Yoav Limor
Israel Hayom, Dec. 26, 2023
“Until now Israel has operated within the CBM framework (the Campaign Between Wars) in an attempt to keep hostilities below the threshold of war. In an era where overt war is being waged in the north and south and where Iran is using many tools at its disposal to challenge Israel, we must examine whether the time has come to remove some of that ambiguity in order to enhance deterrence.”
The importance of eliminating Revolutionary Guards’s General Sayyed Razi Mousavi goes beyond the importance of the man himself. It shows that Israel, which has been blamed for the assassination, has decided to step up its struggle, not only against Iran’s proxies in the region, but against Iran itself.
Mousavi was a little more than a mid-level commander in the Revolutionary Guards. He was involved in smuggling weapons from Iran, manufacturing weapons in Syria, and transferring funds to Hezbollah and the Shiite militias operating under Iran’s auspices in Syria. His rank (equivalent to brigadier general in Israel) and role were less about his importance and power than with his proximity to Quds Force power centers – especially the most mythological among them, the former Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, who was eliminated in a January 2020 American strike in Baghdad.
Israel has been blamed for taking out various Iranian figures in Syria. Sometimes these were deliberate assassinations meant to exact a price from Iran for its activity in the region; sometimes they were a byproduct of attacking weapons warehouses or infrastructure that also housed Iranian civilians or operatives. From reports coming out of Damascus Monday, this seems to have been a targeted assassination whose dual purpose was both to get rid of the man himself and send a deterrent message to Tehran.
Overt ambiguity
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