BREAKBREAK,
Hassan Sayyad Khodayari was a member of the Quds Force, the IRGC’s foreign arm, who has served in Syria in recent years.
Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) unit says one of its members was murdered in the capital Tehran by gunmen on two motorcycles, according to the state news agency IRNA.
Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem said the IRGC issued a statement on Sunday saying Hassan Sayyad Khodayari had been assassinated by the enemy of the revolution. He said Khodayari is a member of the Quds Force (responsible for the IRGC’s overseas operations) that has served in Syria in recent years.
The Al Jazeera correspondent said that in a few hours we will learn about Khodayari and what he was doing in Syria and the message behind this assassination.
“Is it an Israeli assassination, for example? This is what the Iranians are referring to when they say ‘the enemies of the revolution are behind this assassination,'” Hashem said.
The state agency referred to him as a “defender of the sanctuary” – a term used to describe anyone working on behalf of the Islamic Republic in Syria or Iraq.
The IRGC, the Iranian military’s ideological arm, identified Khodayari as a colonel.
According to IRNA, Khodayari was killed by five bullets around 4:00 p.m. (11:30 GMT) while returning home.
The agency released images showing a man slumped in the driver’s seat of a car, with blood on the collar of his blue shirt and on his upper right arm.
“act of terrorism”
In a statement published on their website, the Guard Corps also condemned an “act of terrorism” which they claimed was committed by “elements related to global arrogance”.
The Guard Corps said they had launched an investigation to identify the “attacker or attackers”.
In another development, Iranian state television previously announced that members of an Israeli intelligence network had been located and arrested by the IRGC.
“Headed by the Zionist regime’s intelligence agency, the network attempted to steal and destroy personal and public property, hijacked and fabricated fabricated confessions by a network of thugs,” the IRGC’s public relations service said in a statement.
Iran was a key military supporter of the Syrian regime. It has sent thousands of fighters known as “Defenders of the Shrines” into Syria and Iraq to fight the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) group within the Guard’s elite Quds force, which oversees foreign operations .
assassinations
In recent years there have been assassinations of high-profile Iranians.
In November 2020, a senior Iranian nuclear physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in an ambush near the Iranian capital, Tehran.
The Jewish Chronicle reported that Fakhrizadeh was killed by a one-ton cannon, parts of which the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had smuggled into Iran.
Citing intelligence sources, the British weekly said a team of more than 20 agents, including Israeli and Iranian nationals, carried out the ambush on Fakhrizadeh after eight months of surveillance.
In January 2020, General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and architect of its regional security apparatus, was killed in a US airstrike on Baghdad International Airport.
The White House and Pentagon confirmed Soleimani’s killing in Iraq and said the attack was carried out on orders from US President Donald Trump and was aimed at deterring future attacks said to be planned by Iran.