Syrian chief of air defense dies in battle

BEIRUT — The general in charge of Syria’s air defense has been killed in fighting near Damascus, an opposition monitoring group and Syrian security officials said yesterday.

The officer, Lt. Gen. Hussein Ishaq, one of the highest-ranking officers to die during the country’s three-year conflict, commanded 60,000 troops in Syria’s airdefense forces, said Hisham Jaber, a retired Lebanese army brigadier general who closely follows the military in neighboring Syria. It was unclear what impact Ishaq’s death would have on the battlefield, given that Syrian opposition fighters do not possess any aircraft, Jaber added.

“Will this have any effect on the military operation? No,” he said, noting that such officers usually groom a successor. “It could have an effect on morale, but in the field there are many officers who can take his place.”

Ishaq died of injuries suffered on Saturday in Mleiha, a district on the outskirts of Damascus where there have been intense battles in recent weeks, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain that monitors the conflict with a network of contacts inside Syria.

Jaber said it was unclear how Ishaq had been wounded. He surmised that the officer had been helping direct the battle from an operations room rather than leading a fighting formation on the ground, and that he could have been hit by a mortar shell or a rocket or caught in an ambush.

Insurgents have attacked many of the antiaircraft batteries around Damascus, in part to seize weapons that they could use against government warplanes that have bombed rebel-held areas. The government has been seeking to clear insurgents from the suburbs ringing Damascus and has called many of its most-respected officers and elite units to battles there.

Four of the country’s most-senior security officials were killed in an explosion in Damascus in the summer of 2012, and a few other top-ranking officers have died. But the high-profile deaths have not typically shifted the tide of battle.

Government forces have made advances lately in central Syria while insurgents keep up pressure in the north, east and south, leaving the conflict far from a military resolution even as efforts to reach a political settlement falter.