Iran’s Foreign Ministry announced Monday through its spokesperson Borhan Qassemi that Russian Federation had now stopped using the base for strikes in Syria.
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“It was a specific, authorized mission and it’s over for now”.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner told a briefing the United States was closely monitoring the cooperation between Russian Federation and Iran and “it’s not clear to us. whether their (Moscow’s) use of this air base has definitively stopped”.
“The Russian military aircraft involved in launching airstrikes from the Iranian Hamadan base against terrorist sites in Syria successfully accomplished the tasks they had set out to complete“, Maj.
The Russian aircraft’s presence in Hamedan was the first time since World War Two that a foreign power used an Iranian base for operations. While Yildirim said Assad could remain in power during a transitional period in the war-torn country, he emphasized that the dictator could not be a part of Syria’s future. Both Iran and Russian Federation support embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad in his country’s long war.
Russia’s defense ministry announced its warplanes took off from the base last week in the first time they used facilities outside Russian Federation or Syria for air operations against the extremist group.
Earlier Monday, Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan made rare public criticism of Russian Federation.
“Therefore, it needed to refuel in an area closer to the operation”.
Iran unveiled its new missile defense system, Bavar 373, on Monday, a system created to intercept cruise missiles, drones, combat aircraft and ballistic missiles.
The US, which backs the opposition to Syria’s president, had said Russia’s use of the Iranian base was “unfortunate but not surprising”.
“On Russia, and bombings, and Iran, you’d have to ask the Iranians and the Russians why they made whatever decision they made to something that I’m not sure anybody had admitted previously was in fact going on”, the secretary of state said.
Airstrikes launched from there hit targets belonging to ISIS and the Jabhat al-Nusra militant group in the Syrian provinces of Aleppo, Deir Ezzor and Idlib, Russia’s defense ministry said.
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Both oppose calls for Assad to step down as a way of resolving the conflict that has killed more than 290 000 people since it erupted in March 2011.
