The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) announced that Sayyed Reza Mousavi, an IRGC commander, was killed by an alleged Israeli airstrike last Monday in the vicinity of Damascus.
Iran has vowed revenge for the death of Mousavi, who was reportedly responsible for fashioning a military alliance between Iran and Syria.
Now there’s a report in the Jerusalem Post that a strike on the Damascus airport took out 11 IRGC commanders. J-Post quotes Saudi Arabian media, but the reports are entirely plausible.
“While there is no independent confirmation of Guard Corps names or ranks, the IRGC has long seen Syria as a critical regional hub to project power into the Eastern Mediterranean and connect its constellation of proxies called the ‘Axis of Resistance,’” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said.
“It should come as a shock to no one that Guard Corps elite are operating there, especially amid a regional war, which they are directing far away from their own soil,” he added.
The Iranians wouldn’t necessarily be transiting through the airport. They may very well be based at the airport as they are in southern Lebanon.
Iranian human rights activist Masih Alinejad reports that four Iranians were executed after the death of Mousavi. The regime claimed that they were spies for Israel, but given the lack of a justice system in Iran, no one knows the truth.
This act follows a pattern of revenge by the regime. When it loses a commander, it targets its own citizens, demonstrating its inability to directly confront countries like the United States and Israel, who it considers enemies.
Three years ago, after the United States killed top general Qasem Soleimani, the regime shot down a Ukrainian plane. This action killed 176 innocent people, including women and children, as a form of revenge. The regime demonstrates its brutality by killing its unarmed citizens and yielding to its adversaries.
This is the true face of the totalitarian regime: a cowardly act of targeting the defenseless.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrote a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, saying he wants to make “the ayatollahs pay for sowing chaos through their Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies.”
The Iranian regime is at the center of most of the Middle East’s problems and much of global terror. Yet inexplicably, almost nobody is touching it. For the past 45 years, the regime has been the source of endless war, terror and suffering throughout the world. I’ve come to realize that enough is enough. The evil empire of Iran must be brought down.
As a young officer in Israel’s special forces, I spent a great deal of time fighting Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy. I studied its methods and vulnerabilities. I targeted its commanders and fighters. In 2006, as a reservist, I commanded a special search and destroy team in the second Lebanon War.
Only after that war, in which I lost my best friend, did I begin to realize our great folly. We were fighting the wrong battle, and that is exactly what Iran wants us to do.
Iranian attacks on Saudi oil company Aramco, the United Arab Emirates, the Kurds, and Israel, and amazingly, Iran has largely gotten away with it.
Bennett is right, but war is a lot different these days. So many dominoes are lined up in a row that toppling one of them could set off a chain reaction that could lead to another world war.
Biden is rightly trying to avoid this in Gaza. As for Israel vs. Iran, that scenario may play out in the north where Hezbollah may inadvertently trigger a war with Iran.