Israeli Strike Targeted Iranian Drone Assembly Site Near Damascus, Syrian Rights Monitor Says
The strike hit Syria's Dimas military airport on Friday night, a base of operations for Iran-backed forces and Hezbollah that has been ramped up in recent months as Iranian drone shipments start rolling in
A Friday airstrike near Damascus destroyed an Iranian-backed drone manufacturing and weapons storage site, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Sunday.
Widely believed to be carried out by Israel, the nighttime strike successfully targeted equipment used to assemble Iranian drones at Dimas military airport near the Lebanese border, the rights monitor claimed. A radar and runway were also apparently damaged.
Iran-backed forces and Hezbollah have used the Dimas military airport as a base of operations throughout much of the Syrian Civil War, and Observatory sources reported back in January that Iran and Hezbollah were expanding the site and excavating underground storage sites.
Hezbollah’s Unit 4400, responsible for transferring military equipment to Hezbollah in cooperation with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, was operating the facilities which were hit, a Saudi paper Al Arabiya reported.Top of FormIsrael’s alleged Friday strike was the first such attack in over a month, with no casualties reported at the time. Following the strike, the Observatory, which has been monitoring violence in Syria since 2011, said at the time the target of the attack was an arms shipment heading for Iranian proxy militias.
But the new Observatory report paints a more complicated picture of a drone manufacturing and weapons storage site not far from Lebanon and Israel’s borders.
