US on high alert for Iran threat in region after Israeli strike in Syria
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The United States is on high alert and preparing for a possible attack by Iran targeting Israeli or American assets in the region in response to Israel’s strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria, a US official has said.
“We’re definitely at a high state of vigilance,” the official said on Friday, confirming a CNN report that said an attack could come in the next week.
Suspected Israeli warplanes bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus on Monday in a strike that killed an Iranian military commander and marked a major escalation in Israel’s war with its regional opponents.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has said that seven Iranian military advisers died in the strike, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in its Quds Force, which is an elite foreign espionage and paramilitary arm.
Iran has said it reserves the right “to take a decisive response.”
US President Joe Biden discussed the threat from Iran in a phone call on Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Our teams have been in regular and continuous contact since then. The United States fully supports the defence of Israel against threats from Iran,” a senior Biden administration official said.
In the Israeli strike, part of Iran’s consulate was flattened by what was described as an Israeli air strike, a startling apparent escalation of conflict in the Middle East that would pit Israel against Iran and its allies.
The Israeli air strikes destroyed the Iranian embassy’s consular annex, killing and wounding everyone inside, Damascus said as Iranian state TV reported a Revolutionary Guards commander among the dead.
Monday’s attack was the first time the vast embassy compound itself had been hit, and comes amid soaring tensions over Tel Aviv’s war in Gaza and intensifying violence between Israel and Iran’s allies.
UK-based war monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said eight people, including several Guards members, were killed when “Israeli missiles… destroyed the building of an annex to the Iranian embassy”.
