Iran buries victims of US attack on wedding party

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - TEHRAN — Victims of a US strike on a wedding celebration in southern Iran were buried on Thursday, as Tehran reported mounting civilian casualties from recent US attacks on the country.

Large numbers of mourners joined relatives, military and civilian officials in Kuhestak, in Sirik County in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province, for the funeral procession.

Iranian authorities identified the four victims buried on Thursday as Amir Ali Karimi, 4; Mohammad Mallahi, 16; Kulthum Mallahi Nezhadnia, 43; and Zarkhatun Taheri, 50.

State TV reported on Thursday that a fifth person, ‌a 22-year-old woman, ‌has since died in hospital.

Sixty-eight people were wounded in the attack, according to the latest figures cited by the outlet, with several remaining under medical treatment.

The strike occurred Tuesday evening during US attacks across Hormozgan province, including Bandar Abbas, Sirik, Jask and Qeshm. A residential area in Sirik was struck while a wedding gathering was taking place.

The mourners assembled in the late afternoon outside the village of Kuhestak in Sirik County, along a stretch of the coast of the Strait of Hormuz that was hit by heavy US airstrikes late on Tuesday.

“This is the body of Martyr Amir-Mohammad Karimi, a 4-year-old child who was martyred in an attack on the country’s south by the criminal American regime,” a reporter from Iran’s Mehr news agency said in footage filmed in front of a pickup truck carrying a flag-draped coffin beneath a canopy of palm fronds.

In other footage of the funeral, mourners threw petals into the air as doleful music played from a loudspeaker. A casket was carried past a row of soldiers standing at attention with rifles.

“If it was a ⁠military location, it wouldn’t be so painful. This was a wedding ceremony, ‌but they turned people’s joy into mourning,” the semi-official Tasnim ‌news agency quoted a local man as saying.

Washington launched the airstrikes on Tuesday, ‌hitting what it said were military targets along the coast in retaliation for Iranian attacks on ‌shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

The sudden escalation of the Iran war has caused a surge in oil prices to levels unseen since July. Prices rose for a fourth straight day on Thursday, taking Brent crude futures over $96 a barrel.

Iran’s Health Ministry released figures covering the latest wave of US and Israeli attacks across the country.

Health Ministry spokesman Hossein Kermanpour said 18 people were killed and 142 wounded between 8:30 pm on August 30 and 8:30 pm on September 2.

The wounded included 61 women and 44 people under the age of 18. Two women and one child were among those killed.

“Behind every number is a human being and a family,” Kermanpour said.

Expediency Council Chairman Sadeq Amoli Larijani condemned the Sirik attack, describing the killing of women and children as a war crime.

“The war crime in Sirik proved that what they describe as civilization is nothing but savagery that has been decorated and beautified,” he said.

IRGC commander Major General Ahmad Vahidi also addressed the victims’ families, saying the attack on the wedding gathering and civilians constituted a “terrorist and inhumane act.”

He vowed that the victims’ blood “will never go in vain.”

Iran responded ‌on Wednesday to the US strikes with attacks on US bases in Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, and carried out further attacks early ⁠on Thursday, saying it was ⁠targeting another US base, in Kuwait.

Kuwait’s military said its air defenses had intercepted missiles and drones. But following that, the war’s biggest flareup since July appeared to subside, with no more major attacks from either side reported as the day wore on.