Israeli airstrikes near Damascus on Wednesday killed nine combatants, among them five Syrian soldiers and four Iranian terrorist designated IRGC militia fighters, in the deadliest such raid since the start of 2022, a war monitor said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said an ammunition depot and several positions linked to Iran’s military presence in Syria were among the targets.
Government media in Syria confirmed four of the five casualties in the strikes, on which Israel did not comment.
“The Israeli enemy carried out an air assault at dawn … targeting several positions around Damascus,” a military source was quoted as saying by the state news agency SANA.
“The investigation indicated that four soldiers were killed, three others injured and material damage noted.”
The latest strike follows another near Damascus on April 14, without casualties, according to SANA.
The UK-based Observatory, which relies on an extensive network of sources in every region of Syria, said eight people were also wounded in the strikes.
The other four killed were not members of the Syrian military but belonged to Iran-backed militia, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said, adding he could not verify their nationality.
He said at least five separate sites were targeted in the latest Israeli raid.
In early March, two officers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were killed in Israeli strikes on targets in Syria.
The terrorist designated IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) is the ideological arm of the Iranian military and holds considerable political and economic sway over the country.
The Quds Force is the Guards’ foreign operations arm of the IRGC, which is listed as a terror group by the US.
Damascus has the backing of Iran and its proxy militias. But it is Russia’s military intervention in the Syria conflict in 2015 that turned the tide in favour of President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces once only controlled a fifth of the country.