Deadly attack

Gunmen attacked an annual Iranian military parade yesterday in the country’s oil-rich southwest, killing at least 29, including 12 members of the country’s elite Revolutionary Guard, and wounding 53 others, state-run IRNA news agency reported. Daesh claimed responsibility for the attack in southwestern Iran yesterday, according to the group’s Amaq News Agency.

Amaq said Daesh’s fighters had carried out the attack in Ahvaz city. The group provided no evidence for the claim. State television aired footage of the aftermath of the assault on Ahvaz’s Quds, or Jerusalem, Boulevard, which like many other places around the country saw an annual parade marking the start of Iran’s long 1980s war with Iraq.

The images included paramedics trying to help one person in military fatigues as other armed security personnel shouted at each other. The semi-official ISNA news agency published photographs of the attack’s aftermath, with bloodied troops in dress uniforms helping each other walk away. A local news agency in Khuzestan province, of which Ahvaz is the capital, aired grainy mobile phone footage showing parade goers fleeing as soldiers lay flat on the ground.

Gunfire rang out in the background. “Security forces have restored security in the area but the parade has totally been disrupted,” a reporter on the scene for Iranian state television said by phone in a live broadcast. “People have been killed but we have no figures yet.”