September 28, 2024
BEIRUT (AP) — Iran announced Saturday that a prominent general in its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard sanctioned by the U.S. died in an airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.
Abbas Nilforushan, 58, was killed Friday in Lebanon, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported.
The U.S. Treasury had identified Nilforushan as the deputy commander for operations in the Guard. It sanctioned him in 2022 and said he had led an organization “directly in charge of protest suppression, which has played a critical role in arresting protest leaders during previous protests.” Those sanctions came amid the monthslong protests over the death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest for allegedly not wearing her headscarf, or hijab, to the liking of police.
Nilforushan also served in Syria backing President Bashar Assad in his country’s decades-long war that grew out of the 2011 Arab Spring that swept the wider Middle East. Like many of his colleagues, he served in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
In 2020, Iranian state television called him “comrade” of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of its expeditionary Quds Force who was killed in a 2020 U.S. drone attack in Baghdad. In 2021, Nilforushan told state TV that Israel was not in a capacity to pose a threat against Iran over what he described as Israel’s weakness.
