Iran vows revenge after senior IRGC officer slain in alleged Israeli strike in Syria

A senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was killed Monday in an alleged Israeli airstrike in the Syrian capital of Damascus, Iranian media said, Report informs, citing The Times of Israel.

According to the semi-official Iranian Tasnim news agency, Brig. Gen. Razi Mousavi was killed in a strike in the Damascus suburb of Sayeda Zeinab.

Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, vowed that Israel “will certainly pay for this crime.”

The Israel Defense Forces’ top spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, declined to comment on the reports during a press conference on Monday evening.

While Israel’s military does not, as a rule, comment on specific strikes in Syria, it has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed terror groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country over the last decade.

Mousavi was responsible for coordinating the military alliance between Iran and Syria and was believed by Israel to be heavily involved in Tehran’s efforts to supply weapons to terror proxies in the area, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group.

The Tasnim report said Mousavi was “one of the oldest advisers of the IRGC in Syria” and close to former IRGC Quds force head Qassem Soleimani, killed in a 2020 US drone strike in Iraq.