Reports emerged of explosions near an important shrine south of Damascus on Wednesday evening. Set Zaynab is around 10 kilometers southwest of the Damascus city center, about a 30-minute drive away. Syrian state media said that air defense systems were activated in an attempt to confront airstrikes, as photos posted online showed smoke rising from buildings near the Shi’ite shrine that has the same Set Zaynab name as the town around it.
The important mosque is also called Sayyida Zaynab and is a pilgrimage site for Shi’ites. It is named for the grave of Zaynab, the daughter of Ali and Fatima and a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. The area has been renovated due to support from Iran and Shi’ites; the mosque complex is now quite large and has a golden dome.
By press time on Thursday, it was still not clear what happened. A Syrian source told local sources that “at around 11.40 p.m., the Israeli enemy carried out an air aggression from the Golan Heights towards several sites in the southern region, and our air defenses intercepted the enemy’s missiles.” The subsequent reports provided minimal details about the casualties or the intended target of the purported airstrike in Set Zaynab.
The area of the mosque is known to be a hotbed of activity for Hezbollah and Iranian-backed militias, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In April, an Israeli airstrike on a building next to the Iranian consulate in Damascus led to Iran launching more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel on April 13 and April 14.
Iranian fronts
Those tensions simmered and eventually lowered sufficiently. Israel has been carrying out a “war between the wars” campaign (MABAM in Hebrew) against Iranian entrenchment in Syria for years. This campaign has usually taken the form of targeting arms-smuggling to Hezbollah. Not all the details are known, but over the years, foreign reports indicated that Israel carried out thousands of airstrikes in Syria.
Since October 7, Iran has continued to threaten Israel via Syria and operationalize multiple fronts against Israel, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. This week, the Houthis claimed to target a ship linked to Israel, while a militia in Iraq targeted Eilat.
The Zaynab shrine has been targeted previously by other groups. It has served as a center of pro-Iranian activity since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, with a large number of militias and the IRGC gathering at the shrine to “defend” it early on in the war. This served as a pretext for deeper Iranian intervention and Hezbollah intervention in Syria in 2012. Although the Syrian rebels were largely defeated in southern Syria in 2018, the shrine remained a center for pro-Iranian groups.
Last July, a motorcycle rigged with explosives was used in a terror attack against Shi’ites near the shrine on the eve of Ashoura, a Shi’ite holy day. The attack was likely carried out by ISIS.
In December, IRGC commander Razi Mousavi was killed in an airstrike near the Zaynab shrine. Iran’s state media IRNA said he was “killed during an attack by the Zionist regime.” Then, in January, Iran International reported that an airstrike hit an IRGC base in the same town as the shrine.
The shrine remains an important center of pro-Iran activity and will continue to be a key node in the Iranian axis in the region.