People and rescuers gather in front of a building destroyed in a reported Israeli strike in Damascus on Jan. 20, 2024. (Credit: Louai Beshara/AFP)
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has confirmed five of its military advisers were killed in a strike attributed to Israel that targeted a residential building in the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Saturday morning.
The state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) identified four of them as Hojatollah Omidvar, Ali Aghazadeh, Hossein Mohammadi and Saeed Karimi.
Hojatollah Omidvar
Hojatollah Omidvar (also known as General Yousef Omidzadeh, Sardar Haj Sadiq Omidzadeh, Abu Sadegh Omidzadeh and Haj Sadegh) is believed to be the deputy intelligence chief of the al-Quds force in Syria, according to Iran's Nour News. Iran's elite al-Quds force is the overseas operations branch of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), which was set following the Iranian revolution in 1979.
One of the advisors killed in Damascus on Saturday was his deputy, known as Hajj Gholam or 'Moharram'.
Omidvar was mentioned back in June in a Washington Post piece on a leaked Iranian plan to attack US troops in Syria. The piece cited plans by Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, to test a new type of roadside bomb to target military vehicles. The paper accused Omidvar of having “identified U.S. Humvee and Cougar armored vehicles in Syria as intended targets" and spoke of "dispatching unidentified operatives to take reconnaissance photos of roads traveled by US forces."
Sky News Arabia reported that he was close to Razi Mousavi, a high-ranking general of the al-Quds force who was killed in a Israeli strike in Damascus on Dec. 25. Mousavi played a crucial role in Iran’s political and military expansion in the Middle East, being close to Kassem Soleimani, who was killed in an American strike in Baghdad in January 2020.
Omidvar was also said to be among Iranian prisoners who were held hostage by Jabhat al-Nusra at the beginning of the Syrian war and was later released, according to Iranian reports.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani "strongly condemned" Israel's "criminal act" which is "a desperate attempt to spread instability and insecurity in the region." He said Tehran would respond "at the appropriate time and place."
Exchange of strikes
In recent weeks, Israel has been accused, as it announced to be moving to a third phase of the war, of intensifying targeted strikes on senior Iranian and allied figures in Syria and Lebanon, raising fears that the Israeli war on Gaza could expand.
In less than a month, a high-ranking member of the IRGC’s al-Quds force, Razi Mousavi, was assassinated near Damascus. Shortly after, Hamas’s number two man, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in a surgical strike in Beirut’s southern suburb. Moreover, two members of the pro-Iranian Popular Mobilization Unit (PMU) were killed in Baghdad, as well as an official of Hezbollah’s al-Radwan force, Wissam Tawil, in southern Lebanon.
On Monday night, Tehran launched strikes in Syria and Iraq as part of a retaliation move against the targeted assassinations of senior figures of the "Axis of Resistance" and the attack claimed by the Islamic state, which killed more than 90 people in the Iranian city of Kerman on Jan. 3.
The next day, Iran sparked a significant escalation by striking a Sunni jihadi group called Jaish al-Adl in the Pakistani region of Sistan-Baluchistan, resulting in the deaths of civilians, including two children.
Pakistan responded by recalling its ambassador to Tehran and carried out airstrikes on targets within the Iranian part of this separatist region straddling the two countries.
On Friday, Pakistan and Iran "agreed to de-escalate" tensions, Islamabad said, following a phone call between the two countries' top diplomats.