Western intelligence sources said that Iran has used an ostensibly civilian airline to transport arms to Hezbollah via indirect routes to Beirut’s international airport to evade detection two times during the past two months, Fox News reported Monday.
On July 9, a Boeing 747 belonging to Qeshm Fars Air left a Tehran air force base and traveled to Damascus, before continuing on an “uncharacteristic flight path” over northern Lebanon and landing in Beirut. According to a Western intelligence source with knowledge of the flight, “The Iranians are trying to come up with new ways and routes to smuggle weapons from Iran to its allies in the Middle East, testing and defying the West’s abilities to track them down.”
The cargo on board the flight was reportedly components for manufacturing precision weaponry at secret factories in Lebanon. The United States, Israel and intelligence agencies of other Western nations have provided evidence that Iran operates weapons factories in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
So #Iran smuggles arms to Lebanon – and uses civilian flights.https://t.co/8numQGDGdS pic.twitter.com/F8D6skFYo0
— Tzippy Yarom-Diskind صِپورة (@zpyarom) September 3, 2018
A second flight detected left from Tehran’s international airport and flew what was described as a “slightly irregular” route north of Syria, before landing in Beirut two and half hours later.
Qeshm Fars Air has ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its elite Quds Force, which is headed by Gen. Qassem Soleimani. In October of last year, President Donald Trump imposed sanctions on both the IRGC and the Quds Force.
Qeshm Fars Air stopped operations in 2013 reportedly due to poor management. However, the airline was revived in March 2017. Three of its board members — Ali Naghi Gol Parsta, Hamid Reza Pahlvani and Gholamreza Qhasemi — are representatives of the IRGC.
The U.S. provides Lebanon with over $1.7 billion annually in an effort to fight Hezbollah’s influence in its government.
However, the strong presence of parties tied to Hezbollah in Lebanon’s parliament prompted Soleimani to boast in June that Lebanon is now a “resistance” state, meaning that it is strongly allied with Iran.
In February of last year, a pro-Hezbollah newspaper boasted that Iran had given the terrorist group that has political and military control over Lebanon, game-changing weapons.
A month earlier, a secret report to the United Nations Secretary General charged that Iran had violated U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 by transferring arms to Hezbollah.
[Photo: Konstantin von Wedelstaedt / WikiCommons ]