Pompeo, Israel send message to Iran with bold airstrikes in Syria
In a rare acknowledgement, a US official said Washington provided intelligence support for the strikes.
Aircraft bombed a number of locations in eastern Syria in the early hours of the morning Wednesday in what appears to be Israel’s most extensive string of airstrikes against Iran-linked targets in years.
The death toll of the strikes was not immediately clear. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights assessed that 57 people were killed, most of them Iran-backed militia fighters as well as 14 Syrian government forces.
Bombs reportedly landed inside the city of Deir ez-Zor, and were reported nearby in the area of the Deir ez-Zor Airport, long home to a Syrian military garrison.
The Syrian state-run SANA news agency said strikes also landed near the towns of Mayadeen and Abu Kamal, areas in which Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has maintained a presence. Abu Kamal is very close to the Iraq border near a main crossing point for Iran-backed forces into Syria.
