Iran's Military Intervention in Syria: National Security Defense or Continuation of Threats Against Israel?

Ali Khamenei stated, "If the seditionists were not stopped in Syria, we would have had to defend in Tehran, Fars, Khorasan, and Isfahan." (January 6, 2017) Before Khamenei, this statement had been repeated hundreds of times by his propaganda apparatus and military commanders. Is there any truth in this statement? The Islamic Republic claims to be in Syria to defend its country and borders, keeping the Assad regime afloat at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Khamenei's statement could be considered realistic under five conditions (assuming all of them exist together): the existence of ISIS terrorist operations in Iran. This statement might have some validity if ISIS and other Syrian opposition groups had carried out operations in Iran (like the September 11, 2011 attacks by Al-Qaeda in the United States or the July 7, 2005 attacks by the same group in London) and the government had transferred the war to their territories to prevent their attacks. However, ISIS and other Syrian opposition groups have not conducted a single terrorist operation in Iran over the past five years. Claims from the Islamic Republic's security apparatus that they periodically arrest ISIS-affiliated members in Iran have never been confirmed by an independent group or media. The names of these individuals have not even been disclosed. The Islamic Republic's security agencies have lied so much that their claims are hard to believe. The other side of this story, namely the psychological warfare against ISIS and the effort to convince public opinion about the justification for intervention in Syria, seems more plausible. American officials justified the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 events, which resulted in about three thousand deaths, with the same claim. However, such an event has not occurred in Iran, and this claim or justification is merely a clumsy imitation of Bush administration officials and their futile war in Iraq. The Islamic Republic today considers the entire Middle East, from Syria and Lebanon to Yemen and Bahrain, and from Iraq to Afghanistan, as part of its vital space, while most of these areas were previously parts of the Ottoman Empire and today have closer ties to the Arab world than to the Islamic Republic. This claim would be justifiable if any of the groups that the Islamic Republic is fighting in western Syria (and not in ISIS-controlled areas) had threatened Iranian cities with occupation or terrorist operations. This has never happened. ISIS's claims regarding world leadership and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate are similar to the Islamic Republic's claims of being the center (Umm al-Qura) and leading the Islamic world. The groups that the Islamic Republic has been fighting in Syria have never been part of ISIS; rather, they are groups that have only fought against the butcher regime of Bashar al-Assad. They have never threatened Iran or its political system, nor do they have the capacity to do so. This war was initiated by Bashar al-Assad through the massacre of defenseless people after their non-violent protests. Let us not forget that there was no war in Syria for a year after the protests began. The regime's ruthless killings fueled reciprocal violence. If the Islamic Republic's fundamental strategy was not the annihilation of Israel, the defensive nature of its presence in Syria could have some justification if the Islamic Republic had not declared its strategic goal in the Mediterranean region to be the border presence of its forces with Israel and unconditional support for Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Islamic Republic's officials are not in Syria to defend Iran but to prepare for an attack on Israel in Syria and Lebanon. Military and political officials of the Islamic Republic have repeatedly stated that they want to be a threat to Israel in the region, and Khamenei himself has prophesied the elimination of Israel in the next 25 years. Can the Islamic Republic's anti-Israel strategy be in any way aligned with the national security of the Islamic Republic? The answer is absolutely no. Israel has never been a threat to Iran, is not now, and will not be in the future. Given the competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia for influence in the Middle East, Israel is considered a good ally for Iran. The problem lies with the Islamic Republic's officials who have threatened to annihilate it, not with Iran as a country. Even the most right-wing Israeli government officials have never threatened to annihilate Iran in response to threats of annihilation. If the Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun brigades were not involved, Khamenei's claim could at least express part of the reality if the majority of the Iranian people shared this view and had been harmed by ISIS terrorism or perceived it as a threat. If that were the case, there would be no need to recruit thousands of Shiite forces from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq to send to Syria. Iranian youth, just as they voluntarily went to the battlefields during the Iran-Iraq War, would do the same if they perceived ISIS as an aggressor against Iran and had witnessed the consequences of this aggression. Interestingly, if we do not consider the members of the Fatemiyoun (Afghan Shiites) and Zainabiyoun (Pakistani Shiites) brigades as mercenaries, the threat of ISIS against Iran's national security has only been perceived by them and a small group of Basijis and mourners. No independent survey shows that the majority of the Iranian people support military intervention in Syria. If the Islamic Republic were not present in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon, one should not forget the ambitions of the Islamic Republic in the region.