Iran

A militant attack near the Pakistani border with Iran left five Iranian forces dead, the state-run IRNA news agency reported Sunday.

The report said the dead were ethnic Baluch members of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard's volunteer Basij force and were killed in Saravan city in Sistan and Baluchistan province. Saravan is some 1,400 km (870 miles) southeast of the capital Tehran.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Earlier in the day, state TV reported that Revolutionary Guard forces killed three terrorists and arrested nine others in a military operation. The report did not specify which group the suspects belonged to.

Last month, unknown gunmen killed four people, including the chief of the Revolutionary Guard in the province.

In September, gunmen killed four border guards in Sistan and Baluchistan province in two separate attacks. The militant group Jaish al-Adl, which seeks greater rights for the ethnic Baluch minority, claimed responsibility for one attack in which one officer and two soldiers were killed.

The province, which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been the site of occasional deadly clashes involving militant groups, armed drug smugglers and Iranian security forces. It is one of the least developed parts of Iran. Relations between the predominantly Sunni Muslim residents of the region and Iran's Shiite theocracy have long been strained.

U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi will visit Iran next Wednesday and start consultations with Iranian officials the following day, state media reported on Sunday.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Wednesday he might head to Iran in the coming days to discuss its disputed nuclear program and that he expected to work cooperatively with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.

Long-standing issues between Iran, the IAEA, and Western powers include Tehran barring uranium-enrichment experts from IAEA inspection teams in the country and its failure for years to explain uranium traces found at undeclared sites.

Iran has also stepped up nuclear activity since 2019, after then-President Trump abandoned a 2015 deal Iran reached with world powers under which it curbed enrichment -- seen by the West as a disguised effort to develop nuclear weapons capability -- and restored tough U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

Tehran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% fissile purity, close to the roughly 90% required for an atom bomb. It has enough higher-enriched uranium to produce about four nuclear bombs, if refined further, according to an IAEA yardstick.

Iran has long denied any nuclear bomb ambitions, saying it is enriching uranium for civilian energy uses only.