Iran Is Increasingly Calling The Shots For Assad In Syria

Jul. 24, 2013
Michael B Kelley
Source: Business Insider

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been forced gradually to cede power to Iran to prop up his regime during the grinding conflict in Syria.

The implications for the Middle East could be dramatic.

"Whether Assad stays or goes is becoming irrelevant," a diplomat in the region told Khaled Yacoub Oweis of Reuters. "The conflict is now bigger than him, and it will continue without him. Iran is calling the shots." 

Assad has been increasingly leaning on Iranian troops, Hezbollah guerrilla fighters from Lebanon, and Shi'ite militias from Iraq as he preserves his elite loyalist units after 28 months of fighting. 

Consequently, Hezbollah and Iranian troops have become directly involved in the command structures of Assad's forces.

"Now the operations are well-planned and the objectives are precise," Rami Abdel, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP in April. "This is because Iranian officers are on the ground, leading operations, while new Iranian weapons conceived for this kind of battle are flowing in."

Iran has had troops on the ground to fight for Assad's regime in August, and Quds forces from the foreign operations arm of the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) may have been there as early as 2011.

More recently Iran has been training Syrian militias in guerrilla tactics while Iranian officers and Hezbollah fighters lead in battle.

"[Assad] can no longer call a division head and tell him to bomb the hell out of this neighborhood or that," Abu Nawar, a Jordanian military analyst, told Reuters. "His command has been eroded and the command structure is now multinational."

Right now the fighting inside Syria is most intense in Homs, which is a key corridor between Damascus, Lebanon, and the coastal Alawite heartland.

There is also talk that Assad is aiming to form an Alawite state in that area to sequester himself and his less fervent sect of Shia Islam from wider Sunni-Muslim war playing out in Syria and Iraq.
Martin Chulov and Mona Mahmood of the Guardian report that Assad asked a well-known diplomatic figure "to approach the former Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, late last year with a request that Israel not stand in the way of attempts to form an Alawite state."

(Previous reports of sectarian cleansing of Sunnis along the coast corroborate that notion.)
Iran is primarily concerned with maintaining the Shi'ite crescent — which includes Shi'ites from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria — and is fully determined to keep its geographical link to Lebanon intact.

 Essentially, Iran holds sway over a huge swath of the Middle East right now (i.e. the Shi'ite crescent), with the crux being Syria.

The ongoing war in the area could drag on for years, and the outcome will alter the balance between Shias and Sunnis as well as between Iran and Israel/U.S.

As Iranian-American journalist Ali Gharib recently wrote in a Daily Best piece about the hawkish stance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "The U.S. and Iran are on a collision course, one that ends very badly for everyone involved."


 
 Link: .businessinsider.com/iran-is-calling-the-shots-in-syria-2013-7.

Tens of thousands await Turkish PM's return after protests

8 hours ago
By Humeyra Pamuk and Jonathon Burch 
Source: Yahoo News

ISTANBUL/ANKARA (Reuters) - Thousands of supporters welcomed back Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan from a North African tour on Friday in a show of strength after a week of violent anti-government demonstrations across the country.

Erdogan addressed crowds from an open-top bus at Istanbul airport in a speech also broadcast live on television, as supporters, who had blocked roads to the airport for hours, chanted his name.

"We stood strong, but we were never stubborn ... We are together, we are unified, we are brothers," Erdogan told tens of thousands of his ruling party faithful.

Anti-government protesters also gathered in their thousands in central Istanbul and Ankara awaiting a speech that could appease or aggravate the crowds after a week of violent unrest.

Some of the demonstrators in Istanbul's Taksim Square chanted "Tayyip resign", while others sang and danced. In Ankara's Kugulu Park, thousands chanted anti-government slogans, sang the national anthem and swigged on beer.

What began as a campaign against planned construction on a leafy park in a corner of Taksim Square has grown into an unprecedented display of public anger over the perceived authoritarianism of Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK Party.

Police backed by armored vehicles and helicopters have clashed with groups of protesters night after night, leaving three dead and some 4,000 injured, while thousands of Erdogan's opponents have massed peacefully in Taksim, surrounded by barricades of torn-up paving stones and street signs.

"It's all up to Erdogan and what he says right now. He will decide the fate of this resistance, whether it will calm (down) or escalate," said Mehmet Polat, 42, a ship captain who has not worked all week, coming instead to protest at Taksim.

"These people have been here for days. He has to understand it is for a reason," he said.

Erdogan has so far struck a defiant tone. Speaking in Tunis on Thursday, he condemned the "burn and destroy" tactics of some of those involved in the protests, and promised to press ahead with the plans for Taksim that triggered the unrest.

"If you say: 'I will hold a meeting and burn and destroy,' we will not allow that," he told reporters after meeting his Tunisian counterpart. "We are against the majority dominating the minority and we cannot tolerate the opposite."

He said that "terror groups", including one that claimed responsibility for a February 1 bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, were manipulating the crowds. Seven foreigners were among those arrested, he said.

The protesters are of a variety of political stripes, including far leftists, nationalists, environmentalists and secular Turks, and their numbers at Taksim have swollen at points to more than an estimated 100,000.

But despite the unrest, Erdogan remains by far Turkey's most popular politician, his assertive style and common touch resonating with the conservative Islamic heartland.

His AK Party has won an increasing share of the vote in three successive elections and holds around two thirds of the seats in parliament. A man who rarely bows to any opposition, he clearly has no intention of stepping down and there are no obvious rivals inside or outside his party.

Still, he faces a challenge in calming the protests without appearing to lose face.

"Erdogan cannot backtrack now. It would mean defeat," said Ali Aydin, 38, a car dealer in the Tophane neighborhood of Istanbul, a conservative bastion in the mostly Bohemian district around Taksim Square. "Weakness would destroy the party."

(Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Philip Barbara)