1. Home
  2.  » 
  3. "The War on Terror"
  4.  » 
  5. Iran
  6.  » Iranian Revolutionary Guards general killed in Syria -IRGC

News Brief — Oct 9, 2015

An Iranian Revolutionary Guards general has been killed while he was advising the Syrian army on their battle against Islamic State fighters, the guards said in a statement on Friday.
The statement said that General Hossein Hamedani was killed late on Wednesday near Aleppo, Syria. Iran is the main regional ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has provided considerable military and economic support during Syria’s four-year-old civil war.
A veteran of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, General Hamedani was made deputy chief commander of the IRGC in 2005.
In the biggest deployment of Iranian forces yet, sources told Reuters last week that hundreds of troops had been arriving since late September to take part in a major ground offensive planned in west and northwest Syria.
It is thought that the ground offensive will be backed by Russian air strikes; with Russian jets and helicopter gun ships using targeting intelligence provided by unmanned Russian surveillance drones based at Latakia.
Russian warships in the Caspian Sea launch cruise missiles on targets in Syria

Russian warships in the Caspian Sea launch cruise missiles on targets in Syria

Meanwhile in a related development Iran rejected claims by Western news agencies that four of the 26 cruise missiles fired by Russian warships in the Caspian Sea had crashed in Iran.
A source at the Iranian Ministry of Defence described the reports as part of a campaign of “psychological warfare being waged by the West.
Russia’s Defence Ministry also rejected the claims, which were first reported on CNN and said to be based on intelligence disclosures from the Pentagon.