L’Iran émerge comme le gagnant de la guerre civile et ceci est de mauvaise augure pour nous tous.
Par Dr. Mordechai Kedar, professeur à l’Université Bar Ilan, ex-agent du Renseignement militaire de Tsahal, spécialiste des questions arabes
Traduit et adapté par Albert Soued écrivain, http://symbole.chez.com pour www.nuitdorient.com
Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/20689
Le monde occidental a accepté le fait que la Russie, présente sur le sol syrien depuis 2 ans, occupe la côte méditerranéenne avec 2 Ports et 2 aéroports. Il s’est habitué à voir le Hezbollah et les milices shiites libanaises impliquées dans le conflit syrien et soutenant le président Bashar el Assad. Par ailleurs, d’autres milices shiites, dirigées par les Gardiens de la Révolution Iranienne affluent d’Irak et d’Afghanistan. Ces forces ont parfois des pertes et cela donne l’impression sur le terrain que l’Iran a simplement envoyé des « gangs » shiites combattre des « gangs » sunnites.
Mais la situation réelle est totalement différente, car les forces iraniennes engagées en Syrie ne sont plus des « gangs », ni d’ailleurs des milices. Il s’agit d’une véritable armée, formée et instruite par les Gardiens de la Révolution, une armée qui a une infanterie, des chars, de l’artillerie, des commandos, une force aérienne, une logistique et un réseau de renseignements. Cette armée a été construite lentement pendant 4 ans, tout au long de la guerre civile, « au su et au vu » des medias mondiaux.
La plus grande offensive menée par cette armée a permis de libérer la région d’Alep de l’emprise de l’Etat islamique ou EI (2016). La Russie et l’Iran ont coopéré, la Russie bombardant par les airs et les forces iraniennes aidées du Hezbollah et d’autres milices shiites ont conquis le terrain pour le régime d’Assad. L’Iran a élargi son domaine d’influence au début de 2017, en s’emparant de toute la zone désertique du Centre et de l’Est de la Syrie. Aujourd’hui l’Etat islamique est en voie de disparition et se bat pour sa survie en 3 endroits : à Mossoul en Irak, à Raqqa en Syrie et à Deir al Zor. Quand Mossoul tombera le reste suivra.
Il faut savoir que l’armée régulière iranienne a profité du vide laissé par la retraite de l’Etat Islamique de ces zones très peu peuplées. On estime aujourd’hui que l’Iran contrôle 60% de la Syrie, directement par l’armée des Gardiens de la Révolution ou par le biais du Hezbollah et des milices shiites.
Les forces armées iraniennes ont des bases importantes en Syrie qui leur permettent de se mouvoir librement dans le pays. Tadmor est une base aérienne au Centre du pays, qui autorise l’Iran à acheminer rapidement n’importe quel équipement militaire, arme, ou missile. Et ceci préoccupe Tsahal qui a attaqué en mars dernier cette base, détruisant sans doute un dépôt de missiles et de roquettes.
Rappelons que jusqu’ici, l’Iran acheminait des armes en Syrie par la voie des lignes aériennes commerciales, via Damas ; et quand Israël bombardait les dépôts à l’aéroport, les medias s’indignaient… Devant ces destructions systématiques, l’Iran a conclu qu’Israël avait de bons et rapides renseignements locaux. Pour l’Iran la base de Tadmor a l’avantage d’être à des centaines de km d’Israël, alors que Damas est à 30 km. Et le Renseignement semblait plus difficile à obtenir ; mais Tadmor a été aussitôt bombardé… Des rumeurs parlent d’un autre aéroport secret à Alsin au sud de la Syrie, à la frontière Irako-jordano-syrienne… Cette zone est cruciale pour l’Iran, car elle permet la continuité territoriale entre l’Irak et la Syrie, et l’acheminement aisé d’hommes et de matériel d’Iran vers le Liban et le Hezbollah, bras important de la pieuvre iranienne. Le contrôle de cette voie fait de l’Iran la puissance hégémonique de la région, allant de l’Asie centrale à la Méditerranée.
Et tout cela devant les yeux ouverts des grandes puissances, des Etats-Unis et de la Russie, chacune ayant ses propres intérêts. Pour la Russie, il est important de contrôler la zone côtière alaouite où se trouvent ports et aéroports stratégiques et de consolider le régime des Assad dans ce but. Pour cela la Russie cherche à détruire les milices sunnites financées par l’Arabie et les émirats. Mais la Russie est prudente vis-à-vis de la Turquie qui se bat aussi bien contre les kurdes que contre les milices shiites et l’Etat islamique sunnite…. De ce fait, la Turquie est neutralisée et ne peut lutter contre les Assad.
Les Etats-Unis ont observé l’avancée de l’Iran au Moyen Orient, sans s’y opposer sérieusement du fait du choix de l’ex-président Obama en faveur de l’hégémonie de l’Iran shiite dans cette région du « Mashreq » (orient), au détriment de l’Arabie, laissant « le Maghreb » à la Sunna. Aujourd’hui le président Trump est préoccupé par l’élimination définitive de l’Etat islamique qui est en bonne voie, mais qui prendra encore quelques mois. Il veut une défaite totale du Califat d’al Baghdadi pour dissuader toute velléité nouvelle d’état islamique. Il semble que dans l’entourage de Trump, il y ait des experts qui estiment utile de remplir le vide laissé par l’Etat Islamique par l’Iran, plutôt que par le chaos. Il est probable qu’un accord ait été conclu avec la Russie pour laisser l’Iran occuper cette zone désertique de la Syrie, pour éviter que l’EI n’y retourne.
Mais il faut savoir aussi que les forces shiites qui ont envahi la Syrie (Iraniens, Irakiens, Libanais, Afghans) procèdent depuis 4 ans à un nettoyage ethnique des citoyens sunnites qui ont été éjectés dans des camps, leurs villages et leurs maisons ayant été attribuées à des migrants shiites venant de Syrie, d’Irak et d’Afghanistan. Profitant des manoeuvres d’Obama et des choix stratégiques de Trump, l’Iran est de fait le principal gagnant de cette guerre civile syrienne. Personne ne pourra plus déloger les forces iraniennes et affiliées du pays.
Nous autres en Israël, en Europe et aux Etats-Unis nous devons nous habituer au fait que l’Iran contrôle des territoires importants de 3 pays, l’Irak, la Syrie et le Liban, ce qui relie ce pays par voie terrestre à la Méditerranée. Ceci explique la décontraction de Hassan Nasrallah vis-à-vis d’Israël et du silence israélien devant cette avancée pleine de menaces.
Il y a 2 ans, Israël pensait que le Hezbollah s’était enlisé en Syrie et ne menaçait plus Israël. Aujourd’hui l’Iran est devenu le voisin immédiat d’Israël et le Hezbollah surarmé fait partie de l’armée iranienne, nichée à quelques km d’Israël.
Et les medias d’Israël omettent de décrire la situation des forces iraniennes en Syrie et les menaces immédiates et à terme. Personne ne dit que l’Iran est le principal et véritable gagnant de la guerre civile en Syrie. Il est grand temps que le monde entier le sache !
Iran has conquered Syria
by Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a senior lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. He served in IDF Military Intelligence for 25 years, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups and the Syrian domestic arena. Thoroughly familiar with Arab media in real time, he is frequently interviewed on the various news programs in Israel.
June 30, 2017 - Written for Arutz Sheva, translated by Rochel Sylvetsky
Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/20689 -
Iran has emerged the victor in the Syrian civil war. And that bodes ill for the rest of us.
The world has accepted the fact that Russian forces have been in Syria for the past two years and that Russia controls the Syrian coastline, its seaports and its two airbases. It has become used to having Hezbollah, the Shiite Lebanese militia, involved in the fighting in Syria and giving Assad much-needed support. Other Shiite militias, commanded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, are reported to have arrived from Iraq and Afghanistan. These forces sometimes endure losses on Syrian land, leaving the impression that Iran simply sent some Shiite gangs to fight Sunni gangs on Syrian soil.
The real situation is totally different, because the Iranian forces in Syria are not gangs anymore, nor are they militias. They are an army by every existing definition of one. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are charged with building up Iranian forces in Syria, and they are a regular Iranian armed force, not a militia and certainly not a gang. An army. They have infantry, commando, tank, artillery, air force, intelligence and logistics units. This Iranian army's presence has slowly evolved on Syrian soil over the last four years and it has done so under the radar of world media.
The largest military offensive in Syria in which Iran's army took part was freeing the northern city of Aleppo from Islamic State in 2016. Russia and Iran cooperated in the operation, with Russia bombing from the air and Iranian forces, along with Hezbollah and other Shiite militias, advancing on the ground and handing over control of conquered areas to Assad's army.
Iran has been expanding the area controlled by its forces since early 2017, encroaching upon the desert regions of central and southern Syria which were, until several months ago, in the hands of the Sunni Islamic State (Daesh), the organization now fighting for its survival in three places: Mosul in Iraq, its capital city Raqqa in Syria and Dir A-Zur in eastern Syria. Once Mosul falls,into the hands of the Iranian Army, any day now, the other two cities will follow suit.
Iran's regular armed forces took advantage of the power vacuum created by Islamic State's retreat to take over Syria's central and eastern sparsely poulated desert regions. I estimate that Iran controls over 60% of Syria today, either directly - through its Revolutionary Guards - or indirectly, through Hezbollah and Shiite militias.
Iran's armed forces have several important bases in Syria that allow them complete freedom of movement. Most important of those is the Tadmor airfield in the center of the country, allowing Iran to fly in any military equipment it wishes to bring to Syria, mainly rockets and mortars but also other weapons. Israel is extremely concerned about this development and in March of this year attacked targets in the Tadmor region. The foreign press reported that the raid's objective was an Iranian rocket storage facility.
The entire story shows a basic change in the way Iran is running its affairs. Until recently, Iran used commercial flights to camouflage its arms transports, landing in the Damascus international airport, whille foreign press reports claimed that Israel repeatedly bombed storage facilities in the airport's environs. Iran concluded that Israeli intelligence had enlisted Syrian citizens who work or live in proximity to the airport in order to obtain information in real time. Damascus is not far from Israel, allowing the IDF to operate effectively against objectives near the Syrian capital.
In contrast, the Tadmor airfield is hundreds of kilometers from Israel.The area has few residents, making it harder for Israel to enlist people to pass on information. Israel, however, did bomb Tadmor, possibly having found another source of information. The war of the minds is being waged all the time, even though the public may be blissfully unaware of it.
Reports have claimed that Iran is now using another airport, Alsin, in the Altanef region of southern Syria, near the three-country Syria-Iraq-Jordan border. There is a border crossing between Iraq and Syria nearby, control over which allows the Iranians to freely transport anything at all to Syria. Iranian activity along the Iraq-Syria border is meant to create a continguous land passage from Iran to Syria via Iraq, resulting in Iran being able to move its forces undisturbed all the way to Lebanon, already under Hezbollah's control to all intents and purposes. Hezbollah is the Lebanese arm of the Iranian octopus, so that Iran is turning into a regional power whose forces control an enormous area, ranging from central Asia to the Mediterranean Sea.
In this context, it is important to note that all this is happening under the watchful eys of two global powers, Russia and the United States, each concerned with its own interests. The Russian interest is clear: Russia wants to strenghthen Assad and destroy all the Sunni organizations fighting him with Saudi funding and guidance, in addition to other Sunni Arab countries including Turkey. Putin taught Erdogan a lesson and he is now more fearful of the Syrian Kurds than he is an enemy of Assad and his Iranian allies, making Erdogan an important link in the Russo-Iranian coalition supporting Assad.
The US observed the growing strength of Iran in Syria over the past four years without initiating any serious attempt to stop it, unless one counts the recent downing of two drones, basically a light tap on Iran's spreading wings. Up until January 2017 the US gave silent assent to Iran's moves, because Obama wanted to empower Iran at the expense of the Saudis. He might have considered it preferable to give the Shiite Arabs and Iranians control of the "Masrek", the name for the regions to the east of Israel, while the area from Egypt westward, known as the "Maghreb," would be under Sunni control.
Now that Trump is in the White House, the main goal of American activity in Syria is the elimination of Islamic State, aka Daesh. The US is busy creating "moderate rebel" forces and an alliance ith the Kurds who, helped by US air power, are charged with getting rid of Caliph Abu Bakr al Bagdadi and the state he established. The reason the US is concentrating on Daesh is the American fear, shared by Europe, that the terror-state model of Islamic State might seem like a successful one in Muslim eyes. That could lead to Islamic State clones in other parts of the world, including Europe, with the local Islamist public providing a support base.
Trump did not see Iran's growing power in Syria as a pressing issue. For example, the US did not initiate a meeting of the UN Security Council on the subject, even though the Security Council itself prohibited Iran from transferring weaponry out of its borders. It's quite possible that there are those in the US government who see the Iranian takeover of the Syrian desert as a positive development, preventing a vacuum that might lead to a problematic group, such as Islamic State, taking over instead.
There might even be an understanding between Trump and the Russians that allows Iran to take over central and eastern Syria in which Russia does not have any interest, keeping these regions from becoming a place of refuge for Daesh fighters. America learned about the problem from the Afghanistan debacle when after toppling the Taliban government in 2001, most of the territory was left unprotected, allowing the Taliban to return to its hold over most of the country today.
The coalition of Shiite forces that invaded Syria (Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Afghans) are carrying out ethnic cleansing against Sunni Syrian citizens, and in parts of the country have ejected Sunni residents in order to preempt their homes and villages for Shiite migrants from Syria, Iraq and Afganistan.
This is how, maneuvering between Obama government's purposeful intentions and Trump's choice of objectives, Iran managed to become the clear victor in the Syrian war. No one in the world will succeed in removing the Iranian army from Syria, and we, in israel, Europe and the US, will have to get used to the fact that Iran now includes large swathes of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Hezbollah in Lebanon is now connected to Iran by land, and that is the reason Hassan Nasrallah feels such confidence vis a vis Israel, and why Israel hesitates to build a concrete wall in its own territory to protect Israelis from Hezbollah snipers.
Two years ago, when Syria was in the midst of falling apart, there were Israelis who claimed that Israel's security situation had improved now that Syria was a threat no more and Hezbollah was stuck in the Syrian quagmire. Today it looks very different. Instead of Syria, we have Iran as our immediate neighbor. Hezbollah is no more an isolated terror group in Lebanon but an important arm of the Iranian entity, parked only a short distance from Israel's border.
Worst of all is the fact that Israel's media, which reports from time to time on Iranian forces in Syria, does not show the larger, more threatening picture, the one that has developed from the Iranian line that connects the dots on the map of what was once Syria.
Iran has emerged the great, ultimate victor of the civil war in Syria. The sooner we and the rest of the world realize this, the better off we and the rest of the world will be.