Senior Commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Assassinated In Syria On His Way From Damascus To Lebanon

So this story was out yesterday that a senior commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was assassinated when his convoy was hit inside of Syria.  The part that I don't think other sites took note of was his destination.

From the article at The Telegraph:

General Hassan Shateri was killed on Tuesday in an ambush on the way from Damascus towards the Lebanese capital

So here's my question - since WHEN are Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders and troops hanging out in Lebanon?  Another question - does this mean that the Lebanese government is complicit with all actions by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard?  Hmmmm.   One has to wonder just how deep the Iranian influence is in Lebanon right now - I wonder, has Hezbollah taken full control in Lebanon and in order to safeguard or expand that control, has Iran sent the Revolutionary Guard into that country?

Iran commander assassinated in Syria

General Hassan Shateri was killed on Tuesday in an ambush on the way from Damascus towards the Lebanese capital, the Iranian authorities said. They blamed the attack on Israel.

Gen Shateri was also in charge of the Iranian of the Iranian Committee for the Reconstruction of Lebanon, set up after the devastating war in 2006 between Israel and the Iran supported Shiite Hezbollah militia.

He died "at the hands of Zionist regime mercenaries and backers," the force's spokesman, Ramezan Sherif, said in the statement.

The circumstances of his death and the purpose of his visit in Syria were still murky yesterday. The Lebanese newspaper As-Safir claimed Mr Shater had been "in Aleppo, to study projects to reconstruct the city"; a claim that was rejected as "laughable" by opposition figures in the city that is currently in the grip of full-scale war.

Last month, US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford accused Iran of fighting alongside Syrian president Bashar al-Assad against the Sunni-majority insurgency. "They are sending arms, they are sending other kinds of experts, and in fact we know that they are sending Iran Revolutionary Guard members," said Mr Ford.



Israeli jet planes were reported to have bombed a military base on the outskirts of Damascus last week. Western diplomats told the Daily Telegraph they believed that the Syrian regime may have been transferring surface to air missiles to Lebanon, into the hands of the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah, with whom Israel is still at war.

Residents of the Shia district of Dahiyeh in the Lebanese capital Beirut expressed fury at the death of Mr Shatari who they said had been responsible for re-building their livelihoods. The neighbourhood that was flattened during the war with Israel now gleams with new mosques and high-rise buildings, paid for by Iran.

"He is famous here. He did such a good job here. He was a financial man with a good brain. He was a hiring master who brought in the construction companies," said one resident.

"Entire areas are still destroyed in the United States because of Hurricane Katrina. But here Martyr Shateri rebuild everything in just two years," said one commander.

Sources inside the Hezbollah militia told the Daily Telegraph they had known that Mr Shateri was targeted for assassination for a long time, and that arrests had been made of men suspected of planning an attack.

Israel has been accused using its secret service or proxy agents to murder Iranian targets before. Four Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated in the past two years in what Iran, and many other countries have said are Israeli maneouvres in a proxy war.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Gen Shateri was shot dead by rebels.

"We do not know exactly where he was shot, but we do know that a rebel group ambushed his vehicle while en route from Damascus to Beirut," the Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

US Secretary of State John Kerry offered a grim reminder of the costs of continued violence on Thursday saying that as 90,000 people may have been killed in the two years of fighting in Syria.

He spoke as it emerged that rebel fighters had shot down two fighter jets on Thursday, and the seized town of Shadadeh, near the Iraqi border, in a fourth straight day of blows to the Assad regime.

Mr Kerry said that Mr Assad should accept the "inevitability" of his departure.

A new peace plan proposes creating a 140-member senate body that would manage dialogue between the regime and the Syrian opposition and be supervised by the United Nations.

The plan, seen by the London-based newspaper Sharq al-Awsat, says that Faruq al-Sharaa, Syria's vice president, should head the senate and optimistically predicts an "immediate ceasefire".