TEHRAN: A senior general with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards was killed on Monday by an Israeli air strike in Syria, the military force and Iranian state media said.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has repeatedly said it will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.

Razi Moussavi “was killed during an attack by the Zionist regime a few hours ago in Zeinabiyah district in the suburbs of Damascus,” Tehran’s official IRNA news agency reported.

IRNA said Moussavi was “one of the most experienced advisers” of Quds Force, the foreign arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Six civilians killed in Turkish attacks in Kurdish-held northeast

The general was “active in the field of providing logistical support to the axis of resistance in Syria,” IRNA added, referring to groups backed by Tehran and arrayed against Israel.

The IRGC confirmed Moussavi’s death in a statement, saying he was killed in a “missile attack”.

The statement added that Moussavi was a companion of General Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s revered Quds commander who was killed in Baghdad in a US drone strike in 2020.

Next week Iran will mark the fourth anniversary of Soleimani’s assassination.

A Britain-based monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported Israeli strikes on positions used by Iranian groups and by Lebanon’s powerful Tehran-aligned Hezbollah in the Sayyida Zeinab area.

Residents of the area reported hearing loud explosions and seeing columns of smoke rising from farms there. Israel has launched hundreds of air strikes on its northern neighbour since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces and Hezbollah fighters as well as Syrian army positions.

Israel, which rarely comments on reported strikes in Syria, has intensified attacks there particularly against Hezbollah since the start of Gaza crisis.

Turkish strikes

Turkish air strikes killed six civilians in Syria’s Kurdish-held northeast on Monday, a war monitor and local media said, as Ankara launched operations in Iraq and Syria following deadly attacks on its soldiers.

On Saturday, Turkey announced a new wave of air strikes in retaliation for two separate attacks on its bases in northern Iraq that killed 12 soldiers, which Ankara blamed on Kurdish militants.

“Six civilians have been killed in separate Turkish air strikes,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The head of the Britain-based monitor, which has a network of sources inside Syria, said four of the victims were employees of a printing press in the northern city of Qamishli, near the Turkish border.

“A strike on a mill near Qamishli killed a civilian while another was killed in a gas storage facility,” he added. The strikes hit about a dozen targets, all of them facilities run by the semi-autonomous Kurdish administration, the monitor and correspondents in the region said.

Syrian Kurdish news agency ANHA also reported six deaths, four of them at the printing press, adding that six more people had been injured.

On Saturday evening, a correspondent as well as the Observatory reported strikes against oil sites near the Turkish border, without reporting any victims.

Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2023