The Iranian Ambassador to Beirut, Ghzanfar Asl RoknAbadi, receives condolences following the assassination of Revolutionary Guards commander and Head of the Iranian Commission for the reconstruction of Lebanon, Hessam Khoshnevis, (portrait-left) at the Iranian Embassy in Beirut, yesterday.
BEIRUT: An Iranian military commander has been killed in Syria by rebels fighting Tehran’s ally President Bashar Al Assad, Iran said yesterday, describing the dead man as a Revolutionary Guard.
The rebels accuse the elite corps of sending forces to help Assad crush their 22-month-old uprising — a charge denied by the Islamic republic, whose Shia form of the religion is anathema to many of the Sunni Muslim rebels battling to topple Assad.
The Iranian embassy in Beirut named the man as Hessam Khoshnevis and said he ran Tehran’s reconstruction aid programme for Lebanon. It said he was killed by “armed terrorist groups”, a label used by the Syrian government to describe Assad’s foes, on the highway as he returned to Lebanon from Damascus.
There were contradictory accounts of when that happened; Iran said it was on Tuesday but, after statements by Iranian officials, various Syrian rebel groups offered divergent accounts of him being killed by them as long ago as last month. One report said he died during an Israeli air strike on January 30.
Iran has strongly backed Assad during the uprising in which the United Nations says nearly 70,000 people have been killed. In September, the Revolutionary Guards commander-in-chief said his force was providing non-military support in Syria and might get involved militarily if there was foreign intervention.
Meanwhile, Syrian rebels from the Islamist Al-Nusra Front yestrerday seized the town of Shadadeh in the oil-rich Syrian province of Hasake, on the border with Iraq, a monitoring group said. “After three days of fierce battles against the army, Al-Nusra Front fighters have seized control of Shadadeh,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a broad network of activists, doctors and lawyers for its reporting.
Fighting and car bomb attacks by the jihadists left more than 100 troops dead in three days, during which 30 Al-Nusra Front fighters also died. Five of the jihadists killed in the violence were from Kuwait, said the Observatory.
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