Gunmen killed three Revolutionary Guard members in Iran

Unknown gunmen on Tuesday killed three members of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in a shootout in a Kurdish area, Iranian media reported.

The report by the semiofficial Tasnim news agency, which is close to the Guard, identified the killed as Col. Shakiba Salimi and two others, Jafar Nezampour and Mohammad Shokri, whose ranks were not given.

It said the three guard members also killed “several counterrevolutionaries” in the fighting near the Kurdish town of Divandarreh.

The area has seen occasional fighting between Iranian forces and Kurdish separatists as well as militants linked to Daesh. In July, Kurdish militants killed three members of the guard in the country’s northwest.

Iran’s eastern borders have also been the scene of occasional clashes with Baluch militants, too. The attack comes at a time when Tehran is facing the coronavirus outbreak.

Iran on Tuesday announced that confirmed coronavirus infections had reached almost 100,000 in the country as fresh cases picked up again after a brief drop in recent days.

“The number of confirmed infections with this disease is now close to 100,000,” Health Ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said in televised remarks.

“We lost 63 of our countrymen, reaching a total of 6,340 deaths from COVID-19 to date,” he added.
Jahanpour said that another 1,323 people tested positive for the virus during the same period, bringing the overall number to 99,970.

Source: Arab News