On the eve of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, an Israeli security cabinet minister linked the fate of head of the Syrian regime Bashar Assad to Iran’s behavior.
“If Assad allows Iran to turn Syria into a military vanguard against us, to attack us from Syrian territory, he should know that would be the end of him, the end of his regime,” Yuval Steinitz, the minister of national infrastructure, energy and water resources, told the Ynet news site.
Last month, Tehran vowed revenge after the T-4 army base in Syria was struck in an air raid, leaving members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps dead.
Tehran announced Monday that Tel Aviv cannot assassinate Assad.
Two days ago, Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting that “Assad can allow or not allow Iran to confront Israel from Syria…If he enables it he should know there is a price.”
On the battlefield in Syria, regime forces were close on Tuesday from controlling areas south of Damascus and its suburbs as they continued to displace opposition fighters to northern Syria.
SANA news agency reported Monday that 50 buses carried hundreds of fighters and their families from rebel-held areas in the northern countryside of Homs and the southern countryside of Hama, as part of the fourth batch of rebels evacuated to the north of the country.
Earlier, 63 buses had carried fighters and their families as part of a recent Russian-mediated deal reached between the rebels and the Syrian regime.
Meanwhile, more than 30 Syrian regime troops have been killed in a southern district of the capital in a fierce counter-offensive by ISIS militants, the Syrian Observatory fro Human Rights said.
