TEHRAN -- Tens of thousands of people have paid tribute to Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan in a mass funeral ceremony held in his home town of Isfahan.
Nilforoushan was a former senior commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) who was assassinated in a recent Israeli aggression on Lebanon.
The ceremony on Thursday saw black-clad mourners, in their tens of thousands, carrying Nilforoushan’s coffin, draped in the national Iranian flag, through the main streets and squares in the central Iranian city.
They also carried the flags of Palestine and the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah as they chanted “Death to Israel,” and “Death to America”.
The top commander was laid to rest in Isfahan’s Golestan Shohada cemetery.
General Nilforoushan was martyred alongside Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a heavy Israeli bombing of a number of residential buildings in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh on September 27.
The body of the Iranian commander was taken from Beirut to the holy Iraqi cities of Karbala and Najaf and his funeral prayers were led by a representative of Iraq’s top cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
His remains were transferred then to Tehran on Tuesday and to Mashhad on Wednesday, receiving somber homage from mourners as well as Iranian military and government officials in both cities.
The IRGC announced the discovery of Nilforoushan’s body in a statement on Friday, describing him as one of the Islamic Republic’s “senior advisors” as well as a “stalwart and intellectual” serviceman, who had been martyred as a result of “the ruthless and bloodthirsty Zionist regime’s atrocity.”
On October 1, Iran responded to the Israeli assassination of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, the Hezbollah leader, and Nilforoushan by launching some 180 ballistic missiles as military and intelligence bases in the Tel Aviv area.
Addressing the funeral, IRGC’s chief commander Major General Hussein Salami warned Israel of a “painful” response if the regime carried out any further aggression against the Islamic Republic.
The Israeli regime mistakenly thought that by assassinating Haniyeh, Nasrallah and Nilforoushan, it would cause problems for the Axis of Resistance, Salami said, but Operation True Promise 2 and the penetration of Iranian missiles through Israel’s Iron Dome disrupted their equations.
“The enemy should be aware that any attack on Iran will met with a painful response,” the IRGC chief said. “Operation True Promise 2 was not our defensive power in its entirety but merely a warning.”
The Zionist regime, he said, will receive a response for committing crimes against Muslim nations. “We clearly declare that we know the weaknesses of the enemy and that we are capable of exposing its vulnerabilities.”
Salami said, “We carried out Operation True Promise II to refine your calculations and make it clear that if you attack our interests, we will strike back. We acted to show you that if our national sovereignty is violated, we will target you in your own land without hesitation.”