Iran is stepping up its involvement with political and militant Shiite groups in Pakistan, in what foreign affairs experts see as an escalating shadow proxy war with Saudi Arabia in a country with the world’s second-largest Muslim population.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin Wednesday, the latest in a series of frequent summits between the two amid persistent tensions over the presence of Iran-backed fighters in Syria.
Syrian state media reported Monday that an airstrike against pro-government forces in the far east of the country caused casualties, while Iraqi officials said 20 Shiite paramilitaries were killed just across the border.
Israel has attacked Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias in Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday, casting such actions as potentially helping to stem a Syrian Sunni Muslim refugee exodus to Europe.
Syrian state media reported on Tuesday night that Israel conducted an airstrike south of Damascus, reportedly killing nine pro-Iranian fighters in an area previously identified as the site of a suspected Iranian military base.
The Israeli military was in a state of high alert in the country’s north Monday, in readiness for possible retaliation by Iran over alleged Israeli strikes on its sites in Syria. Security forces are preparing for the possibility of attempted infiltrations of military bases and communities in the north, Hadashot TV news reported.
The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah on Monday praised provisional parliamentary election results as vindicating his Shiite group’s armed operations.
Iran is planning to retaliate for recent deadly airstrikes in Syria attributed to the Jewish state by having its proxies fire missiles at military targets in northern Israel sometime in the near future, defense officials warned on Sunday.
U.S. Army Special Forces have been covertly aiding in Saudi Arabia’s war against Zaidi Shiite Muslim insurgents in neighboring Yemen, where the rebels control the capital and often fire ballistic missiles, according to a new report by The New York Times.
Israel’s envoy to the United Nations said on Thursday that Iran had recruited at least 80,000 Shiite fighters which it was training at a base just over five miles from Damascus.
According to reports, citing Israeli security officials, Iran is attempting to shield military facilities in Syria from attack by building them in close proximity to Russian assets.
Yemen’s Shiite rebels fired a barrage of ballistic missiles targeting Saudi Arabia late Sunday on the third anniversary of a kingdom-led war in Yemen, with fragments of one missile over Riyadh killing one person and wounding two.
Iran operates 10 military bases in Syria and is training militias loyal to President Bashar Assad’s regime for a possible battle with Israel, with two key facilities located near the border with Israel, an analyst for an American think tank said in an article published Monday.
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has accused Saudi Arabia of double-crossing the Palestinians and betraying 1.6 billion Muslims by siding with the U.S. and Israel on regional affairs.
The evacuation of several hundred Syrian rebels from the Beit Jinn area on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights over the weekend puts Israel in an old-new position on the border. Assad’s army is once again at the fences, just like it was from 1967 to 2011.
The Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen’s Shiite rebels said it intercepted a missile fired over southern Riyadh on Tuesday, which the rebels said was targeting the royal palace in the kingdom’s capital.
Iran has virtually completed a ‘Shiite Crescent’ of influence across the heart of the Middle East, using a string of battlefield successes to link a network of allies and proxy forces now spanning from nation’s border with Iraq all the way to Lebanon.
The locations of some of Iran’s military installations in Syria, including some within 30 miles of Israeli territory in the Golan Heights, may be motivated more by Tehran’s desire to provoke an Islamic end-of-the-world cataclysm than for strategic value, contends an expert on Shiite religious dogma.
Iran’s top military officer signed agreements in Syria last month that will keep Iranian forces there indefinitely with a pledge to help the Bashar Assad regime rebuild damaged military bases, according to the main opposition group to Tehran’s Islamic rulers.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone about a ceasefire deal in the Syrian civil war and Iranian presence near Israel’s borders with the war-torn country, the Prime Minister’s Office said.