Syria Foils Major US-Israeli Plot in Eastern Ghouta: Military Source
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Syria’s army and its allies recently managed to foil a major US-Israeli plot for facilitating the transfer of thousands of terrorists to the Arab country’s Eastern Ghouta region near Damascus, a Syrian military source said.
Speaking to Tasnim on Saturday on condition of anonymity, the source said Israeli warplanes had been tasked with pounding the positions of the Syrian army in the suburbs of Damascus in an attempt to pave the way for the so-called Jaish al-Islam Takfiri terrorists to reach the towns of al-Nashabiyah and Outaya in Eastern Ghouta towards the eastern Qalamoun Mountains.
Some other 5,000 armed terrorists based in the town of al-Tanf in southeastern Syria were also supposed to join Jaish al-Islam militants in Eastern Ghouta under the cover of US strikes, he added.
The US-Israeli plot against the Syrian government was nipped in the bud after Syrian forces and their allies took timely action, deployed their troops to the two directions and pushed them back, the source further said.
Angered by the defeat, the militants are targeting civilians with mortar rounds, the Syrian source said, stressing that the Arab country’s military is determined to eliminate the terrorists operating around the capital once and for all.
Eastern Ghouta has witnessed renewed violence in the past few days, with terrorists mounting repeated mortar attacks on the Syrian capital in the face of an imminent rout.
The UN Security Council on Friday delayed a vote on a demand for a 30-day ceasefire in the Eastern Ghouta district
The 24-hour delay followed a flurry of last-minute negotiations on the text drafted by Sweden and Kuwait after Russia, a veto-holding ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, proposed new amendments on Friday.
A resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes by Russia, China, the United States, Britain and France to be adopted.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pointed to the ceasefire proposal for Eastern Ghouta and argued that the initiative fails to provide any guarantee that militants will stop the ongoing violence.
"There are (no) answers to the questions of the guarantees that militants will obey this humanitarian pause and that they will not continue shelling the residential districts of Damascus. These guarantees are not given to us,” Lavrov said.
On Thursday, Lavrov expressed Moscow's readiness to consider the ceasefire in Syria, but only if it does not cover the Daesh, the al-Nusra Front and other terrorist groups that "conduct systematic shelling of the residential quarters of Damascus."
