Israel claims to have assassinated Iran's Basij militia unit commander

The Israeli military has claimed in a post on today (17 March) that it has killed Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of the Basij unit, the internal security paramilitary militia of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reports Al Jazeera.

"Guided by precise intelligence from Military Intelligence, the Air Force conducted a targeted strike yesterday in the heart of Tehran, eliminating Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of the Basij unit over the past six years," it said today (17 March).

Iran has not commented on, nor confirmed this claim.

Israel's Defence Minister, Israel Katz, also said today (17 March) that Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, has been killed in an Israeli strike. 

Iran has neither confirmed nor denied the claim officially. 

If confirmed, Soleimani and Larijani would be the highest-level assassinations in the war since United States-Israeli strikes killed the former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and several members of his family on the first day of the war they launched on February 28.

The US Treasury records Soleimani's birth year as 1965. He has been sanctioned by the United States, the European Union, and other countries for his alleged role in suppressing dissent through the Basij.

The Basij are a volunteer paramilitary force under Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), founded after the 1979 revolution and tasked with enforcing internal security nationwide.

They operate local branches across cities and are frequently deployed on the front lines of protests to crack down, including the anti-government demonstrations that erupted across Iran in January, in which thousands were reportedly killed and stretching back to the 2009 mass protests against what opponents called a stolen presidential election.

The Basij and other internal security forces have been a target of attack by both the US and the Israelis so far in the war.