TEHRAN: A grenade attack in western Iran, blamed on militants, killed two members of the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including a cleric, local media reported Tuesday.
The assault, late on Monday, targeted a building belonging to pro-government paramilitary forces near the city of Sarvabad in the western province of Kurdistan and left three other members of the guard corps wounded, official IRNA news agency reported.
The two IRGC members killed in the attack were identified by the local Tasnim news agency as cleric Alireza Valizadeh and Ayoub Shiri.
While the identity of the attackers was not immediately clear, authorities blamed the incident on an “anti-revolutionary group” which it said hurled a grenade at the paramilitary post.
Iran often uses the term “anti-revolutionary” to refer to Kurdish armed groups operating along the border with Iraq.
Tehran has repeatedly accused such groups of staging cross-border attacks from Iraqi Kurdistan.
In March 2023, Iran and Iraq signed a security agreement aimed at disarming Iranian Kurdish rebel groups and removing them from frontier areas.
In February, Iran welcomed a call by jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) founder Abdullah Ocalan for Kurdish militants to lay down their arms, describing it as a step toward renouncing violence.
That came months after a historic visit by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian to Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region in September 2024.
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