The April 1 air strike leveled the Iranian embassy's consular annex in Damascus, killing seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) members, including two generals.
One of them was Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in the Quds Force, the Guards' foreign operations arm.
Zahedi was the only non-Lebanese on Hezbollah's eight-member Shoura Council, the equivalent of the powerful Shiite Moslem movement's political bureau, led by secretary general Sayyed His Eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
...The satrap of the Medes and the Persians in Leb...
, the source said, requesting anonymity because the matter is sensitive.
In a speech Monday, Nasrallah paid homage to Zahedi and his colleagues killed in the strike, which Tehran and Damascus have blamed on Israel.
In a previous speech, Nasrallah said his group "owed a lot" to the senior Iranian official.
Zahedi "lived with us for long years, away from the spotlight, and provided important services to the resistance in Leb
...an Iranian satrapy currently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...and the whole region," Nasrallah said Friday during a televised address.
Zahedi, 63, had held a succession of commands in a Guards career spanning more than 40 years, and was the most important Iranian military official killed since a United States missile strike at Baghdad airport in 2020 killed General Qasem Soleimani, who headed the Quds Force.
Tehran has promised to respond to the strike, which killed 16 people including two civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor of Syria's years-long civil war.