Iran's military chief warned Israel against breaching Syrian airspace and territory on a visit to Damascus on Wednesday, raising tensions with Israel as it voices deep concern over Tehran's influence in Syria.
General Mohammad Baqeri pledged to increase cooperation with Syria's military to fight Israel and insurgents, Iranian and Syrian state media said.
Iranian forces and Iran-backed Shi'ite militias, including Hezbollah, have provided critical military support to Damascus, helping it regain swathes of Syria from rebels and militants.
"It's not acceptable for the Zionist regime to violate the land and airspace of Syria anytime it wants," Baqeri said at a news conference with his Syrian counterpart.
"We are in Damascus to assert and cooperate to confront our common enemies, the Zionists and terrorists," he said, a reference to Israel and Sunni Muslim jihadists including Islamic State.
"We drew up the broad lines for this cooperation," Syrian state media cited the Iranian military chief of staff as saying.
Iran's expanding clout during Syria's more than six-year war has raised alarm in Israel, which has said it would act against any threat from its regional arch-enemy Tehran.
Israel's air force says it has struck arms convoys of the Syrian military and Hezbollah nearly 100 times during the war.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps on Thursday vowed to accelerate its controversial ballistic missile program, a day after the US urged the international community to follow the Trump administration’s footsteps and confront Iran over its “destructive conduct” across the Middle East.
“Iran’s ballistic missile program will expand and it will continue with more speed in reaction to Trump’s hostile approach towards this revolutionary organization,” the IRGC said in a statement published by the semi-official Tasnim news agency and translated by Reuters.
The Guard’s statement also blamed the “Zionist regime” along with the White House for implementing “devastating” policies in the region.
On Wednesday, US Ambassador Nikki Haley urged the UN Security Council to adopt the Trump administration’s tough approach to Iran and address all aspects of its “destructive conduct” — not just the 2015 nuclear deal. The Trump administration has threatened to label the IRGC, a hardline militant organization that operates outside the Iranian army at the behest of the country’s supreme leader, as a terror group.
Haley told the council that Iran “has repeatedly thumbed its nose” at council resolutions aimed at addressing Iranian support for terrorism and regional conflicts and has illegally supplied weapons to Yemen and Hezbollah militants in Syria and Lebanon.
“Worse, the regime continues to play this council,” Haley said. “Iran hides behind its assertion of technical compliance with the nuclear deal while it brazenly violates the other limits of its behavior, and we have allowed them to get away with it.”
“This must stop,” she said at the council’s monthly meeting on the Mideast and the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Haley cited a long list of Iranian violations, including threatening freedom of navigation in the Gulf, cyberattacks, imprisonment of journalists and other foreigners, and abuses of its people by persecuting some religions and imprisoning gays and lesbians.
She called Iran’s “most threatening act its repeated ballistic missile launches including the launch this summer of an ICBM enabling missile.”
“This should be a clarion call to everyone in the United Nations,” Haley said. “When a rogue regime starts down the path of ballistic missiles, it tells us that we will soon have another North Korea on our hands.”
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