by Yochanan Visser
Iran reportedly is running a huge secret operations center near Damascus International Airport.
Western Journalism, Sept. 2, 2016 – Members of the Iranian opposition say a leaked intelligence dossier reveals the frighteningly high level of involvement of Iran in the Syrian war.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran told the Mail Online in Great Britain that Iran is running a huge five-floor secret operations headquarters dubbed “the Glasshouse” near Damascus International Airport, from where it coordinates the war effort against rebel groups on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
The complex has anti-blast walls and is guarded by heavily armed Iranian soldiers. The NCRI says that roughly 1,000 military personnel are working in the 180-room building. Departments in the command center include a counterintelligence unit, a logistics and propaganda unit and the Iranian intelligence services.
Inside ‘the Glasshouse’ Iran ‘is running covert war in Syria costing BILLIONS from top secret spymaster HQ near Damascus airport’
“The building is also said to contain prayer rooms, a 20-bed private clinic for wounded senior officers, and facilities for holding millions of dollars in cash, which are reportedly kept in the basement,” the Mail Online reported.
Over the past five years Iran hast spent billions of dollars to shore up the regime of al-Assad. The NCRI claims that Iran delivered hardware and other forms of support to the al-Assad regime that could be worth a staggering $100 billion.
“The Iranian HQ, which plays a pivotal role in supporting Assad’s regime alongside Russia, contains intelligence and counterintelligence operations, and has vaults packed with millions of dollars in cash flown in from Tehran,” reported the Mail Online.
The new information gives an entirely different picture about Iran’s involvement in the Syrian war than was known thus far and sheds more light on Tehran’s overall plan with the Middle East.
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For example, until now it was assumed that there were only 16,000 foreign Shiite fighters in Syria who are assisting al-Assad’s army. The NCRI puts the number at 60,000 and says that al-Assad’s standing army now consists of only 50,000 soldiers.
Iran has approximately 16,000 troops in Syria and they are commanding “45,000 Shiite mercenaries from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon as well as Palestinians and Baluchis, a minority group from Afghanistan,” according to the Daily Mail.
The number of 60,000 foreign Shiite fighters in Syria doesn’t include the Hezbollah members who are fighting on al-Assad’s behalf, according to the NCRI, which put their number at 10,000.
If true, this means the majority of the fighters at al-Assad’s disposal are now Shiites and that Iran and not Assad is running what is left of Syria.
The information about the Iranian command center at Damascus Airport is considered to be credible by Iran experts.
The Daily Mail quoted Kamal Alam, a research analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, who said that the leaked intelligence was “entirely plausible.”
“I go quite regularly to Syria and visit the battlefields, and I’ve seen how the Iranians try to keep their operations as secret as possible,” he told the English tabloid.
“Their troops tend to speak Arabic rather than Farsi in public, and generally don’t wear Iranian uniforms. This makes it very hard for observers to know how many are in the country,” the analyst added.
The NCRI claims that it received a dossier with the secret information from dissident members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The revelation about the huge Iranian command center in Syria comes a few days after Western Journalism reported that Iran is also setting up camp in areas that were retaken from the Islamic State in Iraq.
The IRGC has reportedly built six military bases in the area between Mosul and Kirkuk, the oil-rich city in the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq.
What Iran is doing in Iraq and Syria is, in fact, a copy of the modus operandi in Lebanon, where the IRGC established Hezbollah right after the first Lebanon War in 1982.
In Lebanon too, Iran is operating a huge command center that directs Hezbollah’s “resistance” against Israel.
The Israeli Iran expert Ronen Bergman revealed this in his book The Secret War with Iran.
He wrote that the command center in Beirut is located in the Iranian embassy, which is the largest in the Lebanese capital, and includes a department that monitors the Israeli media and a unit that passes on intelligence on the activities of the Israeli army to Hezbollah.
The overall Iranian plan is to create a corridor from the Iranian border via Iraq and eastern and southern Syria to the Israeli border on the Golan Heights. The revelation by the NCRI fits into this picture and shows that Iran intends to control large swathes of Syrian territory with or without al-Assad and is preparing for a future confrontation with Israel.