The chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission praised the ‘important field achievements’ in both Syria and Iraq, as he visit’s Beirut for official meetings.
At the start of a two-day trip to Lebanon that started yesterday (1.8.16), Alaeddin Boroujerdi said the progress made by Syrian and Iraqi forces in pushing back the Islamic State and other rebel groups showed Iran had backed the right side in both conflicts. “After five years of crisis in Syria and Iraq, we see the recent important field achievements show the descending flow of extremist terrorist ‘takfiri’ powers and armed groups and all the regional, international and Western powers that adopted the terrorist choice and supported it from the beginning. That shows the right choice of resistance that stood against the terrorist attempts from the beginning and is now marking continuous victories,” Boroujerdi said.
Iran has deepened its military involvement in Iraq over the past two years, and will do whatever is necessary to keep its friendly, Shi’ite-Muslim-led government in power in Baghdad. Meanwhile, Iran, along with Russia, has been a principle ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad in the five-and-a-half-year-old conflict, which claimed the lives of more than half a million people; while Gulf Arab states and the West have supported various Sunni-Muslim rebel factions that oppose the Assad regime. Iranian proxy groups, including Afghans and Iraqis as well as the most powerful regional Iranian ally – its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah – have been actively involved in Syria from as early as 2012. Lebanon’s Hezbollah is estimated to have lost a total of around 1,200 fighters in Syria since the beginning of the conflict, where its highly trained guerillas have provided crucial support to the Syria military.