Iran Guards commander warns Israel of swift revenge for any soldiers killed

DUBAI (Reuters) -Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned Israel on Wednesday that it would face swift revenge attacks if it continues to target members of the elite force in the Middle East, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.

“Be aware that we will not only take part in the funeral of our martyrs, but also immediately take their revenge. This is a real and serious message. If your mischief is repeated, you will once again experience our attacks and suffer the bitter taste of our missile blows,” Tasnim quoted Revolutionary Guards Commander-in-Chief Hossein Salami, addressing Israel, as saying.

The Guards claimed responsibility for a March 13 attack on what they called “Israeli strategic centres” in Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. A dozen missiles launched from Iran hit what the Iraqi Kurdish regional government described as “civilian residential areas”.

The attack was seen as Iranian retaliation for Israel’s killing of members of the Revolutionary Guards in Syria, a close ally of Iran, in an air strike on March 7.

“In recent weeks you have seen how Zionists are always wrong in their calculations and have been targeted by Revolutionary Guards missiles. We are warning them that they should cease their mischief or we will bury them alive,” Salami added.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said shortly after the March 7 Israeli air strike that it was the seventh of its kind in Syria this year and that the target was a weapons and ammunition depot near Damascus airport.

Israel rarely comments on air strikes in Syria, of which it has carried out hundreds since the start of that country’s civil war in 2011.

(Reporting by Dubai Newsroom; Editing by Michael Georgy and Mark Heinrich)