Overview of Some Recent Israeli Strikes on the IRGC and Hezbollah in Syria

Recently, Israel has carried out airstrikes on a wide-scale across Syrian government territory, hitting targets of both Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah. The most prominent of these strikes came yesterday with the hit on the area of the Iranian consulate in Damascus. This strike most notably killed General Muhammad Reza Zahedi (al-Hajj Abu Mahdi), who has been described as the head of the IRGC’s Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon. In the Syrian context, this meant that he served as the overall IRGC head of the Local Defence Forces (LDF) network. This network, also known as the ‘Forces of the Friends’ (Quwat al-Asdiqa’) is the project of Syrian groups backed and commanded by IRGC and Hezbollah personnel in coordination with the Syrian military.

A graphic commemorating al-Hajj Abu Mahdi

Prior to this, an earlier airstrike incident was reported on 26 March in the Albukamal area in Dayr al-Zur province on the border with Iraq. While the strike was initially reported in local media as carried out by the Americans, there is no reason to think that is actually the case. The Americans, after all, were at the time (and still are as of now) in a state of ceasefire with the Iranians and Iranian-backed groups. It thus makes little sense for the Americans to have carried out the airstrike, and it is surely Israel that is responsible for it.