By Damien Cave and Hwaida Saad
The New York Times, Beirut, Lebanon, August 5, 2012  — 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 the rebels said showed the captives, sitting calmly behind armed Syrian fighters. In the video, the rebels flipped through what they said were Iranian identification cards and certificates for carrying weapons, proving, the rebels said, that the hostages were not religious pilgrims.
The identities and motives of the captives could not be independently verified, 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 taking responsibility for the kidnapping appeared to have been acting on its own and did not tell the Free Syrian Army about the operation.
Iranian officials said the kidnapped Iranians were pilgrims, denying that any of them were members of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s Arabic-language channel Al Alam reported Sunday, quoting an unnamed government spokesman. Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, on Saturday contacted the Syrian and Turkish foreign ministries, asking them to secure the release of the 48 Iranians.
In a statement, the Iranian Embassy in Damascus said that the abducted Iranians had traveled to Syria using a “private” tour company for a pilgrimage to the Shiite shrine of Sayyida Zeinab, a Shiite site in the southeastern suburbs of Damascus, which is a mile or two from where fierce fighting has been raging in the neighborhood of Tadamon. While the video clip of the abducted Iranians showed only men, Iranian state media said that women and children were also among those taken by the Syrian rebels.
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.”
The rebels also warned that Iranians who helped the Assad government would face the same fate: they will end up “dead or as hostages.”
The kidnapping and the intensified fighting on Sunday in both Damascus and Aleppo, where rebels and reporters inside the city said Syrian jets were dropping bombs, highlight what analysts describe as a widening war.
Diplomatic efforts have failed so far, but with neighboring countries expressing greater concern that Syria’s conflict could spread across their borders, American officials said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would go to Istanbul next weekend to discuss the Syrian crisis with the Turkish government.
“Secretary Clinton goes to Istanbul for bilateral consultations with the Turkish government on Syria as well as to cover other timely issues,” Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman, said, according to Reuters.
Also, the leader of Syria’s main political opposition group, Abdelbasset Seida of the Syrian National Council, said that he would negotiate with government officials whose hands are not “stained with blood” after President Bashar al-Assad and his government were out of power.
His comments appeared in an interview published Sunday in Asharq al-Awsat, a pan-Arab newspaper, less than a week after the United Nations and Arab League special envoy for Syria, Kofi Annan, resigned because of a lack of diplomatic progress.
Inside Syria, the war continued. Activists in Damascus said that the neighborhood of Tadamon, near Syria’s largest Palestinian camp, remained under attack. Syria’s official news agency said on Twitter that the area had been cleaned of “terrorists.” Activists said the bodies of rebel fighters along with some women and children were scattered throughout the area but they could not be retrieved because the Syrian Army had set up snipers who fired at anyone trying to reach the dead.
Rebels and activists also reported raids in Homs and in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which has become the war’s main focus since fighting broke out there two weeks ago. Activists said rebels and the Syrian military had been sending in reinforcements over the past few days in anticipation of a large, long battle for control of the city.
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Aleppo, Syria, and Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran.