DAMASCUS // Thirteen members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard were killed by militants in northern Syria, showing Tehran’s deep involvement in the war.
Hossein Ali Rezaei, a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard in the northern province of Mazandaran, said on Saturday that 13 were killed and 21 wounded in an attack last week.
Another Revolutionary Guard spokesman in the same area said the troops were killed when a coalition of opposition groups, including Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra, seized the village of Khan Touman from pro-government forces.
Khan Touman was captured on Friday after two days of intense clashes that also left dozens of Syrian militants dead, according to opposition activists.
The town was captured by a coalition known as Jaish Al Fatah, an ultraconservative alliance led by Al Nusra and hardline militias Jund Al Aqsa and Ahrar Al Sham.
A senior Iranian official met Syrian president Bashar Al Assad, a key ally, in Damascus and vowed continued support for his government in the country’s five-year war.
Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Tehran would always stand by Damascus because it “knows that terrorism does not target Syria, but the whole people of the region”.
Iran and Russia have backed Syria throughout the conflict. All three refer to all those fighting to overthrow Mr Al Assad as terrorists.
Also on Saturday, Russia said that a fragile truce in the northern city of Aleppo had been extended for 72 hours, as ISIL battled other militant factions near the city.
The Russian defence ministry said the extension was Moscow’s initiative and would also apply to the coastal province of Latakia.
The truce will now last until 12.01am on Tuesday.
Russia and the US last week reached an agreement to extend Syria’s temporary ceasefire to Aleppo, after days of heavy fighting that killed 286 civilians, including 57 children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Syrian military had earlier said the truce in Aleppo would last only 48 hours.
The Russian military accused Al Nusra of trying to destroy the truce by attacking Aleppo and trying to impose a blockade on the city from the south. Al Nusra and ISIL are not included in the ceasefire.
The Observatory, based in Britain, and other groups said Aleppo was relatively quiet after the ceasefire was extended, but they reported heavy fighting between ISIL and other militant groups in the northern parts of Aleppo province, near the border with Turkey.
The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria, said ISIL captured two villages in the region in clashes that killed at least 12 ISIL fighters.
The Local Coordination Committees, an activist-run collective, said the fighting was now concentrated near the northern villages of Dalha, Harjaleh and Hiwar Kilis.
* Associated Press