Suicide attack kills 20 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

Twenty members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard were killed in a suicide attack in the southeast of the country on Wednesday. 

Ten members of the Guard were also wounded in the suicide car-bomb attack, which targeted a bus transporting the security force, Iran’s Fars news reported.

The state-run IRNA news agency, citing what it described as an “informed source”, reported the attack on the security forces in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province.

The province, which lies on a major opium trafficking route, has seen occasional clashes between Iranian forces and Baluch separatists, as well as drug traffickers.

The attack happened on the road between the cities of Zahedan and Khash, a volatile area near the Pakistan border where armed groups and drug smugglers frequently operate.

The Jaish al-Adl armed group claimed responsibility for the attack, according to Fars.

The attack came on the day of a US-led conference in Warsaw that included discussions on what the United States describes as Iran’s “malign influence” across the wider Middle East.

Iranian officials have blamed Saudi Arabia and the United States for stirring up dissent in the country.

Repeatedly targetted

The Guard is a major economic and military power in Iran, answerable only to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

While Iran has been enmeshed in the wars engulfing Syria and neighbouring Iraq, it largely has avoided the bloodshed plaguing the region.

In 2009, more than 40 people, including six Guard commanders, were killed in a suicide attack in Sistan and Baluchistan province. Jundallah, a hard-line group still active in the region on Iran’s border with Pakistan, claimed responsbility for that attack.

Most recently, an attack on a military parade in September 2018 in Iran’s oil-rich southwest killed more than 20 and wounded about 60.