Pompeo and the Mossad chief had lunch in DC Monday. The Israeli's launched airstrikes last night.
Israeli night raids targeting arms depots and military positions in eastern Syria killed at least nine Syrian soldiers and 31 allied fighters, in the deadliest raids since 2018, an anti-regime war monitor said Wednesday.
The Israeli air force carried out more than 18 strikes against multiple targets in an area stretching from the eastern town of Deir Ezzor to the Iraqi border, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The raids killed nine Syrian soldiers and 31 foreign militia fighters whose nationalities were not immediately known, the Britain-based monitoring group said.
Paramilitaries belonging to the Lebanese Hezbollah movement and the Fatimid Brigade, which is made up of pro-Iranian Afghan fighters, operate in the region, the Observatory said.
The latest raids came hours after separate strikes near the Iraqi border on Tuesday killed at least 12 Iran-backed militia fighters.
A senior U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the attack told The Associated Press that the airstrikes were carried out with intelligence provided by the United States — a rare incidence of publicized cooperation between the two countries over choosing targets in Syria. The official said the strikes targeted a series of warehouses in Syria that were being used in a pipeline to store and stage Iranian weapons.
The U.S. official, who requested anonymity to speak about sensitive national security matters, said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed Tuesday’s airstrike with Yossi Cohen, chief of Israel’s spy agency Mossad, at a public meeting in popular Washington restaurant Café Milano on Monday.
The official said the warehouses also served as a pipeline for components that support Iran’s nuclear program.