DUBAI (Reuters) – The commander of the overseas arm of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards is well and will receive a medal from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei soon, the semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted a senior Guards adviser on Wednesday as saying.
Two senior Iranian security officials told Reuters earlier that Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani, who travelled to Lebanon after the Sept. 27 killing of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike, had not been heard from since further Israeli bombings of south Beirut late last week.
“Commander Qaani is in perfect health and will receive the Fath medal from the Supreme Leader in the coming days,” Ebrahim Jabbari, an adviser to Qaani, told Tasnim.
Quds Force deputy commander Iraj Masjedi had on Monday denied reports that Qaani had been harmed in the course of Israel’s intensifying airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
The Islamic Republic appointed Qaani as commander of the Guards overseas military and intelligence service after the United States assassinated his powerful predecessor Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.
Revolutionary Guards Aerospace Commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh received the Fath medal from Khamenei on Sunday for his central role in Iran’s missile strikes on Israel carried out on Oct. 1.
Iran has awarded the Fath medal since 1989 to war heroes, military commanders and politicians, especially those linked to the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
(Reporting by Dubai Newsroom; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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