Iran says it killed four militants near Pakistan border

Iranian soldiers - AFP Photo Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Friday they had killed four militants who had slipped across the border from Pakistan to try to carry out an attack. The Guards said two militants were also wounded in the clash in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan, with the "rest of the terrorists fleeing to the soil of the neighbouring country". In a statement on their Sepah News website, the Guards said the overnight clash on the Pakistani border came after "intelligence operations by the Guards' ground forces revealed that a terrorist team linked to global arrogance planned to attack the Islamic republic's border posts on (Friday) morning." "Global arrogance" is a term routinely used in Iranian official rhetoric to refer to the United States and its allies. The violence in the southeast came less than a week after a deadly attack on a military parade in the mainly ethnic Arab city of Ahvaz in southwestern Iran. Iran blamed that attack, which killed 24 people last Saturday, on "jihadist separatists" supported by a US ally in the region. Claims of responsibility were posted by both the jihadists of the Islamic State group and by a separatist group calling itself Ahvaz National Resistance.