On April 1st, 2024, at around 5:00 pm, a building adjacent to the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus was hit by an airstrike. The four-story structure was completely destroyed, killing Mohammed Reza Zahedi, also known as Hassan Mahdawi, along with six other senior Iranian officials (including Mahdawi’s deputy).
Iran has claimed that the building was brought down by no fewer than six missiles, launched from Israeli Air Force F-35 fighter jets.
Mahdawi served as the commander of Iranian forces in Syria and Lebanon, and was the most senior Iranian figure to be assassinated since Qasem Soleimani , who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in January, 2020. Mahdawi held numerous senior roles in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Besides commanding the IRGC’s Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, he was also involved in orchestrating terror activities within Israel. A former Israeli security official stated that Mahdawi headed Unit 1800, which organized arms shipments to Syria under the guise of humanitarian aid.
This article is the second in a series that discusses Mossad assassinations.
Though the state of Israel rarely acknowledges, let alone officially claims responsibility for, actions of this sort, I will proceed with the commonly accepted belief that Israel did indeed carry out these assassinations.
No information will be presented in this article that cannot be found on open sources.
Though the killing itself wasn’t carried out by Mossad, it would be impossible to ignore Mossad’s part in collecting and assessing the intelligence leading up to it, not to mention the planning and precise timing such a surgical attack necessitated.
Just to emphasize that latter point, the two buildings on either side of the targeted one were the Iranian and the Canadian embassies. They were not damaged and no one outside the targeted building was hurt.
According to an Iranian source, Mahdawi arrived in Damascus with two other officials in order to discuss logistics and coordination only a day before the attack. According to another source, Iran is currently investigating whether Israel had achieved an intelligence penetration on Mahdawi and his movements. Reports in February indicated that the IRGC expressed concern to Assad’s regime about leaks of information among Syrian security forces; leaks that led to previous attacks attributed to Israel against senior Iranians in Syria. A notable example was the Damascus airstrike that killed Razi Mousavi in December, 2023.
A Syrian intelligence official claimed that buildings in the area of the Iranian embassy in Damascus were being used by Israel for device planting and monitoring and that Israel had also intensified its efforts in human intelligence (HUMINT) collection.
An Israeli source refused to confirm Israel’s involvement in Mahdawi’s killing but noted that such gatherings by senior Iranians in one place are very rare, especially since the IRGC reduced their presence in Syria due to recent Israeli attacks.
“Whoever carried out this attack would not have wanted to miss this very rare opportunity,” he said. “It’s an opportunity that a country at war would never pass on.”
Mahdawi was instrumental in Hezbollah’s years-long battle with the IDF in southern Lebanon. After the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in May, 2000, Mahdawi was a member of a small joint IRGC-Hezbollah command team that armed, trained and strengthened Hezbollah before the 2006 Lebanon War. This team included Qasem Soleimani, General Ahmad Kazemi and Hezbollah chief of military operations Imad Mughniyeh.
Soleimani, as mentioned, was killed in an American drone strike on his vehicle close to Baghdad airport in 2020. Ahmad Kazemi was killed in a mysterious plane crash in northern Iran in 2006. Reports about the plane crashing due to sabotage or a bomb were never proven. Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated in a car bombing in Damascus in 2008. The assassination was also attributed to Mossad (and will be the subject of my next article in this series).
Mahdawi was the last surviving member of the original IRGC-Hezbollah command team – until he too was assassinated on April 1st, 2024.
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