IDF: Suspects recently arrested in Syria terror cells were working for Iran’s IRGC

Several suspects detained by Israeli troops in southern Syria in recent months were in terror cells and operating on behalf of Iran’s Unit 840, a clandestine unit within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, the IDF says.

The members of the terror cells who were nabbed in the series of recent raids had been directed by Unit 840 to carry out attacks against Israel, according to the IDF.

The IDF details that in March and April, two Unit 840 field operatives, identified as Zeidan al-Tawil and Muhammad al-Kuryan, were arrested in Syria.

In recent weeks, several more terror cells, whose members had been activated by Salah al-Husseini and Muhammad Shuayb — IRGC operatives who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon in July — were also arrested, the military says.

The IDF says the two slain IRGC operatives in Lebanon were among “the most prominent operatives” involved in smuggling weapons from Iran to the West Bank, as well as to Lebanon and Syria.

The interrogations of the Syrian suspects revealed that not all of them knew who they were working for, the IDF says, “and that their recruitment to work with Unit 840 was in many cases done without revealing the unit’s true motives, but rather through financial bribery.”