Thousands of Iranians paid their last respects on Tuesday May 24 to an important officer of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s ideological army, shot dead in Tehran.
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Colonel Sayyad Khodai was killed on Sunday by two motorcyclists who opened fire on him in the east of the Iranian capital as he was returning home. He was shot five times, according to the official Irna agency. Iran has accused “elements related to global arrogance“, an expression referring to the United States and its allies in the official Iranian phraseology, of this murder.
“Death to America” and “Death to Israel”
Iribnews, the state television site, presented the slain officer as a member of the Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guards’ elite unit in charge of external operations. The victim was “knownin Syria, a country at war where Iran provides military support to Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The funeral began in the morning at Imam-Hossein Square in Tehran, with the Iranian national anthem, the recitation of the Quran and religious songs honoring fallen Iranians.martyrsin Syria.
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The crowd then accompanied the military vehicle carrying the coffin covered in an Iranian flag, to Shohada Square, nearly 1.5 km away, near the place where Sayyad Khodai was killed. Participants waved Shiite flags but also photos of Iranian soldiers who died in Iraq, a neighboring country where Iran exercises great influence, and in Syria, as well as those of fighters from the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). “Death to America” and “Death to Israelthey shouted occasionally on the way.
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As the procession passes, on a billboard the words “terrible revenge» accompany a portrait of General Qassem Soleimani, former head of the Quds Force, eliminated in Iraq in an American raid in Baghdad in January 2020. The head of the Revolutionary Guards, General Hossein Salami, as well as Brigadier General Esmaïl Qaani , commander of the Quds Force, attended the funeral. Iran’s Joint Chiefs of Staff announced on Monday the opening of an investigation into the “exact circumstances of the assassinationby Khodai. And President Ebrahim Raisi claimed that his murder would be “avenged“.
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Born in 1972 in the Turkish-speaking city of Mianeh in the province of Eastern Azerbaijan (north-west), Sayyad Khodaï must be buried in the square of the martyrs at the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in the south of Tehran. In November 2020, another prominent Iranian figure, nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed near Tehran in an attack on his convoy blamed by Iran on Israel. Israel and the United States are enemies of Iran. Tehran does not recognize the existence of the State of Israel and its diplomatic ties with Washington have been severed since 1980.
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