The Israeli military carried out an airstrike near the Syrian capital Sunday night, with reports saying a villa belonging to President Bashar al-Assad’s brother Maher was the target.
A military source told the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper that a drone targeted Maher al-Assad’s home with three missiles in the Yafour area, west of Damascus, along the highway leading to the Lebanese capital Beirut.
Sounds of explosions were heard across the Damascus countryside, the source said, but there are no confirmed reports about casualties or the fate of Maher, who heads Syria’s powerful 4th Division.
There have been frequent rumours about Maher Al-Assad’s death throughout the Syrian war, including reports that he lost a limb in a 2012 bombing of a Syrian regime intelligence meeting.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said the villa targeted in Sunday night’s strike belongs to Maher’s Fourth Division, quoting unnamed sources, an armoured unit in the Syrian regime military believed to be aligned to Tehran.
Commanders from Lebanon’s Hezbollah as well as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards frequented the villa, the SOHR said.
The observatory, which gets its information from sources on the ground in war-torn Syria, said warnings had reached Maher that any weapons being transferred from the Fourth Division’s stockpile to Hezbollah in Lebanon would be targeted by Israel.
The SOHR’s sources denied that Maher was injured in the strike, saying he was not in the building at the time of the strike.
Israel has carried out frequent airstrikes in Syria throughout the more than 13-year conflict there but rarely announces them.
Israel has said it will not allow Iran to gain a foothold on its border with Syria, where dozens of foreign-backed militias operate.