General Rasi Mousavi was killed on Monday in a rocket attack by the “Zionist regime” in a southern suburb of the Syrian capital Damascus, the Iranian state news agency Irna reported. The Revolutionary Guards described Mousavi as the “logistics chief of the resistance axis”, i.e. the armed groups fighting against Israel, in Syria and announced retaliation.
In Syria, Mousavi was one of the “most experienced advisors” to the Al-Kuds Brigades, the arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard responsible for foreign operations, Irna reported. According to the information, he was a companion of General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US attack in Iraq in 2020. January 3 marks the fourth anniversary of the death of the Quds Force commander.
Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, told Iran’s Mehr News Agency that Mousavi’s house was hit and destroyed by three missiles. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Mousavi was killed shortly after entering a farm in an area controlled by pro-Iranian troops.
In addition to Mousavi, two foreign fighters and one Syrian fighter were killed in the Israeli attack, the Observatory said. It gets its information from a network of sources in Syria. The organization’s information is often difficult to verify independently.
The Tehran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah militia said it viewed “this assassination as a brazen attack that crosses borders.”
Iran is also a close ally of the radical Islamic Palestinian organization Hamas, whose unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7 triggered the Gaza war. Since then, tensions in the Israeli-Lebanese border area have increased significantly. There are repeated attacks by the Israeli army and Hezbollah.
Since the start of the war against Hamas, Israel has intensified air strikes in Syria. Israel did not want to comment on the report on Mousavi’s death; in general, Israeli representatives rarely comment on individual attacks in Syria. However, the Israeli government repeatedly emphasizes that it will not allow its arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.
