BEIRUT —
Israeli air strikes near Damascus on Wednesday killed 10 combatants, among them
six Syrian soldiers, in the deadliest such raid since the start of 2022, a war
monitor said.
اضافة اعلان
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 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 a vast
network of sources across 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.
The Israeli enemy carried out an air assault at dawn ... targeting several positions around Damascus.
He said at least five separate sites were targeted
in the latest Israeli raid.
AFP correspondents in the Syrian capital said they
heard loud explosions.
Since the war broke out in Syria in 2011, Israel has
carried out hundreds of air strikes inside the country, targeting government
positions as well as allied Iran-backed forces and Hezbollah.
‘Not frozen’
In early March, two officers
from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were killed in Israeli strikes on targets in
Syria.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is the
ideological arm of the Iranian military and holds considerable political and
economic sway over the country.
The elite Quds Force is the Guards’ foreign
operations arm and is listed as a terror group by the US.
While Israel rarely comments on individual strikes,
it has acknowledged mounting hundreds since 2011.
The Israeli military has defended them as necessary
to prevent its arch-foe Iran from gaining a foothold on its doorstep.
The conflict in Syria started with the brutal
repression of peaceful protests and escalated to pull in foreign powers and
global jihadists.
It has killed nearly 500,000 people and displaced
half of the country’s population.
In a briefing to the UN Security Council on Tuesday,
the UN’s special envoy to Syria Geir Pedersen warned the conflict in Ukraine
should not distract from the dire situation in Syria.
“Syria is a hot conflict, not a frozen one,” he
said.
He listed incidents that occurred this month in
Syria involving the armed forces of Israel, Turkey, Russia and the US.
“I worry that any of these flashpoints could be
further exacerbated by heightened geopolitical tensions outside of Syria,”
Pedersen said.
Washington has indicated it was prepared to give
Ukraine the means to fight Russia’s invasion, prompting warnings from Moscow
that arms deliveries to Kyiv risked sparking World War III.
Russia’s military intervention in the Syria conflict
in 2015 is what turned the tide in favor of President Bashar Al-Assad, whose
forces once only controlled a fifth of the country.
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