Iran has deployed troops and allied forces in Syria Portal/CCTV 2023 02/19/2023
Attacks on Iranlinked bases in Syria will prompt a swift response, an Iranian security spokesman said Saturday after 19 people were killed in one of the deadliest clashes between the United States and Iranallied forces in years.
“Any pretense to attack bases created at the behest of the Syrian government to combat terrorism and Islamic State elements in the country will be met with an immediate backlash,” Keyvan Khosravi, spokesman for Iran’s top security agency, was quoted as saying by the semiofficial news agency Nournews.
Iran says its allied forces and soldiers are in Syria at the request of Damascus and sees US troops as occupying forces.
The death toll from US airstrikes on proIranian facilities in eastern Syria has risen to 19 soldiers, a Syrian war monitoring group said on Saturday.
The United States carried out strikes in eastern Syria in response to a drone strike Thursday that killed one US contractor and wounded another and five US troops. Washington claimed the attack was Iranian in origin.
The UKbased Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrikes killed three Syrian soldiers, 11 Syrian fighters in progovernment militias and five nonSyrian soldiers allied with the government.
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