Five senior members of Iran’s security forces have been killed in a suspected air strike on the Syrian capital.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard blamed Israel for the attack, which it said killed its military advisers as well as a number of Syrian forces.
Israel has not commented. For years it has carried out strikes on Iranian-linked targets in Syria.
Such strikes have intensified since the Israel-Gaza war began following Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Senior figures among the Revolutionary Guard - a major military, political and economic force in Iran - have been present in Syria since the civil war began there in 2011, helping to support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad against widespread rebellion to his rule.
Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency said the attacks killed the IRGC’s Syria intelligence chief and his deputy, as well as other Guard members.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based campaign group, said 10 people were killed in the strikes, including leaders of the Revolutionary Guard.
The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency quoted a military source as saying it had managed to stop some of the missiles, but that the attacks - which it said had hit a residential building - killed and injured some civilians.
The Middle East has been on heightened alert since 7 October, when Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, killing about 1,300 people, mainly civilians, and taking 240 hostages back to Gaza.
The conflict has raised concerns about a wider war spreading around the region, particularly between fierce rivals Israel and Iran, and amid a series of overlapping crises.
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