Iranian airlines under U.S. scrutiny for Syria arms flights

U.S. officials are eyeing a crackdown on Ira­nian airlines that alleg­edly supply arms and equipment to Tehran's allies. The main focus of such a measure would be the air bridge between Iran and Syria that fun­nels weapons and military equip­ment to President Bashar al-Assad's military and its Iranian allies, such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, Shia mi­litias in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Hezbollah and the Shia militias have been instrumental in keep­ing Assad, a long-time Iranian ally, in power almost from the moment the Syrian war began in March 2011. Without these airlifts, most of them through Iraqi air space or overland through Turkey and Iraq, Assad's armed forces and the mili­tias would have had a much harder time surviving.

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The missile strikes “helped re­store America's credibility in the region after years of retreat,” ob­served Emanuele Ottolenghi, an Iran expert with the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“But if the president wants to really hurt Assad, he should push back against Iran, the strongman's chief protector,” Ottolenghi said in an April article for The Hill, a Washington publication. “Disrupt­ing Iran's airlifts to Syria by re-sanctioning its civil aviation sector would be a good place to start.”

Iran's badly debilitated aviation sector was included in U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran over its conten­tious nuclear program. Many of the aviation restrictions were lifted under the July 2015 nuclear agree­ment between the Islamic Republic and U.S.-led global powers with the proviso that airline services be re­stricted to “commercial passenger aviation.”

But Ottolenghi and other West­ern analysts insist the Tehran re­gime and particularly its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have not only continued to cov­ertly airlift troops and weapons to Syria but intensified these opera­tions in recent months.

By Western count there are at least five Iranian and two Syrian airlines involved in “regular mili­tary airlifts to Syria,” Ottolenghi noted.

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