The post Why Iraq is at the center of the dispute between Iran and the United States first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

While Russian and Iranian-backed Bashar al-Assad’s regime is consolidating its grip on most areas once controlled by various rebel groups in Syria, Iran’s involvement and military footprints in the country have some experts and U.S. lawmakers concerned that Tehran might be in the process of establishing long-term presence in Syria in an effort to project regional power in the long term.

“These countries [Russia and Iran] are digging into Syria preparing for the long haul, and the implications for the U.S. interests and those of our partners are still coming into focus,” Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said during a recent congressional hearing on U.S policy in Syria.

Lehtinen added that U.S. needs a “coherent” and “comprehensive” strategy to prevent Iran’s growing influence in the region.

“After signing a deal for additional military cooperation with Assad last month, Iran is showing no signs of leaving Syria anytime soon. The U.S. needs a comprehensive and coherent strategy for Syria that rolls back Iranian influence in the Middle East,” she said.

Some analysts such as Majid Rafizadeh, president of International American Council on the Middle East, echo Lehtinen’s concerns and call for measures to stop Iran’s encroachment in Syria and the region.

“Iran is solidifying its presence in Syria in three different approaches: militarily, economically and politically. Tehran is sealing long-term deals and agreements with the weak Syrian state to ‘reconstruct the Syrian military industry,'” Rafizadeh told VOA.

“This will give the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp], the Quds Force and Iran’s intelligence the perfect excuse to remain in Syria, set up more military bases, and further infiltrate Syria’s security apparatuses,” Rafizadeh added.

Indefinite stay

Iran’s engagement in Syria began gradually since the start of the country’s civil war in 2011, initially in the form of providing military advisers to the Syrian regime. The engagement later morphed into a full-scale military intervention where the regime sent its forces and employed its proxies to fight alongside Assad to crack down on the various Syrian rebel groups in the country.

Last August, Amir Hatami, Iran’s minister of defense, made a two-day visit to Syria to meet with Assad. During the visit, Hatami agreed to a defense cooperation agreement with his Syrian counterpart, Ali Abdullah Ayoub.

Following Hatami’s visit, Iran’s military attache in Damascus, Abolghasem Alinejad, was quoted by an Iranian state news agency that Iranian advisers would remain in Syria indefinitely.

“The continued presence of Iran’s advisers in Syria is one of the areas covered in the defensive-technical agreement between Tehran and Damascus,” Alinejad told Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) last year.

$16 billion

Iran reportedly has been spending billions of dollars in the Middle East to gain influence and prop up regimes.

According to a report published by the U.S. Department of State earlier this month, Iran has spent about $16 billion to destabilize the Middle East by funding proxies in different countries including Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

“Since 2012, Iran has spent over $16 billion propping up the Assad regime and supporting its other partners and proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen,” the report said.

Sunni Shi’ite dynamics

Some experts are also charging that Tehran is trying to take advantage of the demographic changes and displacements of people in Syria by seeking to increase the dominance of the country’s Shi’ites at the expense of marginalizing Sunnis.

“Iran brought the families of its [Shi’ite] militias from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq to live in the properties that used to belong to the Sunni communities before displacing the Sunnis to other areas. Iran was also behind issuing decree No. 10 in Syria,” Hanin Ghaddar, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told VOA.

Ghaddar was referring to what is known as Law No. 10 in Syria, which is a decree, issued by the Syrian president in April to plan the reconstruction of areas destroyed by war.

The law seizes the properties of displaced Syrians unless they prove the ownership of their properties in 30 days, which many analysts say is almost impossible because of the scale of the destruction and the fear of potential persecution by the Syrian regime.

U.S. policy

U.S. officials repeatedly urged Iran to remove its forces from Syria, but Iranian officials maintain that their presence in the country is legitimate under the request of the government in Damascus.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that Syria will not receive U.S aid for reconstruction if Iran continues to have troops inside the country.

“If Syria doesn’t ensure the total withdrawal of Iranian-backed troops, it will not receive one single dollar from the United States for reconstruction,” Pompeo said in his keynote address at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a pro-Israel group.

Pompeo also said the U.S. would focus on initiating a peaceful political process and the removal of all Iranian troops and proxies from Syria.

But some analysts charge that Iran’s total exit from Syria might take time, but there are steps that could be taken to contain Iran’s influence.

“There can be many steps taken to contain Iran at this point. The demographic changes need to be countered, the refugees return, containing Hezbollah in Lebanon, working with local allies, working with local tribes, cutting the land bridge,” Ghaddar, of the Washington Institute, said.

Ghaddar believes that a political change in Syria will also be an effective tool to limit Iran’s presence in Syria.

“A political change in Syria will limit Iran’s presence depending on what kind of political change we are talking about,” Ghaddar said.

“If we are talking about transitional period where Assad regime goes, which does not seem like it at this point, and we look at a new power, new people and a new elections then, yes, this will contain Iran’s power in Syria because at the end of the day they are considered a foreign legion,” she added.

Source: https://www.voanews.com/a/iran-growing-influence-in-syria-has-many-concerned/4615242.html

The post Iran’s Growing Influence in Syria Sparks Concern first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

It was a bombshell – for more than five days, the Lebanese military was fighting the terrorist organization “Islamic State” (IS), whose militia have penetrated parts of the Syrian Qalamoun Mountains. Its foothills reach as far as Lebanon and the IS jihadis have proved themselves well equipped.

Lebanon’s military, keen to push Sunni extremists back, has formed a loose alliance with Hezbollah and Iran. The Shiite-dominated alliance has managed to push back Sunni extremists.

“The Lebanese military supported by the resistance movement, Hezbollah and the [Iranian] nation, recorded some significant victories over the IS terrorists,” said Hossein Jaberi Ansari, the Iranian deputy foreign minister, during a recent visit to Beirut.

A long unthinkable alliance
The Lebanese army working with Hezbollah’s paramilitary militia – such an alliance was previously unthinkable. For a state institution such as the Lebanese military to ally itself with the Islamist group, with roots in and support from Iran, is noteworthy. Not least because according to the political scientist Eitan Azani, Hezbollah “operates as a state within a state.”

“The independent politics of the Lebanese organization created conflicts and tensions in their relationship with the Lebanese state,” Azani said in his book on Hezbollah. “One of the main points of conflict between the movement and the government was Hezbollah’s resistance policy, which in many cases was in conflict with the interests of the government, thus undermining the processes that they tried to initiate.”

The tensions this created in the 1990s can still be seen today. Hezbollah remains an independent body in Lebanese politics. Although it has been represented in the Lebanese National Assembly since 1992, it has also maintained its largely independent paramilitary. In 2006, they fought with the Israeli military, which resulted in a war lasting about a month.

A divided Lebanon
Since then, Lebanon has been politically divided. On one side, there are the Sunnis, Druze and parts of the Lebanese Christians – on the other side, there are the Shiites and other parts of the Christian population.

“The coalition of Maronites [a collection of Christian churches], Sunnis and Druze has one main concern,” writes the Turkish analyst Timur Goksel. Particularly, he adds, “to keep Hezbollah from using its weapons and its political weight to change the political and economic balance of the [current] Lebanese system, which is based on religion.”

The fact that the Lebanese army is now cooperating militarily with this barely controllable partner, and also sees Iran as a partner,is causing serious concern in Israel. The fear is that Hezbollah could use the alliance with the Lebanese army to pursue its own agenda against Israel, even more forcefully than it has before.

Hezbollah’s Nasrallah’s threats
Several months ago, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah issued massive threats against Israel. Should Israel attack Lebanon or Syria, he said in June, “hundreds of thousands” of Arab and Muslim fighters would be ready to strike back. In the event of such an attack, it was entirely open as to “whether this struggle is limited to Lebanon and Israel or Syria and Israel,” he said.

In the middle of August he went on to say that an attack on Israel would be “a hundred times” greater than in previous conflicts. He also threatened Hezbollah could attack the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona. Previously, he had already named a huge ammonia tank at Haifa as a possible target. Its explosion would have devastating consequences for the city and its population. This sparked a discussion in Israel about the transfer of the tank into a safer area.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Hezbollah, in association with Iran, is one of the great winners of the war in Syria. Nasrallah’s self-confident words about the hundredfold strength of the organization may be exaggerated, but it indicates that Hezbollah is profiting enormously from its role as the military arm of Iran. Initially, Iran had the goal of not losing Syria, its most important and, at the same time, its only state ally in the region. During the course of the war, however, a new goal emerged – an uninterrupted land road, across Iraq and Syria, to Lebanon.

‘A stone’s throw from the border’
At the same time this means Iran’s sphere of influence extends as far as Israel. “Hezbollah is only a stone’s throw from the Israeli border,” the head of the Israeli military reconnaissance service, Herzl Halevi, said.

Hezbollah is thus given new weight. Since it also has a presence in Syria and will remain there in the foreseeable future, it also represents a whole new danger to Israel’s geopolitical strategy. It could now not only be attacked from the South of Lebanon but also from the Syrian western frontier. This would almost double the length of the front.

An attack is currently unlikely, as a third of the Hezbollah fighters are engaged in the Syrian war zone. In addition, the organization has suffered heavy human and financial losses. In the long run, however, there is a danger of war.

Israel braces itself
Israel is drawing several conclusions from the new situation. On the one hand, there are calls to no longer distinguish between Hezbollah and the regular Lebanese army. “The Lebanese army is a Hezbollah wing,” says Mordechai Kedar of the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Ramat Gan in conversation with the Jerusalem Post.

The newspaper itself also points out that arms supplies from Western countries – it mentions France and the US – to the Lebanese army would sooner or later end up in the hands of Hezbollah.

In addition, Israel has for the first time admitted to attacking arms shipments to Hezbollah “dozens of times” in recent years, as the newspaper Haaretz quoted an unnamed Israeli commander. The escalation of a war in the Middle East was a “trivial” phenomenon, Haaretz Amir Eshel, the commander of the Israeli Air Force, was quoted as saying.

Such an escalation should be avoided, he added. The army, he said, could not win such a war within a few hours. But it was so far developed that she could “dramatically reduce” their opponent.

Source: http://www.dw.com/en/hezbollahs-new-power-threatens-israel/a-40245304

The post Hezbollah’s new ‘power’ threatens Israel first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.