The reason is still unclear, but the toll is likely to rise. This Sunday, a young soldier killed five other soldiers before fleeing from a base in southern Iran, the official Iranian agency IRNA announced. “This (Sunday) evening, one of our conscripts, who was guarding a unit in an army position, entered the soldiers’ rest room and shot his comrades,” said the the agency cited a military official.
“Five soldiers lost their lives,” added the same source who indicated that the motive was “still undetermined”. The shooter who “immediately escaped from the barracks” is still being sought.
In the same province as a recent attack
This incident, rare in Iran, took place in the province of Kerman where a double suicide attack claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State killed at least 89 people on January 3 during a commemorative ceremony near the general’s grave. Qassem Soleimani.
The former head of the Quds Force, the branch responsible for external operations of the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological army of the Tehran regime, was killed in January 2020 by an American strike in Iraq. A key figure in the Islamic Republic, he was celebrated in his country for his role in the defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.