An Israeli airstrike in a Damascus neighbourhood on Monday killed a high-ranking Iranian general, Iranian state media has said.
Iranian officials and allied militant groups in the region vowed revenge for the killing but did not immediately launch any retaliatory strike.
The killing of Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guards in Syria, comes amid ongoing fears of the Israel-Hamas war sparking a regional spillover. Iran-backed groups in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have launched attacks on Israel and its allies in support of Hamas.
Clashes along Lebanon-Israel border between Hezbollah and Israel have continued to intensify, with daily exchanges of missiles, airstrikes and shelling across the frontier.
In the Red Sea, attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen against ships they believe to be connected to Israel have disrupted trade and prompted the launch of a US-led multinational naval operation to protect shipping routes.
Iran-backed militias in Iraq operating under an umbrella group dubbed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq have also launched more than 100 attacks on bases housing US troops in Iraq and Syria, which they have said are in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel.
The group claimed an attack on a US base next to the commercial airport in Erbil in northern Iraq on Monday. The attack injured three US personnel, one of whom was in a critical condition.
In response, the US military carried out retaliatory precision airstrike, likely killing “a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants” and destroying multiple facilities used by the group, officials said.
Israeli strikes killed two other generals earlier this month in Syria.
On Monday Israel struck the Sayeda Zeinab neighbourhood, located near a Shiite Muslim shrine, said Iran’s official news agency IRNA and the UK-based opposition war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. IRNA described Mousavi as a close companion of Gen Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
Neither the Israeli military nor Syrian state media immediately issued a statement about Monday’s attack. Israeli officials declined to comment.
The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, said that Mousavi was “martyred while serving as an adviser for the resistance front, defending holy shrines in Syria as well as safeguarding Islamic ideals”. He threatened that the “Israeli regime will definitely pay for this crime”.
Hossein Akbari, Iran’s ambassador to Syria, condemned the killing, saying Mousavi was in Syria as a “formal military adviser”.
“[Israel] will definitely get a response to this crime at the right time and the right situation,” Akbari said, speaking from Damascus.
Though IRNA did not provide other details about the attack, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Israeli military targeted Mousavi after he entered a farm in the area, which allegedly was one of several offices for Hezbollah. The Lebanese militant group, alongside Iran and Russia, has played a key military role in keeping President Bashar Assad’s government in power throughout the Syrian conflict.
Hezbollah in a statement called Mousavi “one of the best of brothers who worked to support the Islamic resistance in Lebanon for decades of his honourable life”.
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of war-torn Syria in recent years. It does not usually acknowledge its airstrikes on Syria. But when it does, Israel says it is targeting Iran-backed groups there that have backed Assad’s government.
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Israeli airstrike in Damascus kills high-ranking Iranian general, says Iran - The Guardian
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