First of all, let’s recall the sequence of events. Israel carried out three air raids on Thursday, Friday and Saturday of last week. These included a strike on a UAV facility at the Dabaa airport in Homs province on Saturday, close to the Lebanese border, and a raid on Friday in the Damascus area in which two Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) “advisers,” Meqdad Meqdani and Milad Heidari, were among the dead. The latest raids followed two recent additional Israeli attacks on Aleppo airport, which led to its temporary closure.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a monitoring group associated with the Syrian opposition but whose reporting is generally reliable, ran an Arabic-language article on April 3 that noted that Hezbollah had “admitted the killing of one of its members as a result of the Israeli bombing on the night of Saturday-Sunday which targeted military sites of the forces and of Hezbollah in Homs.”
Meanwhile, in eastern Syria, on March 8, four Iran-linked militiamen were killed and eight wounded in a drone strike on a facility in Deir al-Zor city. This area plays host to a large concentration of Iranian IRGC and proxy militia personnel.
The Iranians sought to hit back. On March 23, an Iranian suicide drone strike on a US position at the al-Omar oil field in Hasakah province killed a US contractor and wounded five US service personnel. The US then launched airstrikes on a number of facilities maintained by IRGC franchise militias in eastern Syria. Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that one of the dead in the US airstrikes was a Hezbollah officer. SOHR, incidentally, also reported the deaths of three other Hezbollah fighters in Syria last week, when their car ran over a land mine while carrying out a mission in the Homs countryside. READ MORE
