Iran has vowed revenge over a missile strike in Damascus on Monday that killed two high-ranking Iranian commanders.
Those killed reportedly included Brig-Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force in Lebanon and Syria, his deputy, Brig-Gen. Mohammad Hadi Haji-Rahimi, a member of Hezbollah, and five other Iranian officers, reported the BBC.
Iran’s state media reported that the country’s authoritative Supreme National Security Council has ordered a response to the strike. The country believes Israel was behind the attack.
“We will make them regretful about the crime and similar acts,” said the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, per the Associated Press.
IRNA, the official news agency of the state, reported that Iran holds the United States ultimately responsible for the strike and the commanders’ deaths.
The U.S. has communicated its denial of any involvement in the attack directly to Iran. The country also said it denied foreknowledge that the attack would occur, per the AP.
Though Israel has not confirmed the attack was its doing, the country has targeted Iranian assets in Syria on multiple occasions, as reported by multiple outlets, including the AP. But what marked this attack as bolder than the others and much more likely to lead to an escalation of hostilities between the two regional rivals is that the missiles appear to have struck a consular building adjacent to the Iranian embassy within the embassy’s compound.
Embassy properties are normally considered “protected” by diplomatic norms under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, as reported by Zero Hedge.
Iran has boosted the Assad government against rebels seeking its overthrow while also using Syria as a conduit to move weapons to its anti-Israel proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon. Russia, which is allied with the Assad government in Syria, has mostly turned a blind eye to the frequent Israeli strikes in Syria so long as the targets were ostensibly Iranian-linked, per Zero Hedge.
But this time, Moscow was moved to forcefully denounce the strikes as an extraordinary breach of diplomatic norms.
“We strongly condemn this attack on the Iranian consular office in Syria. We consider any attacks on diplomatic and consular facilities, the inviolability of which is guaranteed by the relevant Vienna Conventions, to be categorically unacceptable,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said, per Zero Hedge.
International observers are on heightened alert that this “major escalation” in the tension between Israel and Iran may trigger a wider war, reported The New York Times. Israel blames Iran for essentially greenlighting the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel.
“This is a huge strike against Iran’s [Quds] Force. Expect to see Iranian missile retaliation directly against Israel. Things are moving beyond proxy war into direct conflict. Crude prices should make a decisive move higher on macro risk,” speculated David Asher, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior State Department official under the Trump administration, to Zero Hedge.
