Mahan Air operates flights from Tehran to dozens of countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East and what interests us is that the company – which has already been blacklisted by the US because of economic and technological assistance to the Revolutionary Guards – is also helping to transfer weapons to Hezbollah.
These attacks against the Iranians, attributed to Israel, are in addition to increasing Israel’s offensive activity against Iranian targets in Syria in the past month, at a rate of two attacks a week on average, against advanced weapons. This is when in the background, Russian President Putin for his own reasons is giving the green light to the move, and Syrian President Assad is advancing with the takeover of parts of his country and expresses displeasure with the price he is paying for Iranian activity in his country. So much so that he pressed for the ouster of the commander of the Iranian Quds Force in Syria because of over-activism that complicated Syria.
In fact, we see an aggressive Israeli policy toward Iran in Syria as well, in other covert dimensions, in the face of the helplessness of the Americans, who prefer not to respond to serious Iranian activity, such as a UAV attack on their military base in northern Syria last month.
And what else are we learning? That the Iranians have so far found it difficult to produce quality goals against Israel and prefer to attack the Americans as convenient targets. This indicates a strong Israeli deterrence against them, and the loss of deterrence of the United States, the ally of Israel, vis-à-vis the Iranians.
On the part of senior officials in Israel, the offensive policy against the Iranians has proven itself, and that is exactly what the Americans need to do against them on the nuclear issue, and of course against their base attacks. Certainly not to run to remove sanctions and throw billions at them when the pressure from home increases, and we saw another example of this at weekend demonstrations in Isfahan.