TEHRAN: Two senior Iranian commanders, one a general, have been killed fighting Islamic State jihadists in Syria alongside President Bashar al-Assad's forces, local media reported Wednesday.
On Tuesday, an Iranian state television reporter working in Syria, in two posts on the Instagram photosharing service, named them as Brigadier General Farshad Hasounizadeh and Hamid Mukhtarband.
The two belonged to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and were killed Monday, the reporter said.
Mukhtarband, whose rank was not given, was formerly a brigade commander in the southern Iranian city of Ahvaz.
There was no official confirmation in Tehran of the deaths. Iran's Fars and Tasnim news agencies and Tabnak, a news website, reported the state television reporter's account.
Neither the reporter nor the agencies said where the deaths had occurred.
If confirmed, they would come the same week the Guards announced their highest-profile casualty in the effort to shore up Assad.
General Hossein Hamedani, who had undertaken 80 missions in Syria according to a eulogy at his funeral in Iran, was killed in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo.
Shiite-dominated Iran is Assad's strongest regional ally, sending military advisers from the Guards and other forces to help him against Sunni Muslim rebels seeking his overthrow.
Lebanon's Shiite militia Hezbollah has done much of the fighting to prop up the Syrian army.
The commander of the Revolutionary Guards' foreign wing, Major General Qassem Soleimani, is said to be heavily involved in guiding military strategy.
AFP
