Thousands of people turned out on Tuesday for the funeral of an Iranian Revolutionary Guards colonel, killed on Sunday by unidentified gunmen, calling for revenge.
A procession of thousands of people accompanied the coffin of Colonel Hassan Sayad Khodayari for part of the journey to the Behesht Zahra cemetery on the outskirts of Tehran. The participants took pictures of the military and they chanted slogans calling for revenge and the usual “death to Israel” and “death to the United States”.
Khodayari was shot five times on Sunday as he sat in his car outside his home in Tehran, in an action carried out by two unidentified people who fled on a motorcycle. The military fought in Syria as part of the Quds Forcethe body responsible for Iranian Revolutionary Guards operations on foreign soil.
The commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards, General Hossein Salami, warned that Iran’s response would be “tough”.
“Our reaction will be harsh and will make our enemies repent”he said in a speech in the city of Khorramshahr, one of the most affected during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The head of the elite corps stressed that “everyone knows that the Revolutionary Guards avenge their own blood.”
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi also vowed revenge for the colonel’s death on Monday. “I have no doubt that the revenge of this martyr is inevitable”he told the media.
Iran blamed “global arrogance” for the assassination, a term used for the United States but also for its allies such as Israel. In recent years, Tehran has accused Israel of committing assassinations against members of its security forces and nuclear scientists, as well as sabotaging Iranian facilities.
Khodayari’s death came at a time when negotiations to salvage the 2015 nuclear pact were gaining some momentum after stalling since mid-March. One of the obstacles to the agreement is Iran’s insistence that the US lift sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards, an organization to which Colonel Khodayari belonged.
Source: Observadora
