Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has claimed that Qassem Soleimani, the late head of Iran’s Quds Force, was responsible for convincing Russia to intervene militarily in Syria.

In a speech delivered to commemorate the upcoming first anniversary of Soleimani's death in a US drone strike in Baghdad on January 3 2020, Nasrallah said that Soleimani had travelled to Moscow for a two-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin which, Nasrallah claimed, played a key role in convincing Putin to deploy Russia’s military in Syria in September 2015 to prop up Assad's regime, after Soleimani explained the facts on the ground there.

According to a report published by the independent Syrian Shaam News Network (S.N.N.), Nasrallah indicated that the Russian intervention was “very effective”, saying that Moscow had initially been hesitant about entering the ongoing war in Syria. The Hezbollah head further stressed that Putin was convinced by Soleimani’s presentation and the feasibility of the military intervention in Syria, adding that Russia has been able to return to global power status as a result of its intervention in Syria.

Nasrallah claimed that Soleimani was concerned about facing resistance in light of the Syrian revolution and the Arab Spring, further claiming that Hezbollah had tried to communicate with the opposition to “solve the crisis” from the beginning, but said that everyone rejected this request, alleging that there was an international decision to prevent any political solution.

The Hezbollah head reiterated his standard claim that external forces had supported the opposition in the belief that Assad would fall within two months, after which his regime would be replaced with a weak regime that would implement the agendas of Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, conclude a settlement with Israel and be in line with Washington’s policy.

It should be noted that the Assad regime is now a very weak satrapy that implements the agendas of Moscow and Tehran, with Lebanon recently negotiating with Israel to demarcate the borders between them with the approval of Hezbollah itself.

With his customary bombast, Nasrallah indicated that, prior to its intervention in Syria on behalf of Iran’s regime to save Assad, Hezbollah had faced only two options; either surrender and accept the fall of the region or demonstrate resistance and steadfastness, asserting that he chose the latter which, he claimed, is why his party's forces intervened in Syria, where they carried out hundreds of massacres and multiple crimes against humanity against the Syrian people, along with widespread ethnosectarian cleansing.

Regarding the aspirations of the Syrian people, Nasrallah said, directly contradicting reality, that Syria was targeted by external forces (other than Russia and Iran) not only for the sake of its defence of Palestine and the resistance, but also for the sake of looting its oil and gas. As well as ignoring the regime’s targeting of Palestinian refugee camps, this also ignores the fact that oil and gas revenues were not included in the state budget prior to the revolution, with these monies going into the pockets of the Assad family. Moscow, which likes to boast about how it saved Syria’s resources from “external forces”, has looted Syria's phosphates, seized the port of Tartus and Lattakia, and built its largest base outside Russia in Hmeimim, before even mentioning Moscow’s and Tehran’s destabilizing expansionist plans for Syria and the region.

Original report from S.N.N. (in Arabic): http://www.shaam.org/news/syria-news/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A...