Iran: ‘We Won. The Americans Have Lost It.’
Photo Credit: FrontPageMagBy Majid Rafizadeh.
Bashar Al Assad has been reelected as the president of Syria for an additional seven years, in an election that is not considered to be legitimate.
Since the election, Iranian authorities have been boasting about their role in keeping Assad in power and keeping their vow. This bragging comes at a time when the Obama administration is eagerly pushing for a final and comprehensive nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic in Geneva, which would urge the United Nations Security Council to remove all economic and political sanctions against Iran.
Iran is already receiving billions of dollars from the United States for signing the interim nuclear deal.
Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the military adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, triumphantly and openly expressed his sense of victory by stating on the government-run Press TV, “The strategy of the US Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and European countries to overthrow Bashar al-Assad has failed,” adding, “this is a strategic failure for the Western, Arab and Zionist front and a big victory for the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Tehran is attempting to show the failure of the US’s and other Western countries’ foreign policy initiatives and campaigns regarding the Syrian crisis. Senior Iranian officials have told the Guardian that the concentrated attempts to overthrow President Assad has failed, and this election shows that Tehran and its staunchest ally, Damascus, have won the war.
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Photo Credit: ReutersIran sends troops into Iraq to aid fight against Isis militants
By Martin Chulov.
Iran has sent 2,000 advance troops to Iraq in the past 48 hours to help tackle a jihadist insurgency, a senior Iraqi official has told the Guardian.
The confirmation comes as the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said Iran was ready to support Iraq from the mortal threat fast spreading through the country, while the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, called on citizens to take up arms in their country’s defence.
Addressing the country on Saturday, Maliki said rebels from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) had given “an incentive to the army and to Iraqis to act bravely”. His call to arms came after reports surfaced that hundreds of young men were flocking to volunteer centres across Baghdad to join the fight against Isis.
In Iran, Rouhani raised the prospect of Teheran cooperating with its old enemy Washington to defeat the Sunni insurgent group – which is attempting to ignite a sectarian war beyond Iraq’s borders.
The Iraqi official said 1,500 basiji forces had crossed the border into the town of Khanaqin, in Diyala province, in central Iraq on Friday, while another 500 had entered the Badra Jassan area in Wasat province overnight. The Guardian confirmed on Friday that Major General Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force, had arrived in Baghdad to oversee the defence of the capital.
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Photo Credit: Militant website via APU.S. evacuates embassy as bombs, fighting rock Iraq
By Ammar Al Shamary and Jabeen Bhatti.
The United States said Sunday it was evacuating some staff from its embassy and beefing up security as deadly explosions rocked the Iraqi capital and advancing militant Islamic insurgents released graphic images appearing to show its fighters massacring captured Iraqi soldiers.
The U.S. State Department said in a statement that an undisclosed number of staffers will be moved to Amman, Jordan, or U.S. consulates elsewhere in Iraq not immediately threatened by the insurgent group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.
The State Department issued a travel warning for Iraq Sunday night that cautioned U.S. citizens to avoid “all but essential travel to Iraq. Travel within Iraq remains dangerous given the security situation.” Violence in many regions of the country is as intense as it’s been since 2007, the warning said.
The embassy will remain fully operational with “some additional U.S. government security personnel,” the State Department said. The embassy, inside the Green Zone near the Tigris River, employs thousands of people, some local hires and others from the United States.
The development came as photos posted on a militant website show what look to be masked fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant loading captives onto flatbed trucks before forcing them to lie face-down in a shallow ditch with their arms tied behind their backs. The bodies of the captives are then shown, soaked in blood after being shot.
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