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WASHINGTON — Israeli F-35s fired six missiles at a building in Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus on Monday, killing the top Iranian Quds Force commander in the Levant, along with six other Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers.
The assassination of Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi and his deputy, Gen. Mohammad Haj Rahimi, marks the deepest cut to the IRGC’s command structure since the 2020 US drone strike that killed top Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.
More than just an intelligence coup for Israel, the strikes signaled the Israeli high command's willingness to rewrite the rules of engagement in its years-long covert war to keep Iran and its proxies at bay.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has vowed retaliation against Israel for the killings. Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned that the United States will be “held accountable” for the Israeli strikes.
Biden administration officials swiftly denied any foreknowledge of or coordination with Israel on the strike, which Iranian officials said hit a diplomatic building normally protected under international conventions.
“We don't support attacks on diplomatic facilities,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said Tuesday, after stating she was not aware of the diplomatic status of the building that Israeli warplanes had struck.
The Biden administration communicated via back channels to Iranian officials that the United States had no involvement, Singh confirmed to reporters.
Singh also directly attributed Monday's strike in Damascus to Israel, something the Israeli government had not publicly done.
It was a notable shot across the bow and a sign of growing frustration within the Biden administration over the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza and the wider region.
Thousands of US troops at bases across the Middle East remain within range of Iran and its proxies’ missiles and drones, and the brazen strike seemed to undercut Washington’s efforts to placate Iran while deterring its proxies from any actions that could trigger a wider regional war.
The Israeli military has coordinated with the Pentagon ahead of strikes on IRGC-linked targets in Syria in past years, but Washington seems to have little say over Israeli strikes that target Damascus and Homs, which lie well outside of the US military’s zone of operations in Syria, as Al-Monitor has previously reported.
Yet, at the same time, the Biden administration appears to be giving carte blanche to Israel in response to the defense ministry's requests for military hardware, without which a full-scale Israeli war against Hezbollah could likely not be easily undertaken.
The Biden administration has been moving to fulfill Israel’s requests for more F-15s and F-35A Joint Strike Fighter jets, despite concerns expressed through private and public messaging.
Monday’s strike in Damascus came just hours after an Israeli naval base in Eilat was struck by a projectile for the first time since the war in Gaza began. The attempted attack, which caused no casualties, was claimed by a militia in Iraq.
The Israeli strike was likely an opportune attempt at restoring deterrence. But it follows a pattern of assassinations by Israel of prominent Quds Force, Hezbollah and other IRGC-linked militia commanders in recent years, a campaign Israel has quietly accelerated amid the Oct. 7 war in an apparent attempt to degrade the IRGC's abilities to support its proxies.
Last week, the IDF said it killed the deputy commander of Hezbollah's rocket and missile unit, Ali Abed Akhsan Naim, in an airstrike that hit the car he was traveling in in southern Lebanon.
The IRGC's reputed intelligence chief for Syria, Haj Sadeq, and its operational coordinator for Syria and Lebanon, Razi Mousavi, were each killed in suspected but unclaimed Israeli airstrikes in or near Damascus in recent months.
Zahedi, on the other hand, was a top IRGC liaison with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, and the highest-ranking Iranian general to be assassinated since Soleimani.
As the Quds Force’s top commander in the Levant, Zahedi oversaw the IRGC’s support for Hamas as well as the transfer of weapons, ammunition and forces into the region for attacks against Israel, a senior intelligence source told Al-Monitor’s Ben Caspit.
He was also the only non-Lebanese member of Hezbollah’s Shura Council and held a veto as a member of Hezbollah’s so-called Jihadi Council, journalists Ali Hashem and Mohammad Ali Shabani reported at Amwaj.
“The killing of a figure such as Zahedi is not merely a direct assault on Iran. It is also an attack on a key element of the connective tissue between Hezbollah and the IRGC,” they wrote.
At best for Washington and Israel, Zahedi’s death could mark a significant blow to Iran’s years-long attempt to build strategic depth in the region while convincing the IRGC to avoid sending top commanders into Syria, at least for a while.
At worst it could trigger a belligerent Iranian response against Israeli diplomatic interests in the Middle East, which could undermine Washington's effort to court Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to establish formal ties with the Jewish state as a counterweight to Tehran's influence in the region.
Once again, much hinges on how Iran and its proxies will respond.
US military intelligence hasn’t picked up any specific threat streams to American forces just yet, the top US Air Force commander in the Middle East told reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
As the Trump administration learned after the assassination of Soleimani, Iran's retaliation is not always immediate, and the IRGC’s ability to restrain its proxy forces does not necessarily increase when you kill its key commanders.
Hardliners in Tehran are predictably calling for direct confrontation, including against the Israeli diplomatic presence in Azerbaijan.
Yet other voices in the Iranian capital have urged caution, voicing suspicions that Israel may be seeking to provoke a reaction and drag it into an all-out war, which could draw in the United States.
“They insist that Tehran should avoid 'falling into that trap’ and that any response ought to be calibrated," Al-Monitor’s correspondent in Tehran writes.
