Three pro-Iran fighters were killed in Israeli strikes south of Damascus Friday, a war monitor said, with Iranian media reporting an adviser from the Revolutionary Guards was among the dead. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said “three members of pro-Iran groups, including an Iranian and an Iraqi” were killed in “Israeli air strikes.” The targets included a site operated by Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on a road leading to the Sayyida Zeinab district and a site on the road to Damascus airport that had recently been vacated by pro-Iran groups, the Britain-based war monitor said. Iran’s Mehr news agency said an Iranian adviser from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Saeed Alidadi, was killed in the strikes. Syrian state media reported damage from “Israeli” air strikes south of Damascus but did not mention casualties. The Israeli military declined to comment.
During more than a decade of civil war in Syria, Israel has launched hundreds of strikes, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces and the Syrian army. Its strikes have intensified since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7. Israel rarely comments on individual strikes but has said repeatedly that it will not allow Iran to expand its presence in Syria. Friday’s reported strikes were the second this week. On Monday, missiles fired on a base in Sayyida Zeinab housing Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah fighters killed at least eight people, the Observatory reported. A previous air strike in Sayyida Zeinab in late December, also blamed on Israel, killed a senior Iranian general. And on January 20, a strike on Damascus’s Mazzeh neighbourhood targeting the Revolutionary Guards’ Syria spy chief killed 13 people, the Observatory said. Iran, a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country’s more than decade-old civil war, says its troops are deployed in an advisory capacity only at the request of the Damascus government.
