Showdown Looming Russia/Baltics/NATO

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Offering apologies from this site as in recent days, several items have been posted discussing Russian aggressions. There is a reason, perhaps many.

Today, May 12, 2016, the missile shield located in Romania went live and this has further angered Russia.

The missile interceptor station in Deveselu, southern Romania, will help defend NATO members against the threat of short and medium-range ballistic missiles — particularly from the Middle East, US assistant secretary of state Frank Rose told a news conference in Bucharest Wednesday.

 

But Russia has taken a dim view of the project, seeing it as a security threat on its doorstep.

“Both the US and NATO have made it clear the system is not designed for or capable of undermining Russia’s strategic deterrence capability,” Rose said.

“Russia has repeatedly raised concerns that the US and NATO defence are directed against Russia and represents a threat to its strategic nuclear deterrent. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Russia has a response and actually Britain did as well. Britain says Typhoon fighters intercepted three Russian military transport aircraft approaching Baltic states. The British fighters, scrambled from the Amari air base in Estonia, intercepted the Russian aircraft, which were not transmitting a recognised identification code and were unresponsive, the ministry said.

 

To add to the matter, the missile defense system slated for Poland that Barack Obama cancelled a few years ago is about to go live as well. This system was for the most part a private investment between U.S. contractors and European countries.

Poland chose the U.S. defense company’s bid over a rival European offering and one from the MEADS consortium led by Lockheed Martin Corp. LMT 1.05 % Officials also selected a unit of Airbus Group NV to supply 50 military helicopters—down from its previous plan for 70—over bids from U.S.-based Sikorsky and AgustaWestland, a European consortium. Poland has pledged to increase its military spending amid concerns that the smoldering separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine will erupt into a full-scale military conflict. Warsaw plans to return to its earlier policy of spending 2% of gross domestic product on its armed forces in 2016, after it scaled back spending in recent years to shore up its public finances. The missile shield is expected to be a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s long-running project to deter missile attacks in Europe. The project is hotly contested by Moscow, which argues its aim is to threaten Russia rather than to protect itself from a potential threat from Iran, as NATO has said in the past. More here from the WSJ.

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The US has switched on a missile shield in Romania that it sees as vital to defending itself and Europe from long-range missiles fired by rogue states, prompting anger from the Kremlin which believes the shield’s main goal is to weaken its own strategic nuclear capabilities.

The eventual missile shield will stretch from Greenland to the Azores, and will be ready by the end of 2018. On Friday, the US will break ground on a final site in Poland. The proposal was first agreed by the administration of George W Bush a decade ago and is a longstanding gripe for Moscow, despite repeated assurances from Washington that it is not aimed against Russia. Control of the missile shield will be handed over to Nato in July, with command and control run from a US airbase in Germany.

Poland is concerned Russia may retaliate further by announcing the deployment of nuclear weapons to its enclave of Kaliningrad, located between Poland and Lithuania. Russia has stationed anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles there, able to cover huge areas and complicate Nato’s ability to move around.

The Kremlin says the shield’s aim is to neutralise Moscow’s nuclear arsenal long enough for the US to strike Russia in the event of war. While US and Nato officials were adamant that the shield was designed to counter threats from the Middle East and not Russia, they remained vague on whether the radars and interceptors could be reconfigured to defend against Russia in a conflict. More from the Guardian.

New Witnesses/Facts on Benghazi

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New witnesses admit more could have been done in Benghazi

New insight into the interagency response to the attacks; Adam Housley goes in depth for ‘Special Report’

See the video here explaining how many people were ready on the flight line, engines hot…just waiting for the GO order. It never came.

NRO: In a terse submission to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., the Obama Justice Department has announced that it will not seek the death penalty against Ahmed Abu Khatallah. He is the only terrorist charged in the Benghazi massacre of September 11, 2012, in which U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other American officials were killed in an attack carried out by dozens of jihadists. Government lawyers provided no explanation for this decision. If you are wondering whether politics played a role in it, you have good reason to be suspicious.

On the face of it, Khatallah is a textbook case for capital punishment. The Benghazi indictment alleges that he willfully and maliciously caused the death of Americans in a terrorist attack that he helped coordinate. The facts of his offense check several of the “aggravating factor” boxes in federal death-penalty law. There is, moreover, a national-security component, inherent not only in the Benghazi atrocity itself but in the perverse incentive that the government’s failure to seek an available death sentence would create for others considering mass-murder attacks against American installations overseas. In addition, terrorists imprisoned by the United States after being prosecuted for successful attacks against America become iconic figures in the jihad. As long as they live, they can and do inspire more attacks, recruitment, and fundraising. Thus, legal and national-security considerations militate in favor of seeking capital punishment. Remember, Mr. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. An attack on our ambassador and on sovereign American facilities abroad is an act of war against the United States. Since national security is the core responsibility of the federal government, there can be no federal offense more worthy of capital treatment. We are talking about the Obama administration, though, so there are always political considerations. And when it comes to Benghazi, they always take precedence.

 

A criminal trial is an opportunity for a defendant to challenge the government’s version of events. It is not like a press conference or a congressional hearing, at which administration officials can get away with spin and stonewalling. Presided over by an independent judiciary applying rigorous rules of due process, criminal trials arm highly capable defense lawyers with copious discovery of the government’s files and legal avenues to demand further disclosures. And because of the life-and-death stakes of death-penalty litigation, federal law gives no one more ample opportunity to test the government’s story than a death-penalty defendant. Unlike a normal trial, a death-penalty case is bifurcated. First comes the “guilt phase,” which is the familiar criminal trial, at which the defendant is found guilty or acquitted on the charges. Next, if the verdict is guilty, comes the “sentencing phase.” In it, the same jury decides whether the defendant should be put to death. (In a normal, non-capital criminal trial, the jury’s work is done when it reaches a verdict; the judge subsequently imposes sentence.) If the government seeks the death penalty in a case, it changes the trial dramatically.
In a normal case, the only real issue is whether the defendant is guilty of the offenses charged. In a death case, however, the question is not merely guilt; it is broadly about relative culpability: In the greater scheme of things, how responsible is the defendant for what has happened? It is possible that during the guilt phase of Khatallah’s trial, the prosecution would be able to narrow the scope of the trial to Khatallah’s own actions on the night of the attacks. But if the government had sought the death penalty, Khatallah would have been entitled, during the sentencing phase, to attempt to show that he was just a minor player; that there are other, more culpable actors who are not even being prosecuted, much less subjected to the death penalty; that the government’s own missteps — its own support of jihadists — played a role.
That is, a death-penalty prosecution would call into question many aspects of Benghazi that the Obama administration has long sought to keep under wraps: how Obama-administration policy empowered the jihadists who carried out the attack; how those jihadists were linked to al-Qaeda, which the president was then ludicrously claiming to have defeated; how those jihadists attacked Western targets in Benghazi several times before September 11, 2012; how, despite that fact, the State Department led by Hillary Clinton reduced security at its Benghazi facility; how there has been no explanation why the State Department had a facility in Benghazi, one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans; how there were American military assets in place that might have been able to rescue at least some of those killed and wounded in Benghazi, yet they were not used.

As pled in the Khatallah indictment, the Obama administration’s version of what happened in Benghazi is woefully incomplete and misleading. As I’ve previously explained: In the indictment against Khatallah, the Justice Department alleges that nothing of consequence happened until the day of the Benghazi attack, when [Khatallah] is said to have complained aloud that “something” had to be done about “an American facility in Benghazi” that he believed was an illegal intelligence operation masquerading as a diplomatic post. Suddenly, at 9:45 that night, “twenty armed men,” including “close associates of Khatallah” (not identified by prosecutors), “violently breached” the facility.

 

In the ensuing violence, the Americans were killed. Khatallah is alleged to have participated in the mayhem and to have prevented “emergency responders” from stopping it. Of course, there is far more to the story than the Justice Department has elected to tell. In the months preceding September 11, the “diplomatic facility” and other Western compounds in Benghazi were targeted in terrorist bombings and threats. September 11 would be the eleventh anniversary of the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans by al-Qaeda, which had every incentive to mark that occasion with a significant attack. American forces, moreover, had recently killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, al-Qaeda’s top Libyan operative; that prompted Ayman al-Zawahiri, the terror network’s leader, to call on fellow jihadists to avenge al-Libi — an incitement issued just a day before the Benghazi attack. So al-Qaeda was very much on the offensive. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail falsely assuring Americans that the terror network had been “decimated.” Obama’s decision to back Libyan “rebels” against Moammar Qaddafi had resulted in the arming of anti-American jihadists and the teetering of Libya on the brink of collapse. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail pronouncing his Libya policy a boon for regional stability.

As Obama next called for the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and reports surfaced of covert American support for the Syrian “rebels,” arms used by jihadists in Libya were shipped to jihadists in Syria by way of Turkey. Was that why we needed a “diplomatic facility” with a CIA annex in Benghazi, which was a transit point for some of these weapons? Was that why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi meeting with Turkey’s ambassador on September 11 despite the obvious peril? The Obama administration refuses to say. Throughout 2012, American personnel in Benghazi were under heightened terrorist threat. Despite their pleas for more protection, however, the State Department under Secretary Clinton actually reduced security. Finally, when the September 11 siege occurred, the Obama administration knew from the first moments that it was a terrorist attack of the sort that any competent assessment of the red-blinking intelligence would have predicted. Obama and Hillary Clinton, however, colluded in an elaborate scheme to convince the public that the atrocity was not an al-Qaeda-connected terrorist attack but a spontaneous protest run amok, provoked by an anti-Muslim video.

This last point is worth emphasizing. We now know, thanks to the belated disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, that even as she and the administration were fraudulently telling the American people that the attack was a video-inspired protest that spun out of control, she was frankly discussing with foreign government officials (and her daughter, Chelsea) that it was a terrorist attack involving al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists.

 

In a criminal trial — and especially in a death-penalty phase — there would be significant disclosure of communications between government officials during and after the attacks. In this case, it could become ever more embarrassingly clear that, for weeks, administration officials were knowingly telling the public things that were not true. By opting not to seek the death penalty, the Justice Department is in a stronger position to argue to the court that the only narrow issue for the jury is whether Khatallah’s conduct makes him guilty of the specific charges in the indictment. Prosecutors have a far better chance of preventing the trial from becoming a free-wheeling inquiry into what happened in Benghazi, and why. And now, if the administration could just get Khatallah to plead guilty to a count or two, maybe it could make the whole thing go away. — Andrew C. McCarthy is as senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

 

 

Dual Threats: Iran and Russia Against the West

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Iran vows to sink US ships

Tehran has issued yet another loud statement about the US presence in the Persian Gulf.

Gen. Ali Fadavi, the naval commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards, has warned that his forces would sink American warships should they pose the slightest territorial threat to the country.

“Wherever the Americans look in the Persian Gulf, they will see us,” the Admiral said on Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN) on Monday night.

  

“They know that if they commit the slightest mistake, we will sink their vessels in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, or the Sea of Oman,” he added.

The naval commander further called the US presence in the Persian Gulf “an absolute evil.”

“Today, there are around 60 foreign military vessels in the Persian Gulf, most of which belong to the US, France and Britain. The vessels are monitored by the IRGC every hour,” said the official.

Fadavi also criticized a recent resolution in the US Congress against Iran’s activity in the Persian Gulf, saying neither the US administration nor other international players are in the position to meddle in this issue.

Earlier this month, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei rebuffed the US government’s demands that Iran withhold from staging military drills in the Persian Gulf, according to a Press TV report.

“The Persian Gulf coast and much of the coasts of the Sea of Oman belong to this powerful nation; therefore we have to be present in this region, [stage] maneuvers and show off our power,” the leader then said.

Fadavi explained that the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of Oman are important strategic areas for the whole world and especially for Iran, as it has a longer maritime border than any other coastal state in the region.

The official added that the world’s future depends on the Persian Gulf as it is the center of the world’s energy resources.

Russia’s New Missile Means the Nuclear Arms Race Is Back On

Team Putin is talking up fearsome new hardware that could accelerate a nuclear contest not seen since the Cold War.

DailyBeast: Russia has a new nuclear missile—one that Zvezda, a Russian government-owned TV network, claimed can wipe out an area “the size of Texas or France.”

Actually, no, a single SS-30 rocket with a standard payload of 12 independent warheads, most certainly could not destroy Texas or France. Not immediately. And not by itself.

Each of the SS-30’s multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle warheads, or MIRVs, could devastate a single city. But Texas alone has no fewer than 35 cities of 100,000 people or more.

Which is not to say the instantaneous destruction of a dozen cities and the deaths of millions of people in a single U.S. state wouldn’t mean the end of the world as we know it.

Nobody nukes just Texas. And if Russia is disintegrating Texan cities, that means Russia is also blasting cities all over the United States and allied countries—while America and its allies nuke Russia right back.

Moscow’s arsenal of roughly 7,000 atomic weapons—1,800 of which are on high alert—and America’s own, slightly smaller arsenal—again, only 1,800 of which are ready to fire at any given time—plus the approximately 1,000 warheads that the rest of the world’s nuclear powers possess are, together, more than adequate to kill every human being on Earth as well as most other forms of life.

One new Russian rocket doesn’t significantly alter that terrible calculus.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be alarmed. The SS-30 is only the latest manifestation of a worrying trend. After decades of steady disarmament, the United States and Russia are pouring tens of billions of dollars into building new and more capable nuclear weaponry that experts agree neither country needs, nor can afford.

The SS-30 by itself is just slightly more destructive than older Russian missiles. It’s what the new weapon represents that’s frightening. The post-Cold War nuclear holiday is over. And apocalyptic weaponry such as Russia’s new SS-30 are back at work making the world a very, very scary place.

Moscow approved development of the SS-30 in 2009 as a replacement for the Cold War-vintage SS-18. Seven years later, the first rockets are reportedly ready for testing. The Kremlin wants the new missiles to be ready for possible wartime use as early as 2018.

Details about the new weapon are hard to come by. Sputnik, a Russian state-owned news website, described the SS-30 as a two-stage rocket with a mass of 100 tons and a range of 6,200 miles. Launching from underground silos in sparsely-populated eastern Russia, SS-30s could fly over the North Pole and rain down their dozen MIRVs on cities and military bases all over North America.

Incidentally, America’s own nuclear attack plans more or less mirror Russian’s plans. U.S. rockets would cross the North Pole headed in the opposite direction and deploy their own MIRVs to smash Russian cities and bases.

Those plans haven’t changed much in 50 years. Nor have the nuclear missiles themselves changed very much. The older SS-18 is actually slightly heavier than the SS-30 and boasts a similar range while carrying 10 MIRVs. One difference between the two missiles is that, being newer, the SS-30 will undoubtedly be easier to maintain.

And then there are the countemeasures. The SS-30 reportedly comes equipped with what Sputnik described as “an array of advanced anti-missile countermeasures” that, in concept, could distract U.S. defenses and ensure that the warheads strike their targets.

But no country—neither the United States nor anyone else—possesses a working missile shield able to intercept a heavy, intercontinental ballistic missile traveling at 20 times the speed of sound. America’s costly missile-defense systems, including ship- and land-based interceptors, are designed to knock down relatively slow-flying, medium-range ballistic missiles fired by, say, Iran or North Korea. Read more here from the Daily Beast.

 

Teach Younger Voters Hillary’s History

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This will not be in any chronological order:

Paula Jones lawsuit

ChinaGate

TrooperGate

Mena Airport Drug Scandal

Rose Law Firm

WhiteWater and Savings and Loan

Hillary’s Radical Summer, Black Panthers

Hillary’s College Thesis, Saul Alinsky

White House TravelGate

Vince Foster is Dead

HillaryCare

Bill, Jeffrey, Planes and Sin Island

Yes, Bill was Impeached

Clinton did Steal White House Stuff

Clinton Showdown with FBI Liaison

Bill Clinton let bin Ladin Go

Bill Ordered Sandy to Stuff the Documents in his Pants

Need more? Okay, one more?

They Stole all the ‘W’s…. lots of damage

  

Whitewater: Twelve Versions of Hillary Clinton Draft Indictment, 451 Pages, Withheld By National Archives

JudicialWatch: New details continue to emerge from Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act fight with the National Archives over the release of draft indictments of Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater case. According to the Archives, release of the indictments—drafted by an independent counsel examining the Clintons’ relationship to a corrupt Arkansas S&L and an alleged cover-up—would violate grand jury secrecy and Mrs. Clinton’s personal privacy. FOIA request denied.

Judicial Watch declined to take “no” for an answer, and so off to court we went. The case is now in the hands of a federal judge.

In the course of litigation, new facts have come to light. Under FOIA, the Archives must produce a “Vaughn Index”—a tantalizing and at times maddening document. A Vaughn Index is the government saying: we are not giving you the documents, but here is an “index” of what we are not giving you, and why we are not giving it to you. Your tax dollars at work.

In the National Archives Vaughn Index for the case, we learn that the government is sitting on at least twelve versions of the the draft indictment of Mrs. Clinton, including one “listing overt acts.” From the public record, we know that the Whitewater case centered around whether Mrs. Clinton, while First Lady, lied to federal investigators about her role in the corrupt Arkansas S&L, concealed documents (including material under federal subpoena), and took other steps to cover-up her involvment. Prosecutors ultimately decided not to indict Mrs. Clinton, concluding that they could not win the complicated, largely circumstantial case against such a high-profile figure.

The draft indictments range from three to forty pages—the former likely excerpts or “scraps” from longer documents, the Vaughn Index indicates. Some of the drafts doubtless are copies but many clearly are not. A total of 451 pages of draft indictments are being withheld by the Archives.

In its final brief in the case, Judicial Watch took a wrecking ball to the Archives’ grand jury secrecy and personal privacy claims. Judicial Watch noted “the truly enormous quantities of grand jury material already made public” in the independent counsel’s final report. Judicial Watch provided the court with a detailed list of grand jury and non-grand jury material that had already been made public. If there ever was a valid claim to grand jury secrecy in this closely scrutinized case, it is long gone.

The Judicial Watch brief noted that the Archives “fails to identify a single, specific privacy interest Mrs. Clinton still has in the draft indictments” following publication of the independent counsel’s report and “hundreds of pages of grand jury materials, non-grand jury materials, and independent counsel legal theories and analysis that are already in the public domain.”

A typical FOIA privacy claim centers on unwarranted invasions of personal privacy. But in Mrs. Clinton’s case, the brief noted, the Archives “makes no claims that disclosure of the draft indictments will reveal any particular personal, medical or financial information about Mrs. Clinton, much less anything intimate or potentially embarrassing.”

Mrs. Clinton of course is one of the most famous women in the world, a former First Lady, senator and secretary of state, and the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president of the United States. The findings of an investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton told the truth to federal investigators and withheld evidence under subpoena while she was First Lady is clearly matter of public interest as voters weigh her suitability for the highest office in the land.

Jihad Tourism, Terrorism Europe/Middle East

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Dozens of terrorism suspects among refugees who entered Germany

BERLIN (Reuters) – German authorities are investigating 40 cases in which Islamic militants are suspected of having entered the country with the recent flood of refugees from the Middle East, the federal police said on Wednesday.

Getty image

That represents a doubling of such cases since January and is likely to deepen concerns about the threat level in Germany, which has not suffered a large-scale Islamist attack like those that have rocked neighbours France and Belgium in recent months.

In the past, the German government has played down the risks of Islamic State fighters entering Europe with the tide of migrants, in part to avoid exacerbating public concerns about the influx, which hit a record 1.1 million last year.

 

But the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency Hans-Georg Maassen told a conference last week that although there were more efficient ways to smuggle in fighters, Islamic State appeared to have sent some via the Balkan route from Greece in order to fan fears about refugees and “send a political signal”.

“I am not telling you a secret when I say that I am concerned about the high number of migrants whose identities we don’t know because they had no papers when they entered the country,” Maassen said.

PARIS ATTACKS

The number of migrants entering Germany reached peaks of more than 10,000 a day last autumn, but has fallen dramatically in recent months due to the closing of the Greek border with Macedonia and a deal between the European Union and Turkey that has discouraged refugees from crossing the Aegean Sea.

The reduction in the numbers has eased pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who came under fierce criticism last year for welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing war in the Middle East with the optimistic slogan “We can do this”.

A spokeswoman for the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), or federal police, said there had been 369 warnings about possible extremists entering the country since the influx of refugees accelerated last year, of which 40 merited further investigation by federal and state authorities.

That represents a sharp increase from the 213 warnings and 18 investigations that the police had recorded in early January.

“German security officials have indications that members and supporters of terrorist organisations are being smuggled in with refugees in a targeted, organised way in order to launch attacks in Germany,” the BKA spokeswoman said, noting however that there was no definitive confirmation of this.

Two of the suicide bombers from the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people came into Europe through the Balkan route and so did two men who authorities believe were meant to participate in those attacks but were delayed and arrested in a refugee centre in Salzburg in December.

There is also evidence that Saleh Abdeslam, believed to be the lone surviving suspect from the attacks, picked up three unidentified militants who entered Europe with the refugees in the southern German city of Ulm in October of last year.

In early February, German authorities arrested a 35-year-old Algerian man and his wife at a refugee centre in the town of Attendorn. The man, a suspected Islamic State member, reportedly posed as a Syrian when he entered Germany in the autumn of 2015.

Days later, a 32-year-old man was arrested in the city of Mainz who is suspected of having fought with the militant group in eastern Syria before travelling to Germany via Turkey.

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Almost 700 Iranian troops and militia fighters ‘killed in Syria’ to preserve Bashar al-Assad

Telegraph: Almost 700 Iranian soldiers and militia fighters have been killed in Syria’s civil war, laying bare the scale and cost of Tehran’s intervention to preserve Bashar al-Assad’s grip on power.

 

Officially, Iran maintains that only “military advisers” have been deployed in Syria.  But the state media has reported numerous battlefield casualties, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) disclosing last week that 13 of its fighters were killed near Aleppo.

About 2,000 troops from the Quds Force – the special forces wing of the IRGC – are present in Syria, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). In addition, 13 Shia militias have been identified among the forces fighting for Assad’s regime.

The IRGC provides these units with recruits, weapons, training and military planning. In total, at least 3,000 Iranian military personnel are believed to be in Syria.

Their losses on the battlefield are becoming increasingly severe. About 280 Iranians were killed in Syria between the onset of Russia’s intervention on Sept 30 last year and May 2, according to a tally compiled by the Levantine Group, a risk consultancy. The Iranian media reported another 400 “martyrs” in Syria between 2013 and mid-2015.

The 13 deaths in the most recent battle near Aleppo would bring the total number of Iranian dead to 693 in the last three years. Given that the first IRGC personnel arrived in Syria in 2012 and many losses have probably gone unreported, the real toll is almost certainly higher.

But the scale of the casualties casts doubt over Iran’s denials of any combat role. On Feb 16, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, told the European Parliament: “Iran does not have boots on the ground in Syria.” He added: “We have military advisers in Syria, as we have them in other places.”

As Mr Zarif spoke those words, Iranian military personnel were helping Assad’s forces to break through rebel lines and encircle Aleppo from the north. In the 16 days before Mr Zarif’s denial, at least 51 Iranian troops were killed in Syria, amounting to Tehran’s heaviest combat losses since the beginning of the war, according to the Levantine Group.

The presence of Iranian forces in Syria – along with their allies from Hizbollah, the Lebanese militia – has proved “indispensable” for Assad’s regime, said Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the IISS. “It is complicated, but certainly Iran’s support – both material and financial – has been a decisive factor in Assad’s survival,” he added.

Assad is one of Iran’s few allies in the Arab world. His survival in office provides Iran with a crucial overland supply route to Hizbollah in Lebanon.

But Iran has been less anxious to conceal its military role in Syria since the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) as a formidable threat in 2014. Since then, Iran has presented itself as being foremost in the struggle against Isil.

“The emergence of Isil has given the Iranians a retrospective pretext for their presence in Syria,” said Mr Hokayem. “It’s easier for them today to justify the intervention in Syria. They have martyrs to celebrate.”

The mask slipped still further last month when the regime disclosed that soldiers from the army’s 65th Airborne Brigade had been sent to Syria. This was Iran’s first deployment of regular troops – as opposed to IRGC fighters – in a war outside the country since the conflict with Iraq in the 1980s.

At least two soldiers from the 65th Brigade have since been killed. The arrival of regular soldiers could be the army’s attempt to claim credit for joining the struggle against Isil. Their presence may also be a sign that the IRGC is short of manpower, particularly as its personnel are also present in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.

“It could be that the Revolutionary Guard is overstretched,” said Mr Hokayem. “It has many missions around the region and it could need the manpower.”