Blast At Iranian Military Base Kills 18 Revolutionary Guard

Okay, the Iranians are saying that they had a fire at one of their military bases in western Iran that spread to a munitions depot and then the munitions exploded and that explosion killed 18 Revolutionary Guard and wounded another 14. That's the story. Is it the real story?

Here's what's being reported via Breitbart:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - An explosion set off by a fire that had spread to an ammunition depot at a military base in western Iran killed 18 members of the country's powerful Revolutionary Guard, the state news agency reported Wednesday.
The IRNA news agency said 14 other Guard troops were wounded in the blast Tuesday in the city of Khoramabad, some 300 miles (500 kilometers) southwest of the capital, Tehran. The injured were taken to hospitals in Khoramabad.

The report said the blast was caused by a fire that had reached the ammunition storage area, but there was no word on what had ignited the blaze. In their first reports of the blast late Tuesday, most Iranian media said the explosion was an accident.

Although Khoramabad has not seen violence recently, it is geographically close to Kurdish-populated areas that have been the scene in recent months of several attacks by Kurds disgruntled with the central government.

Notice that there is no report of how such a fire got started. Now, I don't see anything in the article that leads me to believe that this was an "attack" on the Revolutionary Guard but there is the fact that in the past six months, there have been at least two major attacks against the Revolutionary Guard and there have been a number of them killed.

Now, I'm not too quick to point the finger at the Kurds, although they have every reason in the world to strike out at the Iranians but Sunni resistance groups have been behind the previous attacks.

I'm guessing that within 24 to 48 hours, it is going to come out that this was an attack by enemies of the Iranian regime from within Iran. I won't bet the farm but maybe a tractor.

18 Guard members killed in Iran base blast Tuesday



TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - An explosion set off by a fire that had spread to an ammunition depot at a military base in western Iran killed 18 members of the country's powerful Revolutionary Guard, the state news agency reported Wednesday.
The IRNA news agency said 14 other Guard troops were wounded in the blast Tuesday in the city of Khoramabad, some 300 miles (500 kilometers) southwest of the capital, Tehran. The injured were taken to hospitals in Khoramabad.

The report said the blast was caused by a fire that had reached the ammunition storage area, but there was no word on what had ignited the blaze. In their first reports of the blast late Tuesday, most Iranian media said the explosion was an accident.

Although Khoramabad has not seen violence recently, it is geographically close to Kurdish-populated areas that have been the scene in recent months of several attacks by Kurds disgruntled with the central government.

Iran is battling armed militant and separatist movements in the remote southeast along the border with Pakistan and in the far northwest along the border with Iraq.

On Sept. 12, a blast at a military parade in Mahabad, near Iraq, killed 12 people and prompted a cross-border retaliatory raid by Iranian forces. They blamed the attack on Kurdish separatists and followers of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Tehran has accused the U.S. and Britain of provoking ethnic unrest to undermine Iran's security, charges both Washington and London have denied.

The Guard—Iran's most powerful military force, created after the 1979 Islamic Revolution as an ideological bulwark to defend the clerical rule—has been at the helm of the government's efforts to battle ethnic and religious insurgencies, as well as opposition groups.

In time, the Guard became a vast military-based conglomerate, amassing a network of economic and political power that extends to virtually every aspect of life in Iran.

The force has been targeted by the latest U.N. sanctions imposed on Iran over it's refusal to halt nuclear enrichment—a program the West fears could lead to an atomic weapon. Iran denies ambitions to build nuclear weapons, and insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, such as electricity generation.

The Guard has had large number of casualties in the past.

Last October, a suicide bomber killed at least 42 people, including five senior Guard commanders and more than a dozen other troops, near the Pakistani border in the heartland of a potentially escalating Sunni insurgency. It was the most high-profile strike against the force in the outlaw region of armed tribal groups, drug smugglers and Sunni rebels known as Jundallah, or Soldiers of God.