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Russia Stepping Into Syria Is Sign Of Iran Failure To Protect Assad

Russia's decision to send troops into Syria in defense of its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, is now at the center of a major diplomatic standoff between Moscow and the West. But the move by Russian President Vladimir Putin to send military support to combat ISIS insurgents is also a sign of concerns at the military "shortcomings" of the Hezbollah militia and Iran's revolutionary guards, which have been fighting alongside Assad since 2011.

As regional powers and the West mull over a possible political solution to nearly five years of civil war, Russia's "immediate" concern was said to be for "Tehran's evident military incapacity to protect" the Assad regime, writes Philippe Abi-Akl, a columnist in Lebanon's L'Orient Le Jour.

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Hezbollah flag in Lebanon. Photo: OpenDemocracy

According to Abi-Akl, Hezbollah — a militia that Iran created in Lebanon in the 1980s — and Iran's own revolutionary guards, had "failed" to beat Syrian rebels and secure key regime positions on the Golan Heights.

Western observers believe Russian entry was subject to "prior coordination between Moscow and Tehran," the columnist reports.

Russia's enhanced standing as a key mediator, if not the principal foreign actor, in the Syrian war, Abi-Akl has "blatantly eclipsed Iran's role." Beside winning the "trust" of the Syrian regime, he concludes, Russia had "deftly" managed to "weave" ties with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two powers keen to see Iran as absent in Syria.

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Society

Iran: Time To Ask What The Protest Movement Did And Didn't Achieve

Impatient to be rid of a 40-year dictatorship, many Iranians have sunk into despair at the failure of protests last year to topple the Islamic Republic. They must be patient and sober in their immediate expectations, before a longer, ongoing process of change turns Iran into a free nation with the rule of law.

Iran's women defy headscarf law in Tehran, Iran

Iran's women defy headscarf law in Tehran, Iran, 03 March 2023.

Yusef Mosaddeqi

-Analysis-

Transformation is, by nature, both visible and essential. The mutation of living beings is reflected in changing appearances that herald a new being and life cycle, emerging with the demise of a prior form.

Like creatures, societies also change, even if a longstanding, complex society may find it tougher to evolve. Indeed, the more deep-seated its cultural moorings, the greater the pain of its mutation. Yet transformation is essential to a nation's endurance.

Iran is today in the middle of such a mutation, a phase of which included the months-long protests of 2022. The difference between those protests and previous movements against the clerical regime was, firstly, their duration, and secondly, their collective impact on the consciousness of Iranians.

In other words, a large mass of Iranians with differing perspectives came to see them as a reflection of the state of the country and its direction, which makes the protests a historic landmark.

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