Israel’s Major Airstrike in Damascus—Why Now? Are Iran and the terror masters cooking up something new? P. David Hornik
According to foreign (non-Israeli) media reports, at about 5 p.m. on Monday, missiles fired from Israeli F-35 fighter jets struck a building beside the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Killed on the spot was a very big fish—Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the top commander in Syria of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—along with six other Iranian officials.
Zahedi is considered the highest-ranking IRGC official to be killed since the US assassinated Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad in January 2020. The airstrike appears to have been both an intelligence and a military feat.
An intelligence feat, because the meeting being held at the time of the strike was reportedly supposed to be top-secret—which would make sense considering Zahedi and others’ seniority plus the fact that Israel had already assassinated a series of Iranian officials in Syria in recent months.
And a military feat, because the building beside the Iranian embassy—supposedly a consulate, but apparently a command center—was part of a complex of diplomatic structures including, right nearby, the Canadian embassy in Syria. A slightly misfired missile hitting the Canadian embassy would, of course, have been a painful and dire incident for Israel.
There appears to have been a timeline leading up to the Zahedi assassination:
a. Israeli commentator Ariel Kahana of the popular daily Israel Hayom notes that last week the Qatar-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was getting red-carpet treatment in Tehran, meeting with the Islamic Republic’s loftiest officials including the chief of staff, the president, and Ayatollah Khamenei himself. Also taking part in the meetings was the head of Hamas’s sidekick terror group in Gaza, Islamic Jihad.
These parleys, says Kahana, “may indicate that the heads of the axis of evil are seeking a second opportunity for what they did not achieve the first time”—that is, on October 7. They may be contemplating “a second combined blow on Israel from several fronts, one that God forbid will not allow us to get back on our feet.”
b. Earlier in the day on Monday, before the Israeli strike in Damascus, a drone launched by a pro-Iranian militia in Iraq hit an Israeli naval base in the port city of Eilat, damaging a building without casualties. It marks a sharp escalation in the multifront war Israel has been fighting since October 7, and it’s far from fanciful to draw a line to this development from the meetings between the Iranian top brass and the Palestinian terror chiefs in Tehran.
c. The New York Times reports that the meeting in Damascus in which Zahedi and others were killed was also supposed to include Islamic Jihad leaders. Again, this would fit neatly into the picture. We don’t know if Israeli intelligence knew just what they were planning to discuss, but it definitely wasn’t a charity drive for Israelis displaced by the war.
The Iranian regime is Shiite-jihadist, while Hamas and Islamic Jihad are Sunni-Islamist, and in a different constellation of circumstances, these two camps would be savagely fighting each other. For now, though, they’re united in the common goal of destroying Israel and slaughtering its inhabitants. The question at the moment is whether this joint Shiite-Sunni aspect of the war that began on October 7, which so far has concentrated on Gaza, will escalate, or whether Israel will succeed to deter its escalation.
It’s an even weightier question than those that now surround the fighting in Gaza.
Comments are closed.
