Iran vows revenge on Israel for strike that kills 5 guards in Damascus

Tehran vowed to carry out revenge attacks against Israel on Saturday after a missile strike flattened a building used as a base of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards in Damascus, killing five Guards and an unspecified number of Syrian troops.

Ambulances and fire trucks gathered around the site of the strike, which had been cordoned off, a Reuters journalist at the scene said. Rescue operations for people stuck under the rubble continued through the day. A crane was in place to hoist concrete slabs off the wreckage.

A security source in a network of groups close to Syria’s government and its ally Iran told Reuters the multi-story building was used by Iranian advisers supporting President Bashar al-Assad’s government. It was completely flattened by “precision-targeted Israeli missiles,” the source said.

The Guards said an unspecified number of members of the Syrian military were killed, along with the five Iranians, whom it identified without giving their ranks. The security source said one of the slain Iranians ran the elite force’s information unit.

There was no comment from Israel, which has long pursued a bombing campaign against Iran’s military and security presence in Syria but typically does not discuss such attacks publicly.

It has killed Iranian Guards in several such strikes in a stepped-up campaign in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by militants of the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamist group Hamas from Gaza.

The strike was a “desperate attempt to spread instability in region,” said Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani in remarks reported by state media. “Iran…reserves its right to respond to the organized terrorism of the fake Zionist regime at the appropriate time and place.”

Syrian state media reported an Israeli “aerial attack” on a building in the Mazzeh neighborhood of Damascus and said Syrian air defenses had shot down several missiles.

Essam Al-Amin, head of the Al-Mowasat Hospital in Damascus, told Reuters that his hospital had…