BEIRUT: Two Iran-affiliated fighters have been killed in the latest Israeli air strike on Syria, a war monitor said Sunday, with state news agency SANA reporting five Syrian soldiers wounded.
The strike early Sunday near the western Syrian city of Homs was Israel’s third since early Thursday after the capital Damascus was targeted that morning and early Friday.
During more than a decade of civil war in Syria, Israel has launched hundreds of air strikes on Syrian territory, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, as well as Syrian army positions.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said “two pro-Iran fighters whose nationalities are so far unknown were killed” in the strikes targeting military positions of Syrian government forces and pro-Iran groups.
The monitor, which relies on a network of sources in Syria, said explosions rocked Homs and a fire broke out in a research centre.
“An arms depot belonging to Lebanese Hezbollah forces in the military airport of Dabaa, in the southwestern sector of Homs, was destroyed,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP, adding that the two fighters had been killed in strikes on the arms depot.
State news agency SANA reported, citing a military source, that “the Israeli enemy carried out an air assault... targeting positions in the city of Homs and its province”.
Syria’s air defence intercepted several missiles, but five soldiers were wounded and some material damage was reported, SANA said. Abdel Rahman gave the same number of injured soldiers.
In earlier strikes, on Friday, Israel launched “several missiles from the occupied Golan Heights” against positions near Damascus, Syrian state media had said.
The Observatory said those strikes targeted a weapons and ammunition depot of the Syrian military and pro-Iran groups.
Sepahnews, the website of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Friday that officer Milad Heidari had been killed.
On Sunday, the website reported that Meghdad Mahghani, a military adviser wounded in the same strike, had “attained the high rank of martyrdom”.
It added that Israel “will pay”.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani condemned that attack, saying on Sunday that the “blood of these high-ranking martyrs will not go to waste” and that Tehran “reserves its right to respond... at the appropriate time and place”.
The latest strikes coincide with increasing Arab engagement with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which has been politically isolated since Syria’s war broke out in 2011 with the brutal repression of peaceful anti-government protests.
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