AgenPress – Iran has again threatened retaliation for the deaths of seven Revolutionary Guards in an attack on Damascus, with the army chief saying his country’s enemies will “regret” the killings.
This was stated by the Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Mohammad Bagheri, quoted by IRNA. “The recent Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital, Damascus, is a sort of madness and represents the suicide of the Zionist regime,” assured Bagheri, during the funeral in Isfahan of one of the two senior officers killed, Mohmmad Reza Zahedi , commander of an elite Guardian unit responsible for Iran’s external operations.
The attack razed the consular annex of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, killing seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including two generals.
Iran’s response “will be carried out at the right time, with the necessary precision and planning, and with maximum damage to the enemy so that he regrets his action,” Chief of Staff Mohammad Bagheri said on Saturday.
He was speaking at a ceremony in the central city of Isfahan to commemorate Mohammad Reza Zahedi, one of two dead brigadier generals of the al-Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of the IRGC.
Zahedi, 63, was the commander of the al-Quds Force for the Palestinian territories, Syria and Lebanon, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
He had held several commands over a career spanning more than 40 years and was the most senior Iranian soldier killed since a U.S. missile attack on Baghdad airport in 2020 killed Quds Forces chief General Qassem Suleimani.
The crowd at the Isfahan rally on Saturday chanted “down with Israel” and “down with the United States.”
The Islamic republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Israel “will be punished” for the killings.
On Friday, IRGC chief General Hossein Salami warned that Israel “cannot escape the consequences” of the attack on Damascus.
