Israel says overnight strike killed Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani
March 17 (UPI) — Israel said Tuesday it killed Basij paramilitary force commander Gholamreza Soleimani in an overnight airstrike in Tehran.
Specifics on the strike were scant, but The Times of Israel reported the Israel Defense Forces targeted Soleimani at a camp he had recently established in Tehran after the paramilitary’s headquarters were destroyed.
Established in 1980, the Basij is a volunteer paramilitary reserve force under Iran’s influential Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. The force — which the website for Iran’s supreme leader says consists of millions of members — was sanctioned by the United States for human rights abuses in 2011 and designated as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2018.
Soleimani was appointed in 2019 to lead the Basij, which has been accused of helping suppress protests inside Iran through violence, mass arrests and force against demonstrators.
“The elimination of Soleimani adds to that of dozens of senior commanders from the armed forces of the Iranian regime who have been eliminated during the operation, and constitutes an additional significant blow to the regime’s security command-and-control structures,” the IDF said in a statement on Telegram.
“The IDF will continue to operate with determination against commanders of the Iranian terror regime.”
Iran has yet to respond to the report as of Tuesday morning.
The IDF said it conducted a wave of strikes Monday targeting military infrastructure in the Iranian cities of Tehran, Shiraz and Tabriz.
Its warplanes dropped dozens of munitions on security force command centers in Tehran, including those belonging to the Basij, the IDF said in an earlier Tuesday statement.
“The completed strikes are part of an ongoing effort focused on deepening the damage to the Iranian terror regime’s core systems and weakening its capacity to threaten the State of Israel,” it said.
Later Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s office published a photo on social media showing him on the phone, accompanied by a caption saying he was “ordering the elimination of senior regime officials.”