Syria monitor says Israeli strike kills businessman close to Assad

An Israeli drone strike on a car Monday near the Lebanon-Syria border killed a prominent Syrian businessman who had been sanctioned by the United States and was close to the government of Syria's President Bashar Assad, pro-government media and other allied officials said.

Mohammed Baraa Katerji was killed instantly in his SUV on the highway linking Lebanon with Syria, according to an official from an Iran-backed group. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The pro-Syrian government newspaper Al-Watan quoted unnamed sources as saying Katerji was killed in a “Zionist drone strike on his car,” referring to Israel. It gave no further details.

Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, told The Associated Press by phone that he had no independent confirmation that Katerji was killed. He said it appeared Katerji may have been targeted because he had funded the Syrian resistance against Israel in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, as well as because of his links to Iran-backed groups in Syria.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Katerji in 2018 for allegedly working as Assad’s middleman to trade oil with the Islamic State group and for facilitating weapons shipments from Iraq to Syria.

Katerji and his brother Houssam — widely referred to in Syria as the “Katerji brothers” — got involved in the oil business a few years after the country’s conflict began in March 2011.

For years, Israel has launched frequent strikes in Syria on targets linked to Iran, its powerful regional backer, but rarely acknowledges them. The strikes have escalated in recent months against the backdrop of the war in Gaza and ongoing clashes between the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israeli forces on the Lebanon-Israel border.