Iran blames Israel for death of IRGC officer in Syria, threatens revenge

Col. Davoud Jafari, a senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was killed by a roadside bomb outside the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Monday. 

According to Iran’s state-controlled Tasnim News Agency, Jafari served in Syria as a military advisor and was a member of the aerospace division of the IRGC, which the United States designates a terrorism-sponsoring organization.  

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based opposition war monitor, claims Jafari was a drone- and air-defense expert. 

The bomb reportedly struck Jafari’s car in Sayyida Zeinab, south of Damascus, killing Jafari’s bodyguard instantly, while Jafari, himself, succumbed to his wounds in the hospital. On Wednesday, the IRGC blamed Israel for the lethal bomb and threatened to avenge the senior officer’s death. 

A statement by the IRGC, published by Tasnim News Agency, claimed Jafari was killed “by associates of the Zionist regime” – a derogatory reference to Israel – and said that, “undoubtedly, the criminal Zionist regime will receive the adequate response for this crime.”

The Iranian ayatollah regime, which has ruled Iran since 1979, does not recognize Israel’s existence, and has vowed repeatedly to wipe the Jewish state off the map.  

Iran and Israel are locked into a long shadow war, across the Middle East and beyond, and Syria has been a central stage for this ongoing Iranian-Israeli war. 

The Islamic Republic of Iran, which backs the regime of Basher al-Assad in Syria, has ambitions to establish a Shiite-controlled corridor, stretching from Tehran via Syria to the Mediterranean Ocean. 

In addition, Iran has invested billions of dollars to entrench itself militarily on Israel’s northern border, with pro-Iranian militias in Syria and the Tehran-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

Israel has responded by conducting hundreds of aerial attacks against Iranian and Tehran-affiliated targets throughout Syria and elsewhere in the region. In late October, an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson said Israel had destroyed 90% of Iran’s military assets in Syria. 

Last Sunday, Mojtaba Fada, an IRGC commander in the Isfahan Province of Iran, issued a threat implying that Iran is looking to kidnap Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu and bring him as a slave to the Islamic Republic. 

The Iranian state-controlled Bahar News reported Fada to say that Netanyahu had “hoped that the protests in Iran would lead him to travel to Tehran [in a post-protest, mullah-free Iran], but God willing, the Islamic Republic will prevail [and quash the protests, once again taking charge of the country] and will frog march that prime minister to Iran wearing a leash and a slave collar.”

Without any apparent trace of irony, the Iranian commander referred to Israel as “the child-murdering regime [of] Israel,” while Iran’s government forces have killed at least 43 children and 25 women in the ongoing anti-regime protests sweeping across the country. Overall, Iran has killed more than 300 of its civilians. 

Banafsheh Zand, an Iranian-American expert on the Islamic Republic, recently told The Jerusalem Post that the Iranian ayatollah regime “has a pattern of making physical and assassination threats against world leaders.” 

“In other words, anyone who dares to take issue with Tehran’s brazen terrorism and violent methodology, publicly, ends up getting that exact type of threat issued to them by the Khomeinist authority,” he said. “Though, for the past four-plus decades, most world leaders and international bodies such as the U.N. have willfully turned a blind eye to the criminality of the Islamic regime, now it is becoming more and more inescapable.”