Current and former U.S. officials expressed fears on Tuesday that Israel’s airstrike on an Iranian embassy compound in Syria could escalate hostilities in the region and prompt retaliatory strikes against Israel and its American ally.
The officials said the attack, which killed three generals in Iran’s Quds Force and four other officers on Monday, had dealt a serious blow to the force, the external military and intelligence service of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Ralph Goff, a former senior C.I.A. official who served in the Middle East, called Israel’s strike “incredibly reckless.”
“It will only result in escalation by Iran and its proxies, which is very dangerous” to American troops in the region who could be targeted in retaliatory strikes by Tehran’s proxies, Mr. Goff said.
Indeed, after the Israeli strike in Damascus, Syria’s capital, American troops based in southeastern Syria knocked down an attack drone, a Defense Department official said. It was unclear if the drone was aimed at the U.S. forces, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details. If it were, it would be the first attack by Iran-backed militias against American troops in Iraq or Syria in nearly two months. No injuries or damage were reported.
The official said there had been no further attacks overnight, but that Pentagon officials were monitoring the situation closely.
Mr. Goff said the deadly strike in Syria fit Israel’s “longer-term strategy of degrading” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Quds Force unit, and “punishing them for ongoing plots to kill or kidnap Israeli Jews around the world.”
In the yearslong shadow war between Iran and Israel, Syria has been key terrain for Israel as it works to degrade Iran’s ability to move advanced weaponry by land and air closer to Israel’s borders.
“The strike yesterday is a significant escalation and risks tipping an already volatile, unstable region into full-scale war,” said Dana Stroul, formerly the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy official who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “This is the Israeli version of the U.S. strike on Qassim Suleimani,” she said, referring to the former longtime leader of the Quds Force, who was killed by an American drone strike near the Baghdad airport in 2020.
Ms. Stroul said assessing the post-Suleimani era is instructive because the command and control of the Quds Force was degraded.
“We have seen Iran-backed militia groups take decisions into their own hands under the leadership of Qaani, as well the rise of rival power centers in Iran,” Ms. Stroul said, referring to Gen. Ismail Qaani, the current Quds Force commander. “This has led to a more diffuse, but not less lethal, Quds Force-led network abroad. But Iran’s core strategy never changed. Tehran will continue to invest in its terrorist network abroad in order to keep the fight away from its own borders.”
More broadly, Ms. Stroul said, the message is that Islamic Revolutionary Guards “operatives and leaders are not safe anywhere.”
She continued: “It should have strategic effect on how the Quds Force operates abroad and should erode any semblance of invincibility or deniability that this terrorist organization only brings instability and violence to the places it seeks to operate.”
Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired four-star general and former leader of the Pentagon’s Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said the deaths of the senior Quds Force officers was “a blow.”
“Their long-term, carefully developed relationships will be lost,” he said.
Ms. Stroul said the strike would further inflame Tehran. “The question is, will Iran respond in a manner that de-escalates the situation, or will it climb further up the escalation ladder?” she said.
Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, sought on Tuesday to tamp down fears of escalation, saying that the United States had no involvement in the airstrike and did not know about it ahead of time.
Ms. Singh said at a news conference that the message had also been conveyed directly to Iran. “Tensions being high in the region, we wanted to make it very clear in private channels that the U.S. had no involvement in the strike in Damascus.”
General McKenzie said he expected Iran would retaliate in some way, but he downplayed fears of a major escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran.
“Iran’s options to hit Israel are very, very limited,” General McKenzie said. “And the Israelis aren’t going to back down.”
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