Iranian News Agency Removes IRGC Commander's Comments On Iranian Forces In Syria

[Sally]

Looks like the crazies running Iran didn't like what was said.

Iranian News Agency Removes IRGC Commander's Comments On Iranian Forces In Syria

May 06, 2014

Iran's hard-line Fars news agency has removed comments by a commander of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), who was quoted as saying that the Islamic republic is militarily involved in Syria.

Tehran has repeatedly denied that Iranian combat forces are fighting alongside the troops of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, where the conflict has left tens of thousands of dead.

"Today we fight in Syria for interests such as the Islamic Revolution. Our defense is to the extent of the Sacred Defense," Hossein Hamedani was quoted as saying by Fars. "Sacred Defense" is the term used by Iranian officials to refer to the bloody 1980-88 war with Iraq.

Continue reading at:

Iranian News Agency Removes IRGC Commander's Comments On Iranian Forces In Syria

 

[waltky]

Mission Creep?...

Iran's elite military is entangled in regional wars. Mission creep?
September 4, 2015 | The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps projects Iranian military power across the Middle East, to the alarm of critics of the nuclear deal. But it has become entangled in protracted conflicts that are testing its limits.

President Obama appears to have the votes to ensure congressional approval of the landmark nuclear deal with Iran, a key plank of which is an easing of economic sanctions. And one of the beneficiaries will be Iran’s primary tool for projecting power – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and especially its elite Qods Force, which handles operations abroad. But are Iran’s wizened generals, who mostly cut their military teeth in the 1980s as teenage volunteers during the brutal Iran-Iraq War, already in danger of overreach?

For decades, American military planners aimed to be capable of simultaneously fighting – and winning – two full-blown wars in different regions. It was a challenge, even for a superpower. Today, on a much smaller scale and with a sliver of the military means, Iran is attempting the same thing in the Middle East: It is deeply engaged in Syria and Iraq; waving the flag in Yemen; and very influential in Lebanon. Never before has the Revolutionary Guard, whose 120,000-strong force is much smaller than Iran’s regular 425,000-strong armed forces, been engaged so deeply and widely abroad – yet with increasingly mixed and entangling results.

There is no shortage of commitment: at least seven IRGC generals have died on the frontlines, primarily in Syria but also in Iraq, taken down by snipers’ bullets, bombs, and even an Israeli airstrike. The Guards are relatively top heavy with generals due to their origins as an ideological militia. Still, such high-ranking losses are highly uncommon in modern warfare. In Syria, the IRGC and its Lebanese Shiite ally Hezbollah are bolstering the regime of President Bashar al-Assad against an array of rebels and jihadists. In Iraq, Iran has mobilized Shiite militias to take on the self-described Islamic State, but at a cost of stoking more sectarian strife. While in Yemen, Iran has played a much lesser role in aiding Houthi militiamen against Saudi-backed forces. Each conflict has now devolved largely along sectarian lines that pit Shiite Iran against its regional Sunni rivals, Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states allied with the US and Israel.

The IRGC “exceeded their reach long ago.… They are at the end of their tricks [in Syria], and Hezbollah lost a lot,” says Walter Posch, a specialist on Iranian military forces at the Austrian National Defense Academy in Vienna. “It worked well when it was low cost, but now it is high cost.… There is no Saddam Hussein who insulted the Iranian nation as a whole” as a national motivating factor, as in the 1980s, says Mr. Posch. “This is a war of their own liking, for the purpose of power projection. But they’ve been too ignorant of the fear of the small Gulf countries; too ignorant about the fears of the Saudis.”

Ideological origins

See also:

US revamping rebel force in ISIS fight
Sep 7, 2015, WASHINGTON: In an acknowledgment of severe shortcomings in its effort to create and field a force of moderate rebels to battle the Islamic State in Syria, the Pentagon is drawing up plans to significantly revamp the program by dropping larger numbers of fighters into safer zones as well as providing better intelligence and improving their combat skills.

The proposed changes come after a Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda attacked, in late July, many of the first 54 Syrian graduates of the military's training program and the rebel unit they came from. A day before the attack, two leaders of the US-backed group and several of its fighters were captured. The encounter revealed several glaring deficiencies in the program, according to classified assessments: The rebels were ill-prepared for an enemy attack and were sent back into Syria in too small numbers. They had no local support from the population and had poor intelligence about their foes. They returned to Syria during the Eid holiday, and many were allowed to go on leave to visit relatives, some in refugee camps in Turkey — and these movements likely tipped off adversaries to their mission. Others could not return because border crossings were closed.

The classified options now circulating at senior levels of the Pentagon include enlarging the size of the groups of trained rebels sent back into Syria, shifting the location of the deployments to ensure local support, and improving intelligence provided to the fighters. No decisions have been made on specific proposals, according to four senior Defense Department and Obama administration officials briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential planning. "As with any difficult endeavor, we expected setbacks and successes, and we must be realistic with those expectations," captain Chris Connolly, a spokesman for the US military task force training the Syrian rebels, said in an email. "We knew this mission was going to be difficult from the very beginning."

Rebel fighters, graduates of a training program, displayed their rifle skills in July in a camp near Damascus, Syria.

The Pentagon effort to salvage its flailing training program in Turkey and Jordan comes as the world is fixated on the plight of thousands of refugees seeking safety in Europe from strife in the Middle East, including many fleeing violence of the Syrian civil war and oppression in areas under the control of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Officials in Washington and European capitals acknowledge that halting this mass migration requires a comprehensive international effort to bring peace and stability to areas that those refugees are now fleeing. The 54 Syrian fighters supplied by the Syrian opposition group Division 30 were the first group of rebels deployed under a $500 million train-and-equip program authorized by Congress last year. It is an overt program run by US Special Forces, with help from other allied military trainers, and is separate from a parallel covert program run by the CIA.

After a year of trying, however, the Pentagon is still struggling to find recruits to fight the Islamic State without also battling the forces of President Bashar Assad of Syria, their original adversary. The willing few face screening, but it is so stringent that only dozens have been approved from among the thousands who have applied, and they are bit players in the rebellion. The program has not engaged with the biggest, most powerful groups, Islamist factions that are better funded, better equipped and more motivated. Even the program's biggest supporters now concede that the goal of generating more than 5,000 trained fighters in the first year of the program is unrealistic. With the White House ruling out sending US advisers into Syria with the trainees, the biggest challenge may be deciding where and how to send the rebels back in.

MORE