Parliament Speaker of Iran Ali Larijani said no military base has been given to Russian Federation or any other country by Iran, IRNA reported.
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Russia’s clout, however, will probably continue to rise in the region, analysts said. Moscow and Tehran cooperation in Syria is strategic, confirmed the head of Irans National Security Council. It’s another poke at Russia’s growing influence in the region at the expense of the USA, which has steadfastly declined to involve itself in the bloody Syrian civil war.
Moscow and Tehran signed a military agreement allowing Russian aircraft to station at Hamadan Airport in western Iran.
Russian news agencies on Monday quoted Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu as saying that Russia and the United States were close to starting joint military action against militants in Syria’s Aleppo.
Col. Christopher Garver, a USA military spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon that the Russians activated a communications link with coalition officials just ahead of the bomber mission. Last week, Russia asked Iran and Iraq to allow Russian cruise missiles headed to terrorist targets in Syria to fly through their airspace, according to the BBC. Now that distance is reduced to some 700km, so time-sensitive airstrikes can be delivered immediately and more cheaply.
The Russian military has conducted air strikes in Syria using warplanes based in Iran for the first time, Russian state media are reporting.
Russia’s Defense Ministry announced Tuesday that it launched the strikes from near the Iranian city of Hamedan and struck targets in three provinces in northern and eastern Syria. The two countries have been military allies since the cold war.
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. The civil war, and turmoil in neighboring Iraq, also created a vacuum where ISIS declared a caliphate more than two years ago.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, confirms the strike. The U.S. has accused Russian Federation of indiscriminate bombing in Syria.
Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, has been the center of fighting over the past months. Taking the entire city back from the militants would represent Assad’s biggest victory in the civil war.
Iran’s constitution, ratified after its 1979 Islamic Revolution, bans the establishment of any foreign military base in the country. And Russia had only used its own territory and assets inside Syria for such operations previously. Moscow has been flying smaller planes out of a base in Syria, but its runways aren’t long enough for the bombers.
The Russians are using the Iranian base as a “symbolic gesture” to demonstrate to the USA that they’re “carrying out their plans militarily”, Rashad al-Kattan, a political and security risk analyst who’s a fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said from London.
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The minister also called on the USA not to “nitpick about what is happening in terms of the remaining restrictions on trade and ties with Iran”.
