ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - At least two Syrian soldiers were injured on Sunday when Israeli missile strikes targeted their positions near Damascus, the Syrian defense ministry said in a statement.
“At approximately 22:05 pm today, the Israeli enemy carried out an air aggression from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan, targeting several positions in the Damascus countryside,” Syrian state media reported, citing a statement from the defense ministry.
Two soldiers were wounded in the attack and material damages were reported as Syrian air defense systems intercepted the missiles, the ministry said.
Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on regime-controlled areas of Syria throughout its 12-year civil war, often claiming to strike pro-Iran militias, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah group which supports the Syrian army.
While it rarely comments on strikes attributed to it in Syria, Israel has repeatedly warned that it would not tolerate its arch-rival Iran to gain a foothold there.
On December 10, two Hezbollah fighters and two Syrian fighters were killed in Israeli airstrikes in the vicinity of Damascus.
In northern Aleppo province on Sunday, eight civilians were killed during bombardments by the Syrian army in rebel-held areas, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a Britain-based war monitor.
A pregnant woman was among the casualties, according to SOHR.
Half of Idlib province, as well as parts of Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia provinces, are the last rebel-held bastions in the country after President Bashar al-Assad seized back swathes of territory over the course of the brutal Syrian civil war, which erupted in 2011.
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the former Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, is the prominent force among dozens of different rebel factions operating in the rebel-held northwest. It controls large swathes of Idlib and parts of Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia provinces.
It has been internationally recognized as a terrorist organization.
A ceasefire brokered by Russia and Turkey has been in place in northwest Syria since March 2020, but the area has witnessed a recent flare-up in violence.
Over 13 million Syrians have been displaced since the start of the civil war, more than six million of which are refugees who have fled the war-torn country, according to a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
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