Russia is Arming Hezbollah, According to Commanders


Alliance Troublesome for Future
“We are strategic allies in the Middle East right now—the Russians are our allies and give us weapons,” said one of the Hezbollah officers who chose to call himself Commander Bakr. He is in charge of five units in Syria, around 200 troops. (He chuckled when he said his nom de guerre, mocking Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed “caliph” of the so-called Islamic State.)

As someone who has led units fighting from Latakia to Idlib province, around Damascus, and in the Qalamon Mountains that border Lebanon, Commander Bakr says that the Russian airstrikes have changed the course of the ground war, where Hezbollah, supported by Iran, has taken the lead.

 Bakr said that Russia has been increasing its support for his armed movement since 2012. Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Mikhail Bogdanov, met with Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut in 2014 to discuss regional developments.
 “We maintain contacts and relations with them because we do not consider them a terrorist organization,” Bogdanov said at the time, according to the Interfax news agency.

“Assir,” a Hezbollah recruiter and trainer in Lebanon who also commands a Special Forces unit that fights across Syria, says the Russians are increasingly impressed with Hezbollah and rely on it, rather than the Syrian military, to guard Russian arms depots inside Syria. And to hear Assir tell the story, Hezbollah has extensive access to what’s inside those depots.

“Hezbollah is teaching the Syrian army how to use many of these new weapons,” says Assir. He maintains that Moscow hasn’t placed any restriction on how Hezbollah can use the Russian arms in its possession, including against Israel if the organization deems it necessary. “When it comes to Israel, Hezbollah doesn’t take directions from anyone,” he says emphatically. But it is not clear that he is in a senior enough position to know what secret agreements have been made.

The problem is that with the unsuccessful U.S. military actions against ISIS, the door has been opened for the Russians to gain a much bigger footprint into the Middle East. That may become particularly difficult if conflicts increase between Israel and Hezbollah, as they inevitably will.

That means that the tepid military response by the U.S. that allowed the Russians in could lead to a much bigger problem in the Middle East. Actions or inaction both have consequences, and the Obama administration’s poor grasp on international affairs could lead to a much bigger problem than we are now seeing with the rise of ISIS.

Source:thedailybeast.com



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