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TEHRAN (AP) – Gunmen on Saturday attacked a military parade in Ahvaz, a town in southwestern Iran, wounding 20 people, the Iranian news agency IRNA reported.
The report from the IRNA indicated that the wounded in the Saturday attack included a woman and a child. The agency has not worked out.
Earlier reports described the attackers as "Takfiri gunmen", a term previously used to describe the group of Islamic State.
The semi-official Fars news agency, close to the revolutionary elite guard, said two armed men on motorbikes wearing khaki uniforms had led the attack.
The state television showed images of the immediate aftermath. There were paramedics who were helping somebody with a military trellis to put on the floor. Other members of the armed security forces questioned what appeared to be a support for the parade.
The semi-official ISNA news agency published photographs of the aftermath of the attack, with bloodied troops in uniform helping each other to get away. The attack hit the Quds of Ahvaz or the Boulevard of Jerusalem.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Saturday's attack comes after a coordinated attack by the Islamic State group on June 7, 2017 against the Parliament and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini Shrine in Tehran. This attack was at this time the only one for Sunni extremists inside Shiite Iran, which was deeply involved in the wars in Iraq and Syria, where militants once occupied a vast territory.
At least 18 people were killed and more than 50 wounded in the 2017 attack that saw armed groups carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives storm the parliamentary complex where a meeting is taking place legislative. Meanwhile, gunmen and suicide bombers also struck outside the Khomeini Mausoleum in the southern suburbs of Tehran. Khomeini led the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah to become Iran's first supreme leader until his death in 1989.
Ahvaz is the capital of Khuzestan province, rich in oil in Iran. The province in the past has seen Arab separatists attack the pipelines.
The assault shocked Tehran, which largely avoided militant attacks in the decades following the turmoil surrounding the Islamic revolution.
