Iran TV: 48 Iranians kidnapped in Syria

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A group of Syrian rebels took responsibility on Sunday for the kidnapping of 48 Iranians in Damascus a day earlier, but the rebels insisted that their captives were members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, not religious pilgrims as Iran’s official news agency had reported.

“They are Iranian thugs who were in Damascus for a field reconnaissance mission,” said a rebel leader, in a video that purportedly showed the captives, sitting calmly behind armed Syrian fighters. The rebels said in the video that at least one Iranian was caught with an identification card for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and certificates for carrying weapons — at which point the man identified by the rebels stood up to show some paperwork.

The identities and motives of the captives could not be independently verified. Iran has insisted that they were innocent pilgrims returning from a Shiite shrine on the southern edge of Damascus, and some rebel groups have not embraced the kidnapping or the theory laid out by the fighters in the video. Col. Malik al-Kurdi, a deputy commander of the Free Syrian Army — one of several competing umbrella groups involved in the fighting — said the brigade involved in the kidnapping appeared to have been acting on its own and did not tell the Free Syrian Army about the operation.

For the rebels, the hostages offered an opportunity to broadcast their belief that the government of President Bashar al-Assad was on its way out and to argue that Iran and other foreign supporters of the Syrian government should reconsider their allegiances. In the video, first shown on the Al Arabiya television network, which is owned by Saudi Arabia, a supporter of the rebel cause, the rebels insisted that the Assad government was “inevitably short-lived.”