Admin
Current and former U.S. officers expressed fears on Tuesday that Israel’s airstrikes on an Iranian embassy compound in Syria might escalate hostilities within the area, and immediate retaliatory strikes in opposition to Israel and its American ally.
The officers stated the assault on Monday, which killed three generals in Iran’s Quds Force and 4 different officers, had dealt a critical blow to the pressure, the exterior navy and intelligence service of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Ralph Goff, a former senior C.I.A. official who served within the Middle East, referred to as Israel’s strike “extremely reckless.”
“It will solely lead to escalation by Iran and its proxies, which could be very harmful” to American troops within the area who may very well be focused in retaliatory strikes by Tehran’s proxies, Mr. Goff stated.
Indeed, after the Israeli strike in Damascus, Syria’s capital, on Monday, American troops primarily based in southeastern Syria knocked down an assault drone, a Defense Department official stated. It was unclear if the drone was aimed on the U.S. forces, the official stated, talking on the situation of anonymity to debate operational particulars. If it had been, it will be the primary assault by Iran-backed militias in opposition to American troops in Iraq or Syria in almost two months. No accidents or harm had been reported.
The official stated there had been no additional assaults in a single day, however that Pentagon officers had been monitoring the scenario carefully.
Mr. Goff stated the lethal strike in Syria matches Israel’s “longer-term technique of degrading” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Quds Force unit, and “punishing them for ongoing plots to kill or kidnap Israeli Jews all over the world.”
In the yearslong shadow warfare between Iran and Israel, Syria has been key terrain for Israel because it labored to degrade Iran’s capability to maneuver superior weaponry by land and air nearer to Israel’s borders.
“The strike yesterday is a major escalation and dangers tipping an already unstable, unstable area into full-scale warfare,” stated Dana Stroul, previously the Pentagon’s prime Middle East coverage official who’s now on the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “This is the Israeli model of the U.S. strike on Qassim Suleimani,” she stated, referring to the previous longtime chief of the Quds Force who was killed by an American drone strike close to the Baghdad airport in 2020.
