Casualties as militants attack army parade in Iran

TEHRAN: Militants attacked a military parade in southwestern Iran on Saturday, causing casualties, state television reported. A group of assailants attacked the parade in the city of Ahvaz held to mark the anniversary of the start of the devastating eight-year war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1980.

"Eight to nine of the military forces were martyred and more than 20 were injured. The injured are in a crucial state," the deputy governor of Khuzestan province, Ali-Hossein Hosseinzadeh Hosseinzadeh, told the semi-official news agency ISNA.

Two gunmen opened fire on the large crowd of spectators watching the parade in the city of Ahvaz and then attempted to attack the viewing stand for official dignitaries before being shot and wounded by security forces, the semi-official Fars news agency said.

A woman and a child were among the people wounded in the attack by a "group of assailants," the official IRNA news agency reported.

The rare attack targeted Khuzestan, a province bordering Iraq that has a large ethnic Arab community, many of them Sunni, and was a major battleground of the devastating 1980-88 conflict between Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Saturday's rally was one of many in cities across Iran held to mark the anniversary of the launch of the war with massive Iraqi air strikes.

Attacks by Kurdish rebels on military patrols along the border in mainly ethnic Kurdish areas further north are relatively common. But attacks on regime targets inside major cities are far rarer.

On June 7, 2017, 17 people were killed and dozens wounded in simultaneous attacks in Tehran on the parliament building and on the tomb of revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini -- the first inside Iran claimed by the Sunni Muslim extremists of the Islamic Strate group.

In April, 26 alleged IS jihadists went on trial on charges connected with that twin attack.

The judiciary-linked Mizan news agency said several of the accused were Iranians who had left to join IS in neighbouring countries and then returned.

Five attackers were killed on the day, but police said at the time that five people had been arrested at the scene of the attacks in central and south Tehran. Dozens more arrests were reported in the following months -- many in operations along the borders with Iraq and Turkey.