Iran says IRGC advisor killed in Israeli strike in Syria

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on March 31 one of its officers stationed in Syria was killed in an Israeli strike near Damascus earlier in the day.

“At dawn today, Friday, Milad Heydari, one of the IRGC’s military advisors in Syria, was martyred in a criminal attack by the Zionist regime near Damascus,” the IRGC said in a statement carried by state media, Al Arabiya reports.

The IRGC has vowed to retaliate for Heydari’s death, saying: “Undoubtedly, the fake and criminal Zionist regime will receive a response for this crime.”

According to a military source cited by Syria’s state news agency SANA, an aerial attack was carried out by the Israel at 00:17 local time (21:17 GMT) using multiple missiles fired from the occupied Syrian Golan, with one of the positions near Damascus being the target.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), a war monitoring organization based in Britain, said the airstrikes were aimed at locations in southwest Damascus that were occupied by both the Syrian military and groups that are aligned with Iran.

Iran, a close ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has been heavily involved in Syria since the beginning of the conflict there in 2011, sending thousands of Iranian and foreign fighters to back the Syrian regime.