AMMAN (Reuters) January,2– The Syrian army said on Monday that an Israeli missile strike had temporarily crippled Damascus International Airport. This is the latest in a string of attacks against Iranian-linked assets.
A salvo of air-launched missiles hit the airport by 2 a.m., the army said in a statement. They were coming from the direction of Lake Tiberias in Israel.
Rockets also hit targets in southern Damascus, killing two Syrian army soldiers and causing some damage, the military said.
Earlier, two regional sources said the attack hit an outpost near the airport supported by Iran’s Quds Force and militias. In recent years their presence has expanded in Syria.
The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately comment on the attack.
Over the past year, Israel has stepped up attacks on Damascus International Airport and other civilian airports, disrupting its growing use of Tehran’s air supply lines to deliver weapons to allies in Syria and Lebanon, including Hezbollah.
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Syria suspended flights to and from its airport for nearly two weeks in June after an Israeli strike caused extensive damage to infrastructure, including runways and terminals.
Israel fired rockets again at Damascus International Airport in September, hitting the country’s second largest civilian airport in the northern city of Aleppo, shutting it down for several days. Western and regional intelligence sources say Tehran has adopted civilian airlift as a more reliable means of transporting military equipment to the Syrian army and allied fighters after Israel cut off ground supplies.
According to Israel, the so-called “interwar period operations” in Syria began ten years ago on January 30, 2013, when Damascus attempted to hand over his SA-17 air defenses supplied by Russia to Hezbollah. It started with an attack on the battery.
There have been four such attacks this year, but the pace has accelerated to about one a week, Israel Defense Forces Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohabi said last month.
Iran’s proxy militias, led by Lebanon’s Hezbollah, now control large swaths of eastern, southern and northwestern Syria, as well as several suburbs around the capital.
The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has never publicly acknowledged that Iran’s forces are working for it in the Syrian civil war and said it had only military advisers in Tehran. Kohabi last month claimed credit for an airstrike on a convoy entering Syria from Iraq, saying the target was a truck carrying Iranian weapons.
