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The Israeli air force carried out a wave of attacks in eastern Syria that killed Iranian military personnel, sources said on Wednesday, after Damascus accused the US of carrying out the strikes.
Syrian state media initially attributed the strikes on “residential and military” targets to the US, reporting that the strikes killed one civilian and injured at least 19 soldiers and 13 civilians. US officials denied any involvement.
Sources told The National that the official Syrian statement was incorrect, while the official Iranian news agency, Irna, reported that the attack was “executed by the Zionist regime". Iran says its officers serve in an advisory role in Syria at the invitation of Damascus.
Social media accounts that support Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps praised Bahrouz Wahhdi, an IRGC commander killed in an air strike in Albu Kamal, Deir Ezzor province. Another member of the IRGC, Hajj Askar, was severely injured in another strike.
Tehran started sending more military personnel in Syria as soon as pro-democracy demonstrations started in the country in March 2011.
Although Tehran's intervention has been crucial to the survival of the Syrian regime, Iran has been contesting territory in the country with Turkey, the US and even Russia. There are also occasional conflicts of interest between the pro-Iranian forces and Russia, despite both supporting the regime.
Israeli and US strikes on Syrian territory have intensified since Israel's war in Gaza against Iran-backed Hamas broke out in October.
Tuesday's strikes targeted the Albu Kamal area near the Syrian-Iraqi border, which is seen as the bottleneck of the supply line linking Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon and other pro-Iranian militias through Iraq and Syria.
The IRGC's Quds Force is charged with training, arming and assisting proxy militias across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Since December, air strikes in Syria have killed at least four commanders of the force.
A senior western military official said “Israel has made it known” that it has carried out the latest attack. He did not elaborate.
The head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdulrahman, told The National that “what happened in Deir Ezzor was Israeli attacks".
“The main target was an engineer tasked with establishing a telecommunications structure between militias in Deir Ezzor,” he told The National.
He added that “the final toll of the Israeli strike is three Revolutionary Guards, nine Iraqi militias affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, and five Syrians, including a Syrian linked to the Lebanese Hezbollah. There is also a dead civil engineer. There were no deaths among the Syrian soldiers.”
A villa used by Iranian security personnel
Albu Kamal is in the Syrian part of the Euphrates River valley, which is divided into US and Iranian zones. American forces are mainly to the east of the valley, where most of Syria's oilfields are, and Iranian and Russian forces are mainly to the west.
The IRGC's Quds Force sent Lebanese, Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani and local Syrian militias to the area. But Iraqi Shiites comprise the majority of the 7,000 or so pro-Iranian militia in the east.
Members of the Syrian opposition to President Bashar Al Assad said that the attack on Tuesday struck a villa used by Iranian security personnel.
One opposition member said that after a string of Israeli attacks on targets in Syria belonging both to the military and to Iranian-linked groups, Syrian authorities chose to say the US was behind the attack.
He said the Syrian authorities resorted to this to avoid embarrassment, because repeated Israeli strikes went unanswered. Damascus, he added, has an interest in giving the impression that the US has kept attacking eastern Syria, although there is a de facto truce between Iran and the US.
Syria, meanwhile, is largely powerless to stop either US or Israeli air strikes, since its air defences are antiquated and worn down by years of war. F-35 Lightning jets used by the US and Israel are often said to appear on radar as objects the size of birds or flying insects, depending on their speed and the angle of the jet in relation to the radar beam.
Syria could, at the risk of inviting more Israeli strikes, launch rocket salvos into Israel – as some of its allied militias have done. But it allows Iran to lead anti-US operations in the east, possibly out of fear of provoking aerial attacks by Washington.
“It is in the regime’s interest to show that there is an anti-US resistance active in eastern Syria,” he said.
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
