A senior Iranian official said on Friday that his country will send missiles, drones, and more “military advisers” to Syria as the forces of dictator Bashar Assad crumble before a lightning-fast rebel onslaught.
The Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran is also “providing intelligence and satellite support to Syria.”
“Iran and Syria are united in preventing rebels from advancing toward major cities,” he said.
The official said Assad has not requested ground forces from Iran yet, so “for now, the decision is for Syria and Russia to intensify airstrikes.”
Iran’s terrorist proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, said it has also sent a small group of “supervising forces” to assist the Syrian government with defending Homs, the next city to be menaced by the rebel advance.
Homs could end up falling as quickly as Aleppo and Hama, the first two major conquests of the insurgent offensive that began less than two weeks ago. Hama, a city held by the Assad regime since the Syrian civil war began there in 2011, was captured by the insurgents on Thursday.
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said on Friday that rebel forces have approached within three miles of the outskirts of Homs.
Residents of the city are reportedly fleeing by the thousands. The Syrian military on Friday denied reports that it is already pulling its troops back from Homs as the rebels advance. However, a Homs resident told Turkey’s Daily Sabah on Friday that the offices of Syria’s main security branches in the city appear to have been vacated.
Russia, which supports the Assad regime, used heavy airstrikes to halt the rebel advance, including an apparently unsuccessful effort to destroy a key bridge. The rebels are nevertheless poised to take the city and cut off the roads leading from Syria’s east coast to the capital of Damascus. This would cut Assad off from the Alawites, the Shiite Muslim sect to which he belongs, as most of them live on the coast, and bring the rebels to within 100 miles of Damascus.
SOHR chief Abdel Rahman said Homs would be a “crucial” battle that could determine Assad’s fate.
“Whoever wins this battle will rule Syria in the future,” he predicted.
Abu Mohammed al-Julani, head of the al-Qaeda offshoot known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that is leading the rebel offensive, told CNN on Thursday that his goal is to eliminate Assad and replace his government with a “council chosen by the people.”
“When we talk about objectives, the goal of the revolution remains the overthrow of this regime. It is our right to use all available means to achieve that goal,” Julani said.
“The seeds of the regime’s defeat have always been within it,” he said. “The Iranians attempted to revive the regime, buying it time, and later the Russians also tried to prop it up. But the truth remains: this regime is dead.”
Julani has been making an effort to portray himself and his organization as more forward-thinking than the al-Qaeda jihadis they once were. He claimed the government created by HTS would be Islamic, but would also be inclusive and refrain from persecuting Christians and other minorities.
“People who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” he told CNN.
“No one has the right to erase another group. These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years, and no one has the right to eliminate them,” he said.
“Syria deserves a governing system that is institutional, not one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions,” he maintained.
The U.S. government designated HTS a foreign terrorist organization in 2018, and there is currently a $10 million bounty on Julani. He was captured in Mosul, Iraq, by United States forces in 2005 when he was fighting for al-Qaeda and was held in a U.S.-run prison camp for five years.
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