Gunmen attack Iranian military parade, killing 8 soldiers and wounding 20

Gunmen attacked a military parade in the southwestern Iranian city of Ahvaz on Saturday, killing at least eight members of the elite Revolutionary Guard and wounding 20 others, state media said.

The IRNA report said those wounded in the attack Saturday included a woman and a child. The agency did not elaborate.

Earlier reports described the assailants as “Takfiri gunmen,” a term previously used to describe the Islamic State group.

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.

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES

Attacks by Kurdish rebels on military patrols along the border in mainly ethnic Kurdish areas further north are relatively common.

The semi-official Fars news agency, which is close to the elite Revolutionary Guard, said two gunmen on a motorcycle wearing khaki uniforms carried out the attack and attempted to attack officials on the podium.

پخش زنده تلویزیونی از لحظه آغاز تیراندازی در مراسم رژه نیروهای مسلح در اهواز#رژه_اهواز pic.twitter.com/gzVqbsVfBo

— خبرگزاری ایسنا (@isna_farsi) September 22, 2018

State television showed images of the immediate aftermath. In it, paramedics could be seen helping someone in military fatigues laying on the ground. Other armed security personnel shouted at each other in front of what appeared to be a viewing stand for the parade.

The semi-official ISNA news agency published photographs of the attack’s aftermath, with bloodied troops in dress uniforms helping each other walk away. The attack struck on Ahvaz’s Quds, or Jerusalem, Boulevard.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Saturday’s attack comes after a coordinated June 7, 2017 Islamic State group assault on parliament and the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran. That attack had at that point been the only one by the Sunni extremists inside of Shiite Iran, which has been deeply involved in the wars in Iraq and Syria where the militants once held vast territory.

At least 18 people were killed and more than 50 wounded in the 2017 attack that saw gunmen carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives storm the parliament complex where a legislative session had been in progress, starting an hours-long siege. Meanwhile, gunmen and suicide bombers also struck outside Khomeini’s mausoleum on Tehran’s southern outskirts. Khomeini led the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah to become Iran’s first supreme leader until his death in 1989.

#Iranian Armed Forces mark Sacred Defense anniv. https://t.co/u225quYzvn pic.twitter.com/wSy1mLc6Bt

— IRNA News Agency (@IrnaEnglish) September 22, 2018

Ahvaz is the capital of Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province. The province in the past has seen Arab separatists attack oil pipelines.

The assault shocked Tehran, which largely has avoided militant attacks in the decades after the tumult surrounding the Islamic Revolution.