Iran vows ´crushing response´ after gunmen kill 29 at army parade

TEHRAN: Iran´s President Hassan Rouhani vowed a "crushing response" after gunmen shot dead at least 29 people including women and children Saturday in an attack on an Iranian military parade.

The IS group claimed to have carried out the rare assault in the southwestern city of Ahvaz, while Iranian officials accused "a foreign regime" backed by the United States of being behind it.

"The response of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the smallest threat will be crushing", Rouhani said on his official website, after earlier addressing a similar military parade in Tehran to mark the start of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq.

"Those who give intelligence and propaganda support to these terrorists must answer for it," he said.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the attack near the Iraqi border was carried out by "terrorists recruited, trained, armed & paid by a foreign regime".

"Iran holds regional terror sponsors and their US masters accountable for such attacks," he wrote on his Twitter account.

The city lies in Khuzestan, a province bordering Iraq that has a large ethnic Arab community and has seen separatist violence in the past that Iran has blamed on its regional rivals.