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RFL/RE – At least 53 people have been killed in two explosions during commemorations of the fourth anniversary of the death of Qasem Soleimani, a former commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force killed in January 2020 in an air strike by U.S. forces near Baghdad, Iranian state-run media report.
The Mizan news agency, which is close to Iran’s judicial system, reported on January 3 that the blasts occurred in the city of Kerman, near Soleimani’s grave site.
“53 people have lost their lives so far and were martyred,” the IRGC’s Telegram channel reported, adding that 71 people injured in the blasts have so far been taken to hospital.
The Fars news agency first reported that a “terrible explosion” was heard in one of the roads leading to Kerman’s Martyrs’ Gulzar, while the Mehr news agency reported that a “second explosion” also was heard.
“At the entrance of Kerman Martyrs’ Gulzar, there were two bomb bags that the perpetrator or perpetrators of this apparently detonated by remote control,” the Tasnim news agency, with is affiliated with the IRGC, reported from its journalists who were at the site when the blasts occurred.
Commemorations of Soleimani’s death have previously drawn large crowds.
During his funeral in 2020, a stampede broke out and at least 56 people were killed and more than 200 were injured in a procession of thousands of Iranians.
Considered at the time one of the most powerful men in Iran and the architect of Tehran’s foreign policy in the region, Soleimani was killed in a drone strike while traveling in a two-car convoy near Baghdad’s international airport early on January 3, 2020.
The U.S. military said it carried out the “defensive” strike to prevent Soleimani from orchestrating further attacks against U.S. interests in the region.
The assassination of Soleimani was a significant blow to the clerical regime, which was already reeling from biting U.S. sanctions, a free-falling economy, and anti-government protests.
The Quds Force is the elite foreign arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and has been declared a foreign terrorist organization by the United States.
