Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has asked Turkey’s quick intervention to assure the release of 48 Iranian pilgrims taken hostage in the capital of war-torn Syria by confrontation forces, who arrogated the Iranians were involved in fighting oppositions of President Bashar al-Assad.
Salehi has also got hold of his Qatari counterpart to assure the release of the Iranians. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and Qatari counterpart Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani concorded to look for the pilgrims’ release during separate phone conversations with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s state news agency IRNA said on Sunday.
Turkish diplomatic sources, but then, only told that Davutoğlu and Salehi had changed aspects on recent developments in Syria during their conversation.
Iranian media told the Iranians were traveling on a bus to the airport from the ornate, gold-domed shrine of Sayeda Zainab, the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter — a Shiite site of pilgrimage in the southeastern suburbs of Damascus — to bring back to home when they were seized by armed insurgents. A Free Syrian Army commander, on the other hand, told the bus was far from the mosque and directing to areas where government forces and rebels were fighting.
“We got information about the Iranians and began to track them for 2 months,” Cpt. Abdel Nasser al-Shumair, commander of the al-Baraa brigade of the Free Syrian Army, told in an interview with Dubai-based al-Arabiya television. Fighters were “still checking the documents that demonstrate the identity of these detainees and will make our findings public in due time.”
Syrian confrontation fighters charge Iran of sending fighters from its Revolutionary Guard to assist Assad’s forces put down an uprising against his regime. Tehran refuses the charges
