News
Missile strike on T-4 military base in Syria
The T-4 military airbase in Syria which is an Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) command centre, was hit in a missile attack early this morning.
The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) claimed Syrian air defences shot down several of the missiles fired at the T-4 airbase. The attack killed up to 14 people, including Iranian nationals according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The missile attack followed a suspected chemical gas attack Saturday on the last remaining enclave of the Syrian opposition in the eastern suburb of Damascus. On Sunday, US President Trump said there would be a “big price to pay” for the chemical weapons attack, which the US blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The US formally denied it launched any airstrikes after SANA initially reported that the assault is “most likely to be an American attack”. Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood said: “At this time, the Department of Defence is not conducting airstrikes in Syria.”
“According to a military source in Damascus, the Syrian Air Defense system was deployed from the Mezzeh Air Base after the jets entered Syria from Lebanon’s Beqa’a Valley,” Lebanese news site Al-Masdar News reported.
As outlined in a recent BICOM report, the base is located in a strategic position between the cities of Homs and Palmyra in Syria’s west. It has been a key staging ground for Syrian and Russian aircraft, as well as housing the IRGC’s middle command centre. Up to 1,000 IRGC forces used this base to launch attacks on Palmyra in 2015 and 2016.
The Russian defence ministry released a statement this morning claiming that 2 Israeli F-15s fired ten missiles from Lebanese airspace at the base, five hit the base and five were intercepted and destroyed. Israel has declined to comment on the reports.
Israel has struck Syrian army locations several times in recent years, most notably in February when it bombed the T-4 air base after an Iranian drone entered Israeli airspace. Those strikes targeted the batteries that fired missiles at its fighter jets and also hit Iranian targets such as its drone control centre and communications systems.