Iran Wants A Route To The Mediterean

Iran Wants to Leverage Aleppo into a Campaign Against the Gulf States and Israel

By Yossi MansharofDecember 30, 2016

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Syrian girls in al-Shaar neighborhood of Aleppo, by Jordi Bernabeu Farrús, via Creative Commons

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 390, December 30, 2016

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Events in Aleppo are playing an important role in Iran’s strategic plan to establish an overland corridor that would give it access to the Mediterranean coast. Since the city’s fall, Tehran has been urging non-state groups to come under its wing in return for massive and comprehensive support. The intensification of the Shiite-Sunni conflict acts as a barrier between Iran and its potential clients.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has touted the decisive victory over the rebels in Aleppo, and the city’s return to the control of the Syrian government, as a turning point that will transform not only the crisis in Syria but also other centers of regional conflict. The leading adviser to Supreme Leader Khamenei, Ali Akbar Velayati, and the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, have declared that the Aleppo victory reflects Tehran’s triumph over the Western-Sunni coalition. Iran is portraying itself as ascendant over the Western states, led by the US, and the Sunni states in the region, led by Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

The victory was of course largely achieved through the Russian military intervention, but Tehran appears to have benefited from the event more than Moscow. Aleppo is a crossroads on the overland corridor to the Mediterranean coast that Iran has been attempting to construct since 2014.  According to a Guardian report based on reliable sources, the envisaged corridor would pass through Baghdad, the Kurdish town of Sinjar, the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, Aleppo, Idlib, and Homs, and culminate on the strategic coastal strip of Latakia.

It is therefore hardly surprising that Tehran has expressed great enthusiasm about the return of Aleppo to the bosom of the Syrian regime, which placed the city within the Iranian sphere of influence. During his Friday sermon (the platform for declarative pronouncements by the Islamic Republic), Tehran's prayer leader, Kazem Sediqi, proclaimed that the Aleppo victory meant not simply the liberation of the city but the triumph of the (Shiite) faith of the Islamic Revolution. Commander of the Revolutionary Guards Mohammed Ali Jafari also declared Aleppo to be Iran’s front line of defense. Ever since the formation of the Islamic Revolution, he said, Tehran has sought to establish the widest possible defense margins against the West, Israel, and the Sunni states in the region.

During the Aleppo campaign, Tehran relied on a network of Shiite militias acting under the auspices of the Revolutionary Guards. According to reports, campaign commander Javad Ghafari was appointed by the commander of the Quds forces, Qassem Soleimani. These forces included the Lebanese Hezbollah and other militias sponsored by Tehran, such as the Iraqi al-Nujba’a; the Afghani Fatemiyoun; the Pakistani Zainabiyoun; and local militias established by the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah. According to various estimates, Hezbollah’s role in these battles went far beyond its numbers (it sent approximately 5,000 troops to Syria). Naim Qassem, the organization’s Deputy Secretary-General, claims that five Hezbollah activists in Syria serve as commanders of 25 non-Lebanese armed groups.

Encouraged by the Aleppo victory, Tehran and Hezbollah began to leverage the event’s significance. It was a turning point, they argued, not only with regard to Syria but also with regard to other foci of conflict throughout the Middle East – first in Bahrain, but in Saudi Arabia and Yemen as well.

Ever since the Islamic Revolution, Tehran has applied a strategy of supporting Arab and other militias that agreed to accept its patronage as tools against Sunni, pro-American governments in the region, as well as against Israel and the US. At present, the inclination is to use the “Syrian model,” whereby militias and forces under Iranian auspices act in tandem with local forces against Sunni factions in the region.

On December 9, 2016, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah declared that the Aleppo victory would influence “all the campaigns in the region.” For his part, the Revolutionary Guards’ second-in-command, Hossein Salami, sent a public invitation to the Shiites in Bahrain to replicate the model used by Tehran in Aleppo, declaring that the victory was the “first step” towards the liberation of Mosul, Bahrain, and Yemen. Ramazan Sharif, the head of public relations for the Revolutionary Guards, also declared that the victory in Aleppo would have an impact on the solution of the crises in Yemen and Bahrain. Naim Qassem underscored Hezbollah’s significant role in Tehran’s subversive strategy by expressing Hezbollah’s readiness to help would-be liberation movements whenever he believed in the righteousness of their struggle.

Iran's policy of exporting the Islamic revolution thus continues at full strength, with Tehran using the threat of the Islamic State (IS) as a pretext for maintaining an offensive military presence in other countries and in Sunni areas. The nuclear deal, which is favorable to Iran, must be viewed in this context. Because the West considers IS a threat, it is prepared to tolerate Iranian and pro-Iranian forces in Sunni areas.

This is why Tehran expects the victory in Aleppo to encourage Shiite circles in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to be responsive to its subversive aid. The daily Kayhan, which is close to Supreme Leader Khamenei, anticipated that the victory would increase attraction to the Islamic revolution among non-state groups in the region.

However, Hamas’s harsh reaction to the systematic killing and massive eviction of Sunnis from Aleppo shows the challenge facing Iran’s attempt to export the revolution. Hamas expressed solidarity with the Sunnis of Aleppo, once again highlighting its dispute with Tehran over who is the oppressed party in Syria. This dispute dates back to Ayatollah Khomeini’s indifference to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s pleas in the face of Hafez Assad’s offensive that culminated in the 1982 Hama massacres.

Rejecting this type of criticism and other critiques leveled at Tehran following the Aleppo battle, including the accusation by Al-Jazeera that the Iranians had subjected the city’s Sunnis to a nakba similar to that experienced by the Palestinians in 1948, Iranian government officials and journalists launched a social media campaign entitled “From Aleppo to Jerusalem.” This campaign represented the anticipated victory of Iranian forces in Jerusalem as a continuation of Tehran’s accomplishment in liberating Khoramshahr in southern Iran in 1982 during the Iran-Iraq war and Aleppo in 2016. The second-in-command of the Revolutionary Guards, Salami, declared that the experience gained by Hezbollah in fighting in built-up areas of Aleppo would be extremely useful during its future campaign against Israel.

While Tehran appears to have turned its attention to other areas inside Syria since the fall of Aleppo, a prospective Iranian campaign against Israel is not unrealistic. Tehran looks forward to exploiting the Syrian crisis as a means of deploying on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. This would widen the northern front facing Israel and threaten it substantially. Khamenei expressed this aspiration publicly, declaring that “Iran takes pride today in having forces near the borders of the Zionist regime and over its head,” as “the enemy must be destroyed in its own borders.”

In contrast to the proclamations of victory by leading lights of the Iranian regime, Mir Mahmoud Mousavi, formerly a senior official of the Iranian foreign ministry under Mohammed Khatami (1997-2005), has offered a more sobering prediction. According to Mousavi, joy in Tehran will be short-lived. Iran is likely to confront a considerable challenge for the foreseeable future, as it may be blamed for the fallout of the Syrian civil war with its hundreds of thousands dead and over 12 million refugees and displaced persons.

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Yossi Mansharof is a doctoral student in the Department of History of the Middle East at Haifa University and a scholar at the Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family

For Those Who Believe Muslims Are Peaceful Should Take A Trip To Iraq And Visit With ISIS.

Islamic State forces kill hundreds of Yazidi minority in Iraq threaten Kurdish capital

By REUTERS

08/10/2014 17:48

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The newly declared caliphate buries some alive in mass graves and takes Yazidi women as slaves, US continues to bomb Islamic State positions near Kurdish capital.

Islamic State militants parade in Mosul Photo: REUTERS

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• Behind the Lines: Islamic State’s explosive advance

BAGHDAD - Islamic State militants have killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority, burying some alive and taking hundreds of women as slaves, an Iraqi government minister said on Sunday.

Human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani accused the Sunni Muslim insurgents - who have ordered the community they regard as "devil worshippers" to convert to Islam or die - of celebrating a "a vicious atrocity" with cheers and weapons waved in the air. No independent confirmation was available.

Islamic State's advance through northern Iraq has forced tens of thousands to flee, threatened the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region and provoked the first US air strikes in the area since Washington withdrew troops from Iraq in late 2011.

The United States conducted new air strikes on Islamic State targets near Arbil, the capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region, U.S. Central Command said on Sunday. The strikes, launched by drone aircraft and U.S. fighter jets, were aimed at protecting Kurdish Peshmerga forces as they face off against Islamist militants near Arbil, the site of a US consulate and a US-Iraqi joint military operations center, Central Command said in a statement.

Sudani said in a telephone interview that news of the killings had come from people who had escaped town of Sinjar, an ancient home of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking community whose religion has set them apart from Muslims and other faiths.

"We have striking evidence obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic State have executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar," he said

"Some of the victims, including women and children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar."

President Barack Obama said on Saturday that US air strikes had destroyed arms that the Islamic State, which has captured swathes of northern Iraq since June, could have used against the Iraqi Kurds. However, he warned that there was no quick fix for the crisis that threatens to tear Iraq apart.

Kurdish regional president Masoud Barzani urged his allies to send arms to help his forces hold off the militants, who have bases across the Syrian border. During a visit by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, Barzani said: "We are not fighting a terrorist organization, we are fighting a terrorist state."

In comments likely to put pressure on Washington to step up its response to Islamic State, Iraqi rights minister Sudani said: "The terrorist Islamic State has also taken at least 300 Yazidi women as slaves and locked some of them inside a police station in Sinjar and transferred others to the town of Tal Afar. We are afraid they will take them outside the country.

"In some of the images we have obtained there are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses," he added. "This is a vicious atrocity."

A deadline passed at midday on Sunday for 300 families from the Yazidi community - followers of a religion influenced by the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia - to convert to Islam or die. It was not immediately clear if the victims to whom the minister referred were from that group of families.

US military aircraft have dropped relief supplies to tens of thousands of Yazidis who have collected on the desert top of nearby Mount Sinjar, seeking shelter from the insurgents.

At the Vatican, Pope Francis held a silent prayer for victims of the Iraqi conflict, who include members of the Christian minority, during his weekly address on Sunday.

"Thousands of people, among them many Christians, banished brutally from their houses, children dying of hunger and thirst as they flee, women kidnapped, people massacred, violence of all kinds," he said.

"All of this deeply offends God and deeply offends humanity."

Yazidis Face Death, Obama Sits On His Hands

Who are the Yazidis versus ISIS (Islamist nation of Syria, Iraq and the Levant)?

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Redacted From: Wikipedia and Israeli TV Ch. 1

The Yazidi  are a Kurdish religious community who practice an ancient religion linked to Zoroastrianism and ancient Mesopotamian religions. They live primarily in the Nineveh Province of northern Iraq, a region once part of ancient Assyria. Additional communities in Armenia, Georgia and Syria have been in decline since the 1990s, their members having migrated to Europe, especially to Germany.

The Yazidi believe in God as creator of the world, which he placed under the care of seven “holy beings” or angels, the “chief” (archangel) of whom is Melek Taus, the “Peacock Angel.” In Zoroastrian-like tradition, the Peacock Angel embodied humanity’s potential for both good (light) and bad (dark) acts, and due to pride temporarily fell from God’s favor, before his remorseful tears extinguished the fires of his hellish prison and he reconciled with God.

Historically, the Yazidi lived primarily in communities in locales that are in present-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and also had significant numbers in Armenia and Georgia. However, events since the 20th century have resulted in considerable demographic shift in these areas as well as mass emigration. As a result population estimates are unclear in many regions, and estimates of the size of the total population vary.

In August 2007, some 500 Yazidis were killed in a coordinated series of bombings in Qahtaniya that became the deadliest suicide attack since the Iraq War began. In August 2009, at least 20 people were killed and 30 wounded in a double suicide bombing in northern Iraq, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said. Two suicide bombers with explosive vests carried out the attack at a cafe in Sinjar, a town west of Mosul. In Sinjar, many townspeople are members of the Yazidi minority.

The Salafist militant group Islamic State ISIS) which considers the Yazidi devil-worshippers, overtook Sinjar in August 2014 following the withdrawal of Peshmerga troops, forcing up to 50,000 Yazidis to flee into the nearby mountainous region. Threatened with death at the hands of militants and faced with starvation in the mountains, their plight received international media coverage, leading President Obama to authorize humanitarian airdrops of food and water onto Sinjar Mountain and US airstrikes against militants in support of the beleaguered religious minority. The humanitarian assistance began on 7 August 2014.

Israeli TV news expert reporter, Ehud Yaari, 8-8-14, CH1:

Obama sent TWO airplanes which dropped TWO SMALL bombs ONLY , each of 160 Kg (350 pounds) (I have read 500 pounds elsewhere) on the ISIS Muslim terrorists who are killing ten of thousands of innocent people there and sell women to slavery (yes, in 2014), and the UN council said it “should be stopped”  with no condemnation. The war there has been going on for two months and only now Obama dropped two bombs on the butchers. He has also dropped via air, food supplies that are totally inadequate and are not falling into the hands of people who truly need them.

… ISIS has treated Iraqi minority groups absolutely brutally during its advance. This has included Christians and other groups, but in early August ISIS began threatening Iraq’s Yazidi group, who are trapped in a horrifying plight. The Yazidis are an ethno-religious minority with about 600,000 adherents worldwide. Yazidi religion is often described as a blend between Zoroastrianism and Islam, particularly mystical Sufi Islam, but ISIS calls them “devil-worshippers.”

The planned humanitarian airdrops are explicitly designed to help the trapped Yazidis. Still, airdrops alone may not be enough. One analysis suggests that “24 C-130 transport aircraft flying round trips every day would be necessary to keep the Yazidi supplied with water” — and that doesn’t even include food. US airstrikes will attempt to break ISIS’ encirclement of the mountain.

Iraqi Christians are also victims of ISIS’ march. On August 6, ISIS took Qaraqosh, Iraq’s largest Christian town. The town of 50,000 has had limited access to food, power, and water since, and some Christians have been given the “choice” to convert to Islam or be killed…”

(Obama’s intervention is as usual, too little too late with his foreign policy in complete disarray. The only question is can the US survive two more years of his administration? Obviously, there are hundreds of thousands of people that cannot) jsk

Where Is The UN? 40,000 Civilians Trapped By ISIS On A Mountain And No One Seems To Care.

40,000 Iraqis stranded on Sinjar mountain after Islamic State death threats

Tens of thousands of members of Iraqi religious minority groups are dying of heat and thirst on Mount Sinjar, human rights groups say, after death threats from Islamic State - formerly Isis

By Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent

4:44PM BST 06 Aug 2014

Tens of thousands of members of Iraqi religious minority groups driven from their homes for fear of the jihadist group Islamic State are dying of thirst and heat on a desert mountainside in the north of the country, according to the United Nations and human rights groups.

Some 40 children have already died from the heat and dehydration, the UN children’s organisation Unicef says, while upwards of 40,000 more are sheltering in the bare mountains, without food or water or access to supplies. It says 25,000 children may be stranded.

^{Smoke rises during clashes between Kurdish "peshmerga" troops and militants of the Islamic State on the outskirts of Sinjar, west of Mosul (Reuters)}

Hundreds of adults, particularly men but also women and children, are already feared to have been killed or abducted by the group, which now surrounds their hiding place.

Most of the refugees, who fled their home city of Sinjar when it was seized by Islamic State at the weekend, are members of the Yazidi community. The Yazidis are an offshoot from Zoroastrianism and the “Peacock Angel” at the centre of their beliefs is associated by some Sunni Muslims with Satan.

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This makes them especially vulnerable to the sectarian attacks practised by Islamic State, which refers to them as “devil-worshippers”.

The group’s social media feeds, often used to trumpet its atrocities to instil fear in its enemies, have already begun to show executions said to be of Yazidi men.

“We are being slaughtered. Our entire religion is being wiped off the face of the earth. I am begging you, in the name of humanity,” a Yazidi MP, Vian Dakhil, was quoted as saying in parliament, as she broke down in tears.

There were also said to be Christians and Muslims among the refugees in the mountains, and the shortage of food was forcing them to hunt for wild game.

The Peshmerga announced their troops were in the area, supported for the first time by Kurdish fighters from guerrilla groups in neighbouring Syria and Turkey. But they have so far been unable to reach the refugees.

One man told an Amnesty International researcher, Donatella Rovera, that his relatives were among 30 members of two families seized by Islamic State from the village of Khana Sor, north-west of Sinjar.

“They killed the 15 men and took the women and children and until now we do not know what happened to them, where they are or if they are alive or dead,” he said.

Islamic State, which also controls nearly a third of neighbouring Syria, swept across most Sunni parts of Iraq in a dramatic strike at the beginning of June, seizing the second biggest city, Mosul, and the birth-place of Saddam Hussein, Tikrit.

It has already filmed itself carrying out mass executions of Shia soldiers it captured as the army withdrew precipitously. Sunni soldiers were made to pledge allegiance before being sent home.

Its fighters are still attacking the edges of Shia majority areas of the centre and south of Iraq, including within a few miles of Baghdad, but has held off a full frontal attack. It seemed also to have been held up by Kurdish forces in the north and east, who guard the Kurdistan autonomous region.

However, they too were forced to retreat by a sudden advance across an 80-mile front at the weekend, abandoning both Sinjar and another northern city, Zumar, where Islamic State claimed to have killed the regional Kurdish intelligence chief.

The Kurds, who are only lightly armed, are appealing for help from the United States, but Washington has up to now insisted all military aid in Iraq goes through the central authorities. It has sent military advisers to Baghdad, along with surveillance drones and Predators armed with Hellfire missiles.

Meanwhile, the jihadists’ advance has sent Christians, Shia, and other minority groups flooding into Kurdistan for protection. The number of Christians in Iraq had already declined by between a half and three-quarters since the allied invasion of 2003, and now priests are warning the religion is on the verge of extinction in the country.

^{Displaced families from the minority Yazidi sect walk on the outskirts of Sinjar (Reuters)}

On Wednesday, Islamic State shelled Christian towns near the frontline, sending more refugees on the road to the comparative safety of the Kurdish capital, Erbil.

The Kurdish forces, the Peshmerga, said they were starting to fight back, with the support of the central government, with whom they usually have a poor relationship. State television in Baghdad claimed an Iraqi army air strike on Mosul prison, which Islamic State was using as a base, killed 60 jihadists, though this could not be verified.

The Yazidis mostly fled south when Sinjar was attacked, but the mountains where they are hiding out are entirely cut off by the Islamic State. Some photos have emerged of panicked lines of cars, and groups of people huddled at the entrance of caves.

The army has managed to drop some supplies by helicopter, but not enough.

“The civilians trapped in the mountain area are not only at risk of being killed or abducted; they are also suffering from a lack of water, food and medical care,” Ms Rovera said. “We urge the international community to provide humanitarian assistance."

Amnesty claimed the Kurdish government had begun blocking access to refugees. “The plight of displaced people caught up in the fighting in Iraq is increasingly desperate and all parties to the conflict must do more to ensure their safety,” Ms Rovera said.