Senior member of Iran’s Quds Force dies of Covid-19

General fought in Syria and Iraq alongside Qassem Suleimani

Brig Gen Abdolrasool Ostovar fought in Iraq and Syria alongside Gen Qassem Suleimani, who was killed in January. AP

A senior member of Iran’s Quds Force has died of Covid-19 after contracting the virus in Iraq, state media reported on Sunday.

Brig Gen Abdolrasool Ostovar, the former deputy commander of ground forces for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, caught coronavirus while on a military mission in Iraq in September, state media reported.

Ostovar was in a coma for more than two months before dying in an IRGC hospital in Tehran on Sunday, Mehr news agency reported.

He fought in Syria and Iraq alongside Qassem Suleimani, the former head of the Quds Force who was killed in a drone attack by the US in Baghdad on January 3.

Iran has been hit hard by the virus, with the highest number of deaths from Covid-19 in the region.

More than a million have been confirmed to have had Covid-19 and 50,000 Iranians have died.

Ostovar is the latest in a growing number of Iranian elites to fall victim to the virus.

It is thought that at least 30 parliamentarians in Tehran have suffered Covid-19 symptoms this year, with several high profile figures dying from the disease. In March, a veteran diplomat and adviser to Iran's foreign minister, Hossein Sheikholeslam, succumbed to the virus. Brig Gen Nasser Shabani, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and IRGC commander, also died that month, according to the government-linked Fars news agency.

While the number of senior Iranian political and military figures succumbing to the disease seems to have declined in recent months, almost certainly due to increased social distancing at regime-linked events, Tehran will struggle to provide care for other elites if the virus cannot be controlled soon. Tehran's intensive care unit bed capacity was already overwhelmed in October, weeks before the current peak in the country's third wave.

In a grim indicator of the scale of the crisis the country now faces, a worker at the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery told the Associated Press last month that he had not seen so many deaths since the Iran-Iraq war, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians.