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Nine killed in alleged Israeli airstrike in Syria

[ssba]

Israel has carried out an attack at a Syrian military position near Nayrab airport on the outskirts of Aleppo, reportedly killing nine people, Syria’s official news agency claimed.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said the strikes killed nine people, including six Syrians and three others of unknown nationality. It added that the military base was a logistics site used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

According to agency SANA: “The Zionist enemy returned in its desperate attempts to support defeated terror organizations in Daraa and in Quneitra, and it attacked using missiles one of our military outposts north of the Al-Nayrab airport. Damage was caused to property only.”

An Israeli military spokesman declined comment on the report. Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Monday told YNET that he had no knowledge of the incident but said Israel’s policy towards Iran in Syria had not changed.

Lieberman said: “We will not allow Iranian entrenchment within Syria. We will not let them to turn Syria into a kind of vanguard against the State of Israel. And we take action in accordance with our security interests.”

Israel has consistently voiced its concern that Iran’s growing presence in Syria poses a threat to its security and has struck dozens of Iranian and Iran-backed positions in Syria over the course of the seven-year conflict.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported more details of another alleged Israeli strike near the Iraqi-Syrian border on 17 June that killed at least 20 fighters. A US official told the WSJ that the strike targeted “a villa in the town of al-Hari south of Abu Kamal Iraqi where Shiite militia from Kata’ib Hezbollah were working together with Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to traffic Iranian weapons into Syria”.

The official added: “The aim of Israel’s attack hundreds of miles from its borders was to signal that it won’t tolerate Iranian attempts to establish a so-called land bridge running from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon.”

Sheikh Abu Talib al-Saeedi, a member of Kata’ib Hezbollah’s political office, said the fighters were on Iraqi territory when they were targeted.