Deadliest Israeli Attack Against Syria In Years – A Failed Assassination Attempt

At least five Syrians were killed in a series of unprovoked Israeli airstrikes against Damascus, Syria, at a time when rescue teams are still digging victims of the recent Syria-Turkey earthquake out of the rubble. Despite this being such a major attack on a defenseless country, suffering the aftermath of a natural disaster, no major response came from the International Community.

As the death toll from the horrifying earthquake that took place earlier this month rose to roughly 6,000 inside Syria alone, a series of Israeli airstrikes caused major destruction in a civilian neighborhood in the nation’s capital city, Damascus. The area struck is called Kafr Sousa, known as the area in which Hezbollah leader, Imad Moghniyeh, was assassinated in 2008 and is known for having an Iranian and Hezbollah presence in the area. Initially, the Syrian ministry of health’s death toll was set at 5, including 15 injuries, adding that some of those injured were in critical condition. One of the five Syrians killed held a position in the Syrian Arab Army. The strikes were the deadliest in years and some news outlets in Damascus reported that the civilian death toll was as high as 15.

Context, Distortions, and What Really Happened

According to Syrian State-media, SANA, an unnamed military source said that “at 00:22 a.m. Sunday at dawn, the Israeli enemy carried out an air aggression with waves of missiles from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan, targeting some points in Damascus city and its surroundings, including residential neighborhoods, our air defenses intercepted the missiles and downed most of them”. This is the official report from Damascus, however, it does need some clarification and context as bad-faith actors in Western media are telling a somewhat different story.

Syria has been attacked by Israel on a routine basis for the past decade. Since 2018, the Syrian government has not ordered any known responses to hundreds of airstrikes, with only the country’s air defense working to counter the frequent attacks. Syrian military bases, weapon depots, the air defense systems themselves, in addition to civilian targets, have all fallen victim to the deadly Israeli strikes. Tel Aviv rarely ever acknowledges the strikes and, even when it does, it does not comment on individual cases, which could unnecessarily draw attention as the attacks are blatant war crimes under international law. Israeli bombing campaigns have in the past targeted Syria’s two main international airports, in Aleppo and Damascus, even striking the nation’s primary port in Lattakia on two occasions.

Often, pro-Western Syrian opposition media publish articles and cite non-existent sources to build a narrative that Tel Aviv is successfully targeting Iranian interests inside Syria. Most of the time this is not the case, even if the Israeli military does target Iranians or allied groups, they often fall short of hitting their intended targets. The large majority of those killed in these strikes have been Syrian soldiers and civilians, there is simply no evidence to suggest that the Iranian or foreign death toll is anywhere near as high. Despite this, the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) continues to report that tens of pro-Iranian militia members are killed in almost every strike. The Western funded Observatory has even lost the faith of Israeli media outlets like The Times of Israel, which will even doubt their reports at this point. The ridiculousness of these reports normally comes in the pace at which the so-called SOHR allegedly receives its information about highly sensitive foreign casualties, that high ranking Syrian Arab Army officials sometimes don’t have knowledge on.

All of the above context is necessary for understanding what just transpired in Syria. The Guardian newspaper published a report on the recent Israeli aggression, framing the attack as having hit an Iranian-Hezbollah stronghold and cited “residents” who say that an Iranian installation is located in the area. As rightfully pointed out, a guarded security complex is located nearby the civilian buildings that were struck by Israeli missile fire, however, in the Guardian article they do not specify that the area targeted was not the security complex. Instead the piece desperately attempts (by omitting key facts) to frame the attack as having targeted Iranian, Hezbollah or allied militias, glossing over the well-documented evidence of civilians having been killed.

Western media has also gone out of its way to highlight the death of a member of the Syrian army, this is done in bad faith in order to try and paint the situation as having been a military exchange and not an unprovoked attack on a defenseless nation. The so-called combatant that they are focusing on is Sharaf Amjad Ahmed Ali, who was an Engineer Brigadier General. The reason that he is a “so-called combatant” is because there is no evidence that he was working in a military capacity at the time of his death, so framing him as simply a soldier, or even worse, highlighting him in order to downplay what just happened, is pure propaganda and not journalism. There was no mention in Western media of the female cardiologist, Lillian Odeh, who was killed in the strike, for instance.

Without evidence that any militants were actually killed, the media should not report as such. It is fair to note that the area is well-known for being the site where a Hezbollah leader was assassinated and that there may be an Iranian presence nearby, but not to omit the facts and build an alternative narrative. In a way, the Guardian newspaper is directly complicit in helping to justify and undermine the seriousness of an unprovoked attack, which blatantly violates international law, in which civilians were killed and countless homes were blown to pieces.

According to a Syrian military source speaking with The Last American Vagabond, who chose to remain anonymous, I was informed that the Israeli strikes were indeed attempting to assassinate Iranian members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), but failed to do so. It appears that the strike was attempting to hit some sort of target that was located underground, which could have been a location where meetings were being held. If true, this would mean that the Israeli airstrikes failed, yet struck their intended physical targets, also indicating that they were happy to kill civilians in order to pull off the assassination.

To add insult to injury, the Syrian people are still recovering their dead and wounded from the rubble of the recent earthquake, to which Israel initially responded by alleging that it was sending humanitarian aid to help them. In fact, Tel Aviv attempted to score political points against Syria on the day of the tragedy, by claiming that the Syrian government had requested its help, which was strongly refuted by Damascus. The humanitarian aid that Israel claimed it was mobilizing was evidently never sent to aid Syria, as they had claimed was “on the way.” Instead Israeli airstrikes were launched to kill even more Syrian civilians.

Syria has part of its territory, the Golan Heights, illegally annexed by Tel Aviv and despite the hundreds of dead civilians caused by Israeli strikes, Damascus does not fight back, instead turning to the United Nations. The UN simply ignores it every time, as do Western nations such as Britain, whose ambassador has even praised the Israeli airstrikes.

Whether Israel is attempting to target Iranians, Hezbollah, or Palestinian fighters, or anyone else for that matter, strikes like these are still an act of war, launched against a foreign territory, unprovoked. You cannot simply kill people in foreign countries, on a routine basis, just because you feel like it, yet the Western media try to make their viewers believe that these aggressions are a positive thing.