Syrian President Bashar al-Assad hailed the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 nations, which will provide Iran with billions of dollars of sanctions relief, as a “great victory,” Agence France-Presse reported today. Iran extended the beleaguered Syrian president a $1 billion line of credit last week. Assad said the...

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The Obama administration’s decision to target the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) but not the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad was a “half-measure” that has led to the “latest U.S. failure in Syria,” a staff editorial appearing Wednesday in The Washington Post argued. The latest U.S. failure in Syria is particularly...

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In an exchange yesterday at a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham asked Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter if he thought that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would remain in power after President Barack Obama leaves office, Foreign Policy reported. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — who is also running...

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The desperation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could prompt him to increase the regime’s use of chemical weapons, The Wall Street Journal reported (Google link) yesterday, citing sources in the American government. Last year, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad let international inspectors oversee the removal of what President Barack Obama called the regime’s...

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Thousands of people attended funerals on Thursday of eight Iranian citizens killed in clashes in Syria, calling into question the government’s claim that it has not sent any combatants to support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Iranian officials claim that those who died were “volunteers” rather than government-backed soldiers, and...

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The State Department’s 2014 Country Reports on Terrorism (.pdf) once again listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism and called the Islamic Republic a “proliferation concern,” according to an analysis of the report written by Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael Segall and published today by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). Chapter...

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The United States will be housing American troops at the same Iraqi base that Iran-backed Shiite militias will be using, Josh Rogin and Eli Lake reported for Bloomberg View today. Two senior administration officials confirmed to us that U.S. soldiers and Shiite militia groups are both using the Taqqadum military...

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Police in Bahrain announced today that they had seized Iranian-made explosives intended for terrorist use against neighboring Saudi Arabia. Reuters reported: In a statement, police chief Major-General Tariq al-Hasan said the techniques used in the manufacture of the explosives bore “clear similarities” to methods used by what it called proxy groups of Iran’s Islamic...

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A photographer known only as “Caesar” who photographed thousands of victims of the regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, and smuggled those pictures out of the country as documentation of the regime’s brutality, shared his story in an extensive report published Thursday in Vanity Fair. Caesar had been a crime-scene photographer for Syria’s...

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The United Nations’ special envoy to Syria has estimated that Iran is spending billions to prop up the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Eli Lake reported today for Bloomberg View. On Monday, a spokeswoman for the U.N. special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told me that the envoy estimates Iran spends $6...

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