Bombing of pro-Tehran forces in eastern Syria ‘was Israeli attack’
Air strikes that killed more than a dozen people, including one civilian, in eastern Syria on Tuesday morning were carried out by Israel, sources told The National yesterday, after Damascus accused the US of carrying out the attacks.
Syrian state media initially attributed the strikes on “residential and military” targets in the country’s Deir Ezzor province to the US. American officials quickly denied any involvement.
However, Iran’s official Irna news agency reported that the attack was “executed by the Zionist regime”, and several sources told The National that Tehran’s assessment was correct.
Iran says its officers serve in an advisory role in Syria at the invitation of the government of President Bashar Al Assad.
Tehran began to station more military personnel in Syria in March 2011, at the start of pro-democracy protests in the country that would evolve into civil war.
Although Iran’s intervention has been crucial to the survival of the Syrian regime, it has been contesting territory in the country with Turkey and the US. There are also occasional conflicts of interest between pro-Iranian forces and Russia.
Israeli and US attacks on targets in Syria have intensified since the war in Gaza broke out in October last year.
The strikes on Tuesday hit the Abu Kamal area of Deir Ezzor, near Syria’s border with Iraq, a region considered to be a bottleneck in the supply line used by Iran to move weapons to Hezbollah and other proxies in the region.
Among those killed in the strikes was Bahrouz Wahhdi, an commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversees Tehran’s network of proxies. Another member of the IRGC, Hajj Askar, was severely injured in another strike.
The IRGC’s Quds Force is charged with training, arming and assisting proxy militias across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Since December, air strikes in Syria have killed at least four commanders of the force.
A senior western military official said “Israel has made it known” that it carried out the latest attack.
The head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdulrahman, told The National that “what happened in Deir Ezzor was Israeli attacks”.
“The main target was an engineer tasked with establishing a telecommunications structure between militias in Deir Ezzor,” he said.
“The final toll of the Israeli strike is three Revolutionary Guards, nine Iraqi militia fighters affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, and five Syrians, including a Syrian linked to the Lebanese Hezbollah.
“There is also a dead civil engineer. There were no deaths among the Syrian soldiers.”
Abu Kamal is located in the Syrian part of the Euphrates River valley, which is divided into US, Russian and Iranian zones of control.
US-backed forces control the east of the valley, where most of Syria’s oilfields are, while Iranian and Russian troops are based in the west.
The Quds Force sent Lebanese, Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani and local Syrian militias to the area, with most of the estimated 7,000 fighters being Iraqi Shiites.
Members of the Syrian opposition said the attacks on Tuesday had struck a villa used by Iranian troops.
One opposition member said that after a string of Israeli attacks on targets in Syria belonging to the military and Iranian proxy groups, the authorities in Damascus chose to attribute the strikes to the US.
The reason for this decision was to avoid embarrassment, the source said, because repeated Israeli strikes on Syria have gone unanswered. Meanwhile, the Syrian government has an interest in establishing a narrative that the US continues to attack eastern Syria, although there is a de facto truce in place between Tehran and Washington.
“It is in the regime’s interest to show that there is an anti-US resistance active in eastern Syria,” the source said.
Syria is largely powerless to stop either US or Israeli air strikes, because its air defences are obsolete and have been worn out by years of war. F-35 Lightning jets used by the US and Israel are said to appear on radar as objects the size of birds or flying insects, depending on their speed and the angle of the jet in relation to the radar beam.
At the risk of inviting more Israeli strikes, Syria could launch rocket salvos into Israel, as some of its allied militias have done, the opposition source said.
However, Damascus allows Tehran to lead anti-US operations in the east, possibly out of fear of provoking a response from Washington.