You meant to say "obama armed and protecting ISIS".Heracleum Persicum wrote: All this no secret anymore
Pretty much known fact US created ISIS, armed and now protecting them
Poor Hollande
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Those guys have no power over anything. obama is Commander in Chief, sets all foreign policy.Heracleum Persicum wrote:
Architect of American downfall
.. we are starting to uncover those who speak the language of anti-terrorism while in practice working to facilitate and support it.
Turkey is a key culprit in this regard. A murky relationship has long existed between Ankara, ISIS, al Nusra, and other jihadi groups operating in Syria. Indeed, on the most basic level, without their ability to pass back and forth across the Turkish border at will, those groups could not have operated as easily and effectively as they had until Russia intervened.
However, according to a report by David L Phillips of Columbia University, Turkey’s support for extremist groups operating in Syria, including ISIS has been even more extensive than previously thought. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Phillips reveals that the Turkish government, a member of NATO and a key Western ally, has been involved in helping ISIS with recruitment, training, and has provided it with intelligence and safe havens and sanctuary. Most recently it has been exposed as a major customer for stolen Syrian oil, supplied by the terrorist group.
Perhaps the most damning evidence contained in the report when it comes to Turkey’s role, is in relation to its actions and inaction when it came to the siege of the Kurdish town of Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border in September and October of 2014.
As Phillips reveals: “Anwar Moslem, Mayor of Kobani, said on September 19, 2014: ‘Based on the intelligence we got two days before the breakout of the current war, trains full of forces and ammunition, which were passing by north of Kobani, had an-hour-and-ten-to-twenty-minute-long stops in these villages: Salib Qaran, Gire Sor, Moshrefat Ezzo. There is evidence, witnesses, and videos about this. Why is ISIS strong only in Kobani's east? Why is it not strong either in its south or west? Since these trains stopped in villages located in the east of Kobani, we guess they had brought ammunition and additional force for the ISIS.’ In the second article on September 30, 2014, a CHP delegation visited Kobani, where locals claimed that everything from the clothes ISIS militants wear to their guns comes from Turkey.”
"What we agreed, and this is important, is to strike only terrorists and Daesh (Islamic State) and to not strike forces that are fighting terrorism. We will exchange information about whom to hit and whom not to hit," ..
Putin said Russia was open to greater cooperation with France and the U.S. in picking IS targets.
Hollande was in Moscow on a diplomatic mission to build an offensive force against IS that has also taken him to the U.S., Germany, Britain and Italy.
"Our enemy is Daesh, Islamic State, it has territory, an army and resources, so we must create this large coalition to hit these terrorists," Hollande said in televised remarks at the start of bilateral talks with the Russian leader in the Kremlin.
"I'm in Moscow with you to see how we can act together and coordinate so that we can strike this terrorist group, but also reach a solution for peace," Hollande said.
Putin said Moscow was ready to unite with Paris against a "mutual enemy" following the downing of the Russian airliner and the attacks in Paris.
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“Today, in accordance with the decision taken earlier, all channels of cooperation between the Russian Defense Ministry and the armed forces of Turkey were suspended,” said Konashenkov.
The Russian Air Force base in Latakia has been reinforced with an S-400 SAM system, which was deployed on Thursday.
“Now we are going to ensure the safety of our planes fighting against ISIS militants and other terror groups by taking more reliable measures,” Konashenkov said.
A Turkish fighter jet launched a missile at a Russian bomber on Tuesday well ahead of the Su-24 approaching the Turkish border, the chief of Russia’s Air Force said. The bomber remained on Turkish radars for 34 minutes and never received any warnings.
The attack on the Russian Su-24 bomber was intentional and had been planned in advance, Viktor Bondarev, the chief of Russia’s Air Force, announced Friday, calling the incident an “unprecedented backstab.”
The commander shared with the media previously unknown details of what happened on Tuesday.
On November 24, a pair of Russian Sukhoi Su-24 tactical bombers took off from Khmeimim airbase in Latakia at 06:15 GMT, with an assignment to carry out airstrikes in the vicinity of the settlements of Kepir, Mortlu and Zahia, all in the north of Syria. Each bomber was carrying four OFAB-250 high-explosive fragmentation bombs.
Ten minutes later, the bombers entered the range of Turkish radars and took positions in the target area, patrolling airspace at predetermined heights of 5,800 meters and 5,650 meters respectively.
Both aircraft remained in the area for 34 minutes. During this time there was no contact between the crews of the Russian bombers and the Turkish military authorities or warplanes.
Some 20 minutes after arriving at the designated area, the crews received the coordinates of groups of terrorists in the region. After making a first run, the bombers performed a maneuver and then delivered a second strike.
Immediately after that, the bomber crewed by Lieutenant-Colonel Oleg Peshkov and Captain Konstantin Murakhtin was attacked by a Turkish F-16 fighter jet operating from the Diyarbakır airfield in Turkey.
To attack the Russian bomber with a close-range air-to-air missile, the Turkish fighter jet had to enter Syrian airspace, where it remained for about 40 seconds. Having launched its missile from a distance of 5-7 kilometers, the F-16 immediately turned towards the Turkish border, simultaneously dropping its altitude sharply, thus disappearing from the range of Russian radars at the Khmeimim airbase.
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Not so long ago, David Cameron declared that he was not some ‘naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet’. Just a few weeks after making that speech, Cameron authorised UK forces to join in the bombing of Libya — where the outcome reaffirmed this essential lesson.
Soon Cameron will ask parliament to share his ‘firm conviction’ that bombing Raqqa, the Syrian headquarters of the Islamic State, has become ‘imperative’. At first glance, the case for doing so appears compelling. The atrocities in Paris certainly warrant a response. With François Hollande having declared his intention to ‘lead a war which will be pitiless’, other western nations can hardly sit on their hands; as with 9/11 and 7/7, the moment calls for solidarity. And since the RAF is already targeting Isis in Iraq, why not extend the operation to the other side of the elided border? What could be easier?
But it’s harder to establish what expanding the existing bombing campaign further will actually accomplish. Is Britain engaged in what deserves to be called a war, a term that implies politically purposeful military action? Or is the Cameron government — and the Hollande government as well — merely venting its anger, and thereby concealing the absence of clear-eyed political purpose?
Britain and France each once claimed a place among the world’s great military powers. Whether either nation today retains the will (or the capacity) to undertake a ‘pitiless’ war — presumably suggesting a decisive outcome at the far end — is doubtful. The greater risk is that, by confusing war with punishment, they exacerbate the regional disorder to which previous western military interventions have contributed.
Even without Britain doing its bit, plenty of others are willing to drop bombs on Isis on either side of the Iraq-Syria frontier. With token assistance from Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, US forces have thus far flown some 57,000 sorties while completing 8,300 air strikes. United States Central Command keeps a running scorecard: 129 Isis tanks destroyed, 670 staging areas and 5,000 fighting positions plastered, and (in a newish development) 260 oil infrastructure facilities struck, with the numbers updated from one day to the next. The campaign that the Americans call Operation Inherent Resolve has been under way now for 17 months. It seems unlikely to end anytime soon.
In Westminster or the Elysée, the Pentagon’s carefully tabulated statistics are unlikely to garner much official attention, and for good reason. All these numbers make a rather depressing point: with plenty of sorties flown, munitions expended and targets hit, the results achieved, even when supplemented with commando raids, training missions and the generous distribution of arms to local forces, amount in sum to little more than military piddling. In the United States, the evident ineffectiveness of the air campaign has triggered calls for outright invasion. Pundits of a bellicose stripe, most of whom got the Iraq war of 2003 wrong, insist that a mere 10,000 or 20,000 ground troops — 50,000 tops! — will make short work of the Islamic State as a fighting force. Victory guaranteed. No sweat.
And who knows? Notwithstanding their record of dubious military prognostications, the proponents of invade-and-occupy just might be right — in the short term. The West can evict Isis from Raqqa if it really wants to. But as we have seen in other recent conflicts, the real problems are likely to present themselves the day after victory. What then? Once in, how will we get out? Competition rather than collaboration describes relations between many of the countries opposing Isis. As Barack Obama pointed out this week, there are now two coalitions converging over Syria: a US-led one, and a Russia-led one that includes Iran. Looking for complications? With Turkey this week having shot down a Russian fighter jet — the first time a Nato member has downed a Kremlin military aircraft for half a century — the subsequent war of words between Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin gives the world a glimpse into how all this could spin out of control.
The threat posed by terrorism is merely symptomatic of larger underlying problems. Crush Isis, whether by bombing or employing boots on the ground, and those problems will still persist. A new Isis, under a different name but probably flying the same banner, will appear in its place, much as Isis itself emerged from the ashes of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Does the West possess the wherewithal to sustain another long war? Only if the allies wage that war exclusively from the air. The British army is now the smallest it has been since the 19th century, Cameron’s government having reduced it by 20 per cent since coming to power. The French army today numbers just over 100,000. London and Paris inevitably look to the United States as the pre-eminent member of the western alliance to take up the slack (the US still spends almost twice as much on defence as all other Nato members put together). But apart from Obama’s evident reluctance to close out his presidency by embarking upon a new war, advocates of a major ground offensive against Isis should note that the United States army is also shrinking. It’s also considerably worn out by the trials of the past dozen or more years. Those who cheer from the bleachers may be eager for action. Those likely to be sent to fight, not to mention citizens who actually care about the wellbeing of their soldiers, may feel less keen.
The fact is that Britain, France, the United States and the other allies face a perplexing strategic conundrum. Collectively, they find themselves locked in a protracted conflict with Islamic radicalism — of which Isis is but one manifestation. Prospects for negotiating an end to that conflict anytime soon appear to be nil. Alas, so too do prospects of winning it.
In this conflict, the West as a whole appears to enjoy the advantage of clear-cut military superiority. By almost any measure, we are stronger than our adversaries. Our arsenals are bigger, our weapons more sophisticated, our generals better educated in the art of war, our fighters better trained at waging it.
Yet time and again the actual deployment of our ostensibly superior military might has produced results other than those intended or anticipated. Even where armed intervention has achieved a semblance of tactical success — the ousting of some unsavoury dictator, for example — it has yielded neither reconciliation nor willing submission nor even sullen compliance. Instead, intervention typically serves to aggravate, inciting further resistance. Rather than putting out the fires of radicalism, we end up feeding them.
Although the comparison may strike some as historically imprecise, the present moment bears at least passing resemblance to the last occasion when British and French leaders got all worked up about taking on obstreperous Arabs. Back in 1956, the specific circumstances differed, of course. Then, the problem attracting the ire of British and French policymakers was the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in seizing the Suez canal had committed a seemingly unpardonable offence. And the issue was preserving imperial privilege, not curbing terrorism. But then, as today, in both London and Paris, an emotional thirst for revenge overrode sober calculation.
The vicious Isis attacks in Paris represent another unpardonable offence. Through war, Cameron and Hollande seek to avenge the innocents who were killed and wounded. But as the humiliating outcome of the Suez war reminds us, there are some problems to which war is an unsuitable response.
Across much of the greater Middle East today, we confront one such problem. For western governments to reflexively visit further violence on that region represents not a policy but an abdication of policy. It’s past time to think differently.
obama financed and armed the Monsters. Trump will disarm them and defund them. Pretty open and shut.Heracleum Persicum wrote:
West, McCain, Graham, Lieberman, Bolton, Zionist, Neocons created, financed, armed these beasts .. and now .. the beast turning on them .. Iran was only one who was doing all the footwork, fighting ISIS since beginning.
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This is the left talking itself out of power.kmich wrote:The pretend war: why bombing Isil won't solve the problem
The deployment of our military might in Syria will exacerbate regional disorder – and it will solve nothing
~ Andrew J. Bacevich
obama failed to to this job (he created ISIS, we both know), so falls to Trump. Trump man for the job.Heracleum Persicum wrote:2ss4COzQr4w
well, folks, these are the beast you backing and arming and financing
Wahhabi and Salafi must go .. Sheikhs and Amirs and Kings gotto go
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Mr. Perfect wrote:Heracleum Persicum wrote:2ss4COzQr4w
well, folks, these are the beast you backing and arming and financing
Wahhabi and Salafi must go .. Sheikhs and Amirs and Kings gotto go
.
Trump man for the job.
.
Help McCain?? heeeeeeelp IRan !!!Heracleum Persicum wrote:.
Syria already a "no-fly zone" under Russian control.
McCain, Garahm, Lieberman, Necons have now their "no-fly-zone", happy ? ?
4800 meters per second .. Range now covers at least three-quarters of Syrian territory, a huge part of Turkey, all of Lebanon, Cyprus and half of Israel (limiting Israel's action) .. any plane flying in that space in danger of being shot down if the Russian General decides so
McCain, heeeeeeelp
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WHAT A DISASTER AZ WHAT A DISASTER !!!Iran’s Military Involvement in Syria Will Lead to Even More Death and Destruction
November 11, 2015 7:36 am 3 comments
It should have come as no surprise that Russia and Iran made their joint military move into Syria before the ink on the Iranian nuclear agreement was even dry.
The operation had clearly been long-planned, given the vested interests that Moscow and Tehran have in keeping the Assad regime in power, and the swiftness of their military deployment.
Although the Iranian leadership seldom publishes figures on their casualties in Syria, they can no longer tone down the extent of their intervention in the Syrian civil war, given the rising number of public funerals that the regime inadvertently holds to shore up support and justify its devastating regional policy.
Although the regime hypocritically claims that its military intervention in Syria is to deter ISIS forces from encroaching on its borders and to prevent regional conflict, Iran’s actions have launched a civil war in the Arab world.
According to the regime’s own sources, the death count among its forces has been particularly high in 2015, with 80 Iranians killed, compared with a total of 140 killed since the conflict began in 2011. And those numbers are undoubtedly on the very low end of the true number killed.
In recent weeks, at least 28 senior Revolutionary Guards commanders — advertised as “military advisers” by Iran — have died on three separate fronts.
The death of General Hossein Hamedani in in October was a major setback for both Iran and Syria, as he was credited with helping create the pro-Assad regime militia National Defence Forces (NDF), which comprises of thousands of Syrian fighters, and is modeled after Hezbollah. Ayatollah Khamenei personally called on Hamedani’s family to convey his condolences.
In addition to Iraqi and Lebanese paid militias, Iran is also recruiting Afghan refugees to fight in Syria, promising them a regular monthly salary and work permits in exchange for what it claims to be a sacred duty to save Shia shrines in Damascus.
Western intelligence agencies reported that General Qassem Suleimani, the renowned commander of the Quds Force, arrived in Syria in September to mobilize a new offensive around Aleppo, which coincided with Russia’s new bombing campaign by air.
The cost of Khamenei-Revolutionary Guards’ devastating adventurist regional policy has not been confined to human losses.
In 2014, the Syrian Opposition Interim Minister of Finance and Economy claimed that the “Iranian government has given more than 15 billion dollars” to Syria. According to the United Nations envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, the Iranian government spends at least $6 billion annually on maintaining Assad’s government. Nadim Shehadi, the director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University, said that his research puts the actual number at $15 billion annually.
In July last year, Iran granted Syria a $3.6 billion credit line to buy oil products, according to officials and bankers at the time. Another $1 billion went for non-oil products.
And in July of this year, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad signed a law ratifying a further $1 billion credit line from Iran’s Central Bank.
In a recent report on the Iranian economy,the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said that the lifting of sanctions — which would give Iran access to frozen assets the Obama Administration estimates at roughly $56 billion — would create a “windfall” that Iran could use to resurrect its oil fields, revive domestic industries such as auto and pharmaceutical manufacturing, and reduce widespread unemployment.
Given the Iranian regime’s determination to keep Assad in power at any cost and maintain its military and financial support for its proxy armies in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain, it would not be wrong to assume that this “windfall” has already been squandered.
But but AZ Iranians dying like flies on fly paper in Syria.Heracleum Persicum wrote:Mr. Perfect wrote:Heracleum Persicum wrote:2ss4COzQr4w
well, folks, these are the beast you backing and arming and financing
Wahhabi and Salafi must go .. Sheikhs and Amirs and Kings gotto go
.
Trump man for the job.
.
Agree, Trump man for the job .. Trump said he goin to leave that barn to Russians and Iranians to clean it up .. W. Bush did the same .. when W.Bush realized he was coned by Neocons, handed Mesopotamia to Ahmadinejat, declared "mission accomplished" packed and left .. Trump no dummy, he no lettin conin by Neocon, he will handover that barn to Russian and Iran from start.
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Syria is one sticky mess Obama made. An Iranian fly trap. No wonder so many Iranian generals are afraid to go there. They don't want to get stuck in a grave.Iranian media is revealing that scores of the country’s fighters are dying in Syria
BEIRUT — An increasing number of Iranian soldiers and militiamen appear to be dying in Syria’s civil war, and observers credit media from an unexpected country for revealing the trend:
Iran.
A flurry of reports in Iran’s official and semiofficial news outlets about the deaths — including funerals and even a eulogy to a fallen general by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — have surprised analysts who monitor the country’s tightly controlled media. The reports, they say, indicate that at least 67 Iranians have been killed in Syria since the beginning of October.
Just a few months ago, Iranian media said little about the country’s military intervention in Syria to shore up the government. But as Iranian fighters participate in a new Russian-led offensive against Syrian rebels, Iran’s leaders might have a reason to offer more details of their country’s involvement, said Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“They are proud of this and they want to show it,” he said. Since Iranian forces became increasingly involved in the conflict in 2013, he noted, about 10 fighters were being killed every month, but the numbers surged after Russia, another ally of Syria’s government, began launching airstrikes at rebels in late September.
[Hundreds of Iranian troops mass near Aleppo, U.S. official and activists say]
Iran has been a key military and financial backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during nearly five years of conflict, viewing his government as critical
for projecting Iranian influence across the region.
Iran’s elite Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps helped Assad build powerful pro-government militias to support Syria’s exhausted and broken military. Iran, a Shiite nation, also has ordered thousands of Shiite militiamen from Lebanon, Iraq and other countries to fight in Syria against the Sunni-led rebellion.
But in Iran’s media, the role of Revolutionary Guard soldiers and Iranian militiamen in Syria has been generally played down. They are described as “advisers” or “volunteers” protecting Shiite shrines.
It is unclear precisely how many Iranians are fighting in Syria. While U.S. officials estimate their number to be in the hundreds, Phillip Smyth, a researcher on Shiite militant groups at the University of Maryland, said 2,000 Iranians or more could be deployed there. And they appear to be increasingly involved in “direct combat” operations during the Russian offensive, which could explain the rising death toll, Smyth said.
The United States long sought to exclude Iran from regional discussions about Syria’s future, largely because of its support for Assad. But last month, Iran was invited to join in a regional meeting on the subject, a sign of acknowledgment by Washington of the broad influence that Tehran wields in Syria.
[U.S. and Russian militaries don’t agree about much in Syria]
Alfoneh said that by allowing greater media coverage of the deaths, Iranian leaders might partly be trying to prevent Russia’s headline-grabbing intervention from overshadowing their own.
“The Iranian regime is showing its importance in Syria, using all its propaganda machinery to publicize the names and information of individuals who were martyred,” he said.
That publicity included the death announcement of Mohsen Fanousi, a pro-government Basij militia member thought to have been killed in Aleppo this month. A Basij Web site congratulated Fanousi on his martyrdom, saying in an announcement that he “left and joined God knowingly.”
A video posted on the semiofficial Fars News Agency shows the funeral of a man identified as Qadir Sarlak, a Revolutionary Guard fighter killed in Syria on Nov. 5. The video shows what appears to be fellow Revolutionary Guard members, many of them wearing fatigues, crowding over his coffin and symbolically slapping themselves as a show of grief.
Even Khamenei tweeted a photo of himself visiting the grieving family of Hossein Hamedani, a Revolutionary Guard general who was killed last month in Aleppo.
Sustaining so many casualties may once have generated a backlash in Iran. Support for an autocratic leader such as Assad — whose forces are responsible for many of the conflict’s more than 250,000 deaths — is not a popular cause for many Iranians, analysts say.
But the rise of the vehemently anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian Islamic State militant group, which controls parts of Syria and Iraq, has made justifying the fight in Syria easier for Iranian leaders, said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He added that many Iranians may not be aware that their countrymen appear to be mostly fighting other rebels, not the hard-line Sunni fighters of the Islamic State.
“I think that the capacity for the Iranian people to accept casualties in Syria is greater than a couple of years ago because there is greater consensus of a need to fight what they think are all ISIS people,” said Hokayem, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Sam Alrefaie in Beirut contributed to this report.
Doc wrote:.
WHAT A DISASTER AZ!!! WHAT A DISASTER !!!
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The S-400’s radar has a range of 600 kilometers and is capable of discriminating even objects moving on the ground, such as cars and military vehicles.
S-400 radar covers Syria, western regions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, nearly all of Israel and Jordan, Egypt’s northern Sinai, a large part of the eastern Mediterranean and Turkish airspace as far as the capital Ankara.
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"This may be the very beginning of a conflict between Turkey and Iran. Tehran is responsible for [Syrian President Bashar] Assad’s strategy. Assad as well as Hezbollah is very important to Iran. This is the Shiite axis. Russia came to Syria to support Assad, and then Turkey shot down a Russian jet. It may lead to a war between Turkey and Iran," political analyst Edward Luttwack was quoted as saying in the article.
..
"Turkey wants to drag NATO into this war since its goal is to topple Assad. ISIL and the Kurds are not that important. An ally which acts this way should not be respected in the alliance," Kujat said.
Luttwak confirmed the assumption, saying: "Turkey betrayed NATO when it refused to cooperate and bought oil from ISIL. Ankara made ISIL powerful. While the US is sending weapons to Kurds who fight ISIL Turkey is bombing them. For NATO, having Turkey as an ally is worse than having it as an enemy," he concluded.
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I didn't say anything about Turkish planes AZ. Why are you so concerned about what I said that you deleted the entire thing I posted except for the last line? Oh maybe you just missed it. Well here it is again so you can read it. Don't be scared AZ I am pretty sure the mad mullahs won't send you to SyriaHeracleum Persicum wrote:Doc wrote:.
WHAT A DISASTER AZ!!! WHAT A DISASTER !!!
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Doc, 4get Turkey (Turkish planes can not even approach Syrian border).
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But but AZ Iranians dying like flies on fly paper in Syria.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ir ... story.html
Iranian media is revealing that scores of the country’s fighters are dying in Syria
BEIRUT — An increasing number of Iranian soldiers and militiamen appear to be dying in Syria’s civil war, and observers credit media from an unexpected country for revealing the trend:
Iran.
A flurry of reports in Iran’s official and semiofficial news outlets about the deaths — including funerals and even a eulogy to a fallen general by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — have surprised analysts who monitor the country’s tightly controlled media. The reports, they say, indicate that at least 67 Iranians have been killed in Syria since the beginning of October.
Just a few months ago, Iranian media said little about the country’s military intervention in Syria to shore up the government. But as Iranian fighters participate in a new Russian-led offensive against Syrian rebels, Iran’s leaders might have a reason to offer more details of their country’s involvement, said Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“They are proud of this and they want to show it,” he said. Since Iranian forces became increasingly involved in the conflict in 2013, he noted, about 10 fighters were being killed every month, but the numbers surged after Russia, another ally of Syria’s government, began launching airstrikes at rebels in late September.
[Hundreds of Iranian troops mass near Aleppo, U.S. official and activists say]
Iran has been a key military and financial backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during nearly five years of conflict, viewing his government as critical
for projecting Iranian influence across the region.
Iran’s elite Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps helped Assad build powerful pro-government militias to support Syria’s exhausted and broken military. Iran, a Shiite nation, also has ordered thousands of Shiite militiamen from Lebanon, Iraq and other countries to fight in Syria against the Sunni-led rebellion.
But in Iran’s media, the role of Revolutionary Guard soldiers and Iranian militiamen in Syria has been generally played down. They are described as “advisers” or “volunteers” protecting Shiite shrines.
It is unclear precisely how many Iranians are fighting in Syria. While U.S. officials estimate their number to be in the hundreds, Phillip Smyth, a researcher on Shiite militant groups at the University of Maryland, said 2,000 Iranians or more could be deployed there. And they appear to be increasingly involved in “direct combat” operations during the Russian offensive, which could explain the rising death toll, Smyth said.
The United States long sought to exclude Iran from regional discussions about Syria’s future, largely because of its support for Assad. But last month, Iran was invited to join in a regional meeting on the subject, a sign of acknowledgment by Washington of the broad influence that Tehran wields in Syria.
[U.S. and Russian militaries don’t agree about much in Syria]
Alfoneh said that by allowing greater media coverage of the deaths, Iranian leaders might partly be trying to prevent Russia’s headline-grabbing intervention from overshadowing their own.
“The Iranian regime is showing its importance in Syria, using all its propaganda machinery to publicize the names and information of individuals who were martyred,” he said.
That publicity included the death announcement of Mohsen Fanousi, a pro-government Basij militia member thought to have been killed in Aleppo this month. A Basij Web site congratulated Fanousi on his martyrdom, saying in an announcement that he “left and joined God knowingly.”
A video posted on the semiofficial Fars News Agency shows the funeral of a man identified as Qadir Sarlak, a Revolutionary Guard fighter killed in Syria on Nov. 5. The video shows what appears to be fellow Revolutionary Guard members, many of them wearing fatigues, crowding over his coffin and symbolically slapping themselves as a show of grief.
Even Khamenei tweeted a photo of himself visiting the grieving family of Hossein Hamedani, a Revolutionary Guard general who was killed last month in Aleppo.
Sustaining so many casualties may once have generated a backlash in Iran. Support for an autocratic leader such as Assad — whose forces are responsible for many of the conflict’s more than 250,000 deaths — is not a popular cause for many Iranians, analysts say.
But the rise of the vehemently anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian Islamic State militant group, which controls parts of Syria and Iraq, has made justifying the fight in Syria easier for Iranian leaders, said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He added that many Iranians may not be aware that their countrymen appear to be mostly fighting other rebels, not the hard-line Sunni fighters of the Islamic State.
“I think that the capacity for the Iranian people to accept casualties in Syria is greater than a couple of years ago because there is greater consensus of a need to fight what they think are all ISIS people,” said Hokayem, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Sam Alrefaie in Beirut contributed to this report.
Syria is one sticky mess Obama made. An Iranian fly trap. No wonder so many Iranian generals are afraid to go there. They don't want to get stuck in a grave.
WHAT A DISASTER AZ!!! WHAT A DISASTER !!!
Az, can you tell me, are you more on Turkey side or Russia side.Heracleum Persicum wrote:.
McCain, Garahm, Lieberman, Necons have now their "no-fly-zone", happy ? ?
4800 meters per second .. Range now covers at least three-quarters of Syrian territory, a huge part of Turkey, all of Lebanon, Cyprus and half of Israel (limiting Israel's action) .. any plane flying in that space in danger of being shot down if the Russian General decides so
McCain, heeeeeeelp
.
Unfortunately obama is a neocon by himself, that space may be glowing before Trump gets in.Heracleum Persicum wrote: Agree, Trump man for the job .. Trump said he goin to leave that barn to Russians and Iranians to clean it up .. W. Bush did the same .. when W.Bush realized he was coned by Neocons, handed Mesopotamia to Ahmadinejat, declared "mission accomplished" packed and left .. Trump no dummy, he no lettin conin by Neocon, he will handover that barn to Russian and Iran from start.
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