BICOM

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said Israel is responsible for the attack on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) command centre in Syria early Monday morning.

In a statement released yesterday, the Russian Ministry of Defence said two Israeli F-15s fired ten missiles at the T-4 airbase from Lebanese airspace, with five being intercepted and five hitting the target. Israel has declined to comment on the allegations.

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters that Russian military advisors could easily have been at the base, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the incident “a very dangerous development”.

Iran’s foreign ministry strongly condemned “the aggression and the air strike by the Zionist regime”.

NBC News quoted two US officials saying that Israel had carried out the strike, adding that Washington had been informed in advance of the attack by their Israeli counterparts.

Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported that the target was a shipment of highly advanced weapons thought to be on their way to Hezbollah. Ofer Zalzberg from the International Crisis Group said: “The more we see of this, it seems like it’s a strike against Iranian capacities to operate drones from Syria potentially against Israel.”

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 14 people were killed in the strike, including Syrian and Iranian personnel. Iran’s Fars news agency reported that this included four “Iranian military advisers”.

As outlined in a recent BICOM report, the base is located in a strategic position between the cities of Homs and Palmyra in Syria’s west. It has been a key staging ground for Syrian and Russian aircraft, as well as housing the IRGC’s middle command centre. Up to 1,000 IRGC forces used this base to launch attacks on Palmyra in 2015 and 2016.

Israel attacked the T-4 base in February, after an Iranian drone entered Israeli airspace. That strike targeted the base’s anti-aircraft missile batteries and several Iranian targets, including its drone control centre and communications systems. On that occasion Syrian anti-aircraft missiles hit an Israeli F-16 forcing the crew to eject and the aircraft to crash in Israel.