Iran vows retribution after key commander killed in Israeli strike
Iran announces retaliation against Israel for the killing of deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Abbas Nilforushan. "[Israel] will not go unanswered," said the foreign minister of the Shi'ite country, Abbas Araghchi.
Nilforushan died in an Israeli army airstrike on Beirut on Friday. The head of the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, also died in the attack.
"There is no doubt that this horrible crime committed by the Zionist regime [Israel] will not go unanswered," Araghchi stated.
"The diplomatic apparatus will also use all its political, diplomatic, legal and international capacities to pursue the criminals and their supporters," he added.
Deserving of Iran
In 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on Nilforushan for leading an organization directly responsible for suppressing protests following the death of Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini. Amini died after being detained by the so-called morality police for allegedly violating strict dress code regulations in Iran. After her death, protests erupted in the country for several months, during which hundreds of people died and thousands were arrested.
Nilforushan also served in Syria, supporting forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war. He began his military career in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.
In 2020, Iranian state television called him a comrade-in-arms to General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Forces, an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard, who died in a U.S. attack in Baghdad that same year.
