Iran: Syria Our Friend in Resistance, We Won’t Allow Enemy to Advance in

Iran said on Tuesday that Syria was the Islamic Republic’s friend in Resistance, stressing it would not allow the enemy to advance in.
However, Iran said that there was still no need to directly intervene.

“There is still no need for Syria’s circle of friends to fully enter the arena, and our assessment is that there will be no need to do so,” deputy chief of the armed forces Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri said, according to the Shargh daily.
“In special situations, we decide how to support the regional resistance and our friends. We shall wait to see the future situation and conditions,” he said.

“We are very sensitive when it comes to our friends in the resistance in the region, and we will not allow the enemy to advance,” Jazayeri  added.

Meanwhile, a senior commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, General Hamid Reza Moqadam-Far, said that Syrian civilians were now fighting rebels alongside the regime’s troops.
If the rebellion was routed, it would “deliver an enormous blow to Saudi Arabia and Western countries,” he was quoted in Kayhan news paper as saying.

For his part, Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi held a telephone conversation late Monday with his Swedish counterpart, Carl Bildt, in which he said there was a need for a dialogue to be held between Syria’s regime and opposition to resolve the conflict.

“Syria’s friends and those who want peace and stability in the region must prepare the ground to permit dialogue between the regime and the opposition to facilitate an exit from the crisis,” Salehi was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.

Syria has been the scene of unrest since March 2011. Because the presence of armed groups who are supported, financed and armed by Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara, London, Paris, Berlin and certain Arab regimes.
The US has not objected to its allies aiding rebel groups, and is rather facilitating the arms flow on the Turkey-Syria border, according to a Washington Post report in May.
The CIA’s ability to operate inside Syria was hampered severely by the decision to close the US embassy in Damascus earlier this year, officials said.
The US administration is exploring ways to expand non-lethal support to Syrian opposition groups, officials told the Washington Post.