The United States has denied responsibility for the attack that targeted key positions of Iran-backed militias in Deir Ezzor province, eastern Syria.
The press office of the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) responded electronically to questions from Enab Baladi, quoting a defense department official on Tuesday, March 26, stating that the United States did not carry out any attack in Syria in the past 24 hours.
Unknown warplanes had bombed about ten sites of Iran-supported militias in various areas of Deir Ezzor province, eastern Syria, resulting in deaths and injuries, including a member of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Mehr, the Iranian news agency, reported that an American attack targeted positions of the “Axis of Resistance” in Deir Ezzor province, leading to the death of Behrouz Wahidi, an “advisor to the Revolutionary Guard Corps”.
Hours after the attack, the defense ministry of the regime’s government has not commented on the attack as of the time of this news release.
Meanwhile, the governor of Deir Ezzor, Fadel Najjar, and the chief of police for the province, General Bilal Mahmoud, toured the hospitals in Deir Ezzor to check on the conditions of those injured by the attack, which was said to be American, in Deir Ezzor.
The governor stated that the targeting, which targeted the Villas neighborhood at dawn on Tuesday, March 26, in the center of the city of Deir Ezzor, resulted in one death and injured 14 others, most of whom were children and women.
A post on the Deir Ezzor governorate’s Facebook page showed photos of the governor and the police chief at the Al-Assad and Military hospitals in the city of Deir Ezzor.
The governor did not mention other areas targeted within the same province.
The Deir Ezzor 24 website, which specializes in covering news from the province, reported that one of the raids in the village of al-Sukariyah, west of the city of al-Bukamal in eastern Deir Ezzor, resulted in a severe injury to a prominent leader in the Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as “al-Haj Askar ,” who was then transported to the hospital.
Al-Haj Askar leads the Iranian militias in Al-Bukamal and its surroundings; he is of Iranian nationality and follows another Iranian commander known as “al-Haj Askar,” a military commander also of Iranian nationality, responsible for all their militias in Deir Ezzor.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (based in London) reported that seven members of the Iranian militias were killed, in a preliminary toll, due to the airstrikes. It also highlighted information about the death of a senior figure in the Villas neighborhood of the city.
Repeated targeting
Similar targeting has been repeated in the eastern Deir Ezzor province near the Syrian-Iraqi border, as the area is considered an Iranian passageway that sometimes witnesses intense operations of smuggling and arms transfer, and its intensity decreases at other times.
The Iranian passageway is active with smuggling operations of weapons to Syria and Lebanon, and the smuggling of infrastructure for the production and assembly of advanced conventional weapons on Syrian territory, according to a detailed report prepared by the Israeli Alma Research and Education Center regarding the border crossing with Iraq, considering that the Iranian “precision missile project” is an example of such mechanisms.
On February 3, the US Air Force carried out airstrikes targeting positions of the Iranian militias and the Syrian regime forces in the province of Deir Ezzor and its countryside, concurrently with raids that targeted militia positions in Iraq.
The strikes at that time targeted more than 85 objectives belonging to the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its militias in Syria and Iraq, according to the US Department of Defense, in response to drone attacks that targeted US forces near the Syrian-Jordanian border recently, which resulted in the death of three American soldiers.