Israel Defense Forces special forces captured a pro-Iranian terrorist operative during a raid in Syria, the military confirmed on Sunday, publishing footage from his interrogation by intelligence officers.
The raid across the Jewish state’s northern border was carried out in “recent months” by members of the Egoz commando unit, along with field interrogators of the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504.
Ali Soleiman al-Assi, a Syrian national from Saida in the southern part of the country, was tasked by Tehran with “gathering intelligence on IDF troops in the border area for future terror activity of the network,” the Israeli military announced in a post on social media on Sunday night.
“The operation prevented a future attack and led to the exposure of the operational methods of Iranian terror networks located near the Golan Heights. Al-Assi was transferred for further investigation,” it added.
“The IDF will not allow Iranian proxies in southern Syria to operate and threaten Israeli civilians,” the army statement concluded.
Earlier on Sunday, the Saudi state-owned Al-Hadath television news channel reported that Israeli commandos entered Syria and detained a Syrian citizen working with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IDF military raid was said to have taken place in July of this year.
In the video footage shared by the IDF, Al-Assi describes to interrogators how he was approached by Iran, saying a man came to his home and told him, “Your area is good, strategically, we could make use of it.
“And then he told me, you need to work with us. What does working with you mean? Just to observe on the borders,” the Syrian continued. “He told me he’s from military intelligence … but in reality, Iran is behind them. From what I understood, he belongs to Iran.”
On Friday, Jerusalem’s elite Shayetet 13 naval commando unit captured a senior Hezbollah terrorist in northern Lebanon. The terror operative, identified as Imad Amhaz, is considered to be a “significant source of knowledge” in the terror group’s naval force, according to the IDF.
Amhaz is likewise being interrogated by the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504, which specializes in human intelligence.
Israeli forces have accelerated work on enhancing defensive measures near the Syrian border in the Golan Heights in recent weeks, Reuters reported last week, citing local security sources and analysts.
Troops have cleared land mines and established new barriers on the frontier between the area in the far northeast of Israel and the demilitarized strip bordering Syria, according to the report.
The move suggests Jerusalem could be looking to hit Hezbollah for the first time along Lebanon’s eastern border; while establishing a secure zone from which IDF soldiers can monitor the terrorist army and prevent infiltrations into Israel, sources told the news agency.
