RFL/RE – An Israeli air strike in Syria killed a top commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), prompting Tehran to threaten that Israeli will “certainly pay” for its actions.
Iranian state media on December 25 identified the commander as Razi Mousavi, a senior adviser of the IRGC Quds Force, saying he had been killed in an air strike near the Syrian capital, Damascus.
Full details of the attack were not disclosed, although Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported it took place in the Zeinabiyah district in the Damascus suburbs.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a statement that Israel “will certainly pay for this crime.”
Reuters quoted three sources as saying that Mousavi was responsible for military coordination between Tehran and Damascus as part of the IRGC’s Quds Force.
The Tasnim news agency, which is close to the IRGC, said Mousavi was one of the oldest advisers of the force in Syria and “an associate” of Qasem Soleimani, a former Quds commander who was killed in January 2020 in an air strike by U.S. forces near Baghdad. The United States held Soleimani responsible for the deaths of many of its soldiers in Iraq.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Israel targeted Mousavi at a farm in the area that reportedly housed several offices for the Lebanon-based Hizballah extremist group. Israeli forces have been exchanging intensified gunfire with Hizballah fighters along the Lebanese border in recent months.
Israel did not immediately comment on the attack, but it has consistently vowed that Iran will not be allowed to establish a presence in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is a close ally of Iran and Russia, relying on their support to remain in power despite major opposition and a civil war in the country.
In early December, Israel said its air strikes had killed two IRGC members in Syria who had served as military advisers there, also prompting vows of revenge by Tehran.
A U.S. State Department report this month said Iran remained the leading state sponsor of global terrorism last year, involved in backing terrorist recruitment, financing, and plotting across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
The report said Tehran also provided support to extremist groups in Bahrain, Iraq, and Syria through its Quds Force with the aim of creating instability in the region.