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More Mystery Iranian Deaths Amid Shadow War
At least 10 high-ranking officers in Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps are reported to have died recently, apparently in violent circumstances.
But only two of the deaths have been made public, raising suspicions the officers may have been assassinated by Iran's enemies.
The unusually large number of deaths among senior IRGC commanders followed a disclosure by Israel's military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, in April that covert Special Forces operations against "enemy countries" were becoming more intense.
There doesn't appear to be any solid evidence the Israelis were involved in the deaths of the Revolutionary Guard chiefs.
But Gantz told the Yediot Ahronot daily, "You almost won't find a point in time where something isn't happening somewhere in the world. I'm escalating all those special operations."
He didn't say which countries were being targeted. But in recent years Israel has been mounting clandestine operations against Iran and its contentious nuclear program, which Israeli leaders see as an existential threat.
Intelligence Online, a Paris Web site that specializes in global intelligence and security issues, identified the two officers whose deaths were acknowledged by the Tehran regime as Gen. Gholam Reza Qassemi, former commander of the 92nd Armored Division, and Gen. Mohammad Ali Mousavi, leader of a commando regiment in the southwestern city of Ahwaz, a key oil center.
Intelligence Online said there was speculation some of the deaths could have resulted from turf wars within the increasingly powerful IRGC over control of sections of the vast economic empire the IRGC has built up in recent years.
Read more here: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Mystery_Iranian_deaths_amid_shadow_war_999.html
