Loading ...Exclusive: Tehran expected to invoke defense pact for large-scale troop deployment to Syria
Thursday, June 4, reliable sources in Tehran expected the Iranian government to invoke its 2006 mutual defense pact with Syria “in the coming hours” for the transfer of Iranian troops to Syria – most likely by air. This was reported by debkafile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources. It would be Tehran’s first direct military intervention in the Syria conflict as it goes into its fifth year. Bashar Assad’s regime and the Syrian and Hizballah armies are collapsing under the twin assaults of the Islamic State and the armed Syrian opposition forces and in need of urgent life support.
The possibility of invoking the Iranian-Syrian mutual defense pact for saving the Assad regime was first raised in a debkafile article on May 30.
Tehran was persuaded that, without direct intervention, its ally would go under at any moment Thursday when Islamic State forces broke through Syrian army defenses to the northern Syrian Kurdish town of Hasakeh, which sits on the Syrian-Iraqi-Turkish border junction. Towards evening, the Islamists had come to within one kilometer of the strategic town and captured its power station. Its defenders, the Syrian army’s 52nd Division, were falling apart under the ISIS assault; some of the soldiers making a run for it.