muhammed45
Elite Member
Your point is valid. Syria was the weakest point of resistance. Reason was not Iranian role in Syria. Russia directed their foreign policy. Syria was Russia-centric country under Assad.
You have no idea how hard was it to arm Hezbollah given dynamics of Russia - Israel relationships. We did not mention those reasons because of former atmosphere. Now we can freely state those facts.
Not only that, Russian government did not see itself responsible for protecting Iranian related positions/assets in Syria, Israel freely bombed Iranian assets in Syria while S-400 was watching the flying birds.
You may ask yourself why Russia never provided Iran with air superiority fighters until west knocked their doors in Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia and Libya etc.
Still you can see that Russia has considerations when it comes to Israel. Iranian friendship with Russia is not about a deep alliance.
Syria was politically and militarily dependent upon Russia. The army was corrupt and when push came to shove, they left everything. As we saw, all the air defense systems had no operators after Assad left, hence, Israeli bombing campaign was most successful without a single resistance from Syrian side.
However, its wrong to see everything black and white, Syria under Assad, at the very least, allowed Iran to lightly arm Hamas and Hezbollah. SAA despite being corrupt, managed to repel ISIS attack on Syrian cities with Iranian aid in the first 4 years of multinational terrorists' invasion of Syrian lands.
But as a consequence of being a Soviet ally, corruption was a factor. You can see that corruption in all of Soviet satellite states, you can go to Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan etc by bribing the border guards, even without visa.
It was not as easy as your assumption. Put Israeli freedom in bombing Syria beside Russian consideration and you would understand why we had few options in Syria.
