How the IRGC Routes Weapons to Gaza
January 26, 2009 by Steven OHern · 2 Comments
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) uses two routes to supply its weapons to Hamas in Gaza, according to Times Online. Uzi Mahnaimi writes that the IRGC appears to be using two methods of smuggling weapons into Gaza that have been used since Iran supplied weapons to Yasser Arafat.
[T]he Iranians are attempting to smuggle munitions from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, where the arms shipments are loaded onto commercial vessels. . . .
once in the Red Sea the cargo is taken on one of two routes. The first is to dock in Somalia and Sudan, where professional smugglers carry the cargo overland to Sinai. In Sinai, Bedouin specialists smuggle the shipment into Gaza through the notorious border tunnels.
Despite intensive Israeli bombing, some tunnels remain open. Palestinian sources in Rafah, the Gaza Strip’s southern town, estimate that 100 tunnels are still in action, about 20% of the pre-war total.
A second arms smuggling route into Gaza has also been used by Tehran, according to well briefed sources. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has sent shipments through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean to anchor off the Gaza coast, inside Egyptian territorial waters, where the Israeli navy is barred.
After dark, Iranian frogmen transfer weapons in sealed containers to Palestinian fishing boats. This can prove dangerous as the Israeli navy may open fire without warning, but according to the sources it has worked well in the past.
Analysis: Note the tunnel infrastructure available to Hamas — according to the article about 100 tunnels are still active out of approximately 500 tunnels that were open before the recent Israeli military action in Gaza. Also, the Times Online article reports that a U.S. Navy warship boarded a freighter for inspection and found weapons during its search. U.S. forces have a more active role in monitoring and deterring Iran’s supply of weapons to Hamas than is widely reported in the U.S. media.
IRGC Sustained Losses in Gaza While Advising Hamas Rocket Units
January 25, 2009 by Steven OHern · 2 Comments
Iranian Revolutionary Guards were killed in Gaza during the recent fighting reports The Bulletin (a Philadelphia based newspaper.) David Bedein, Middle East Correspondent for The Bulletin writes that the IRGC was in Gaza to assist Hamas with firing rockets and building new, larger ones:
IRGC officers helped the Hamas regime and Islamic Jihad fire BM-21 Grad rockets from urban areas.
“We believe there were dozens of IRGC personnel in Gaza during the war,” an Israeli source said. “Some were killed; others went into hiding; and others escaped.”
Israeli intelligence sources IRGC sent officers to the Gaza Strip to help Hamas improve the range and accuracy of its rockets.
IRGC was also authorized to help establish facilities to produce the Grad and other extended-range Katyusha-class rockets in the Gaza Strip.
Israel expects Iran to expand the IRGC presence in the Gaza Strip amid the cease-fire. Iran is expected to build a Hamas arsenal of rockets with ranges of up to 50 miles, which would include the Fajr-3 and Fajr-4 rockets.
The IRGC presence was arranged in 2008 by the late Hamas Interior Minister Said Siyam, the sources said. Siyam was killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza City on Saturday, hours before the unilateral cease-fire began.
“Siyam’s death removes Hamas’ key liasion with Iran,” an Israeli source said. “But there are others who could fill his shoes.”
Analysis:It’s unlikely that the death of Said Siyam, the liaison between Hamas and the IRGC, was collateral damage in an attack against another target. Most likely, Siyam was targeted as evidenced by Israeli “sources” providing detailed information to various media sources about the IRGC assistance to Hamas.
Israel Destroys Hamas Unit Trained by IRGC
January 16, 2009 by Steven OHern · Leave a Comment
The “Iranian Unit” of Hamas, composed of Hamas members trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been “destroyed” by the Israeli Defense Force, according to Haaretz.com. The website reported,
most of the unit’s members were killed in fighting in the Zeytun neighborhood, where they had been deployed by the military leadership of Hamas.
The unit numbered approximately 100 men who had traveled to Iran and Hezbollah camps, mostly in the Beka’a Valley, where they were trained in infantry fighting tactics. The militants were also trained in the use of anti-tank missiles, the detonation of explosives, among other skills.
They managed to return to the Gaza Strip through tunnels in the Rafah border area, although a few also crossed during one of the few times that Egypt agreed to open the border crossing as a gesture of good will to Hamas.
Analysis:Clearly, Israel has targeted Iranian supplied and trained forces during its ground operations in Gaza. Although such attacks on Hamas units trained by the IRGC degrade the abilities of such units to attack Israel, such action does not address the more persistent threat of the influence and capability Iran gains by recruiting, training, equipping, and guiding proxy forces in Gaza.
The Telegraph: Iran’s Involvement in Gaza
January 11, 2009 by Steven OHern · 1 Comment
Con Coughlin analyzes the Israel-Gaza conflict as part of a larger continuing attack by Iran upon Israel in The Telegraph.
Israel’s relentless offensive to crush the radical Palestinian Hamas movement in Gaza is the opening salvo of the country’s wider campaign to confront the mounting threat posed by Iran to the survival of the Jewish state.
While the Israeli military’s immediate focus is to destroy Hamas’s ability to terrorise Israel’s southern border, the military campaign should be seen within the wider context of Israel’s growing resolve to deal with the combined danger of Iran’s continuing support for Islamic terrorist groups and its controversial uranium enrichment programme. The Israeli government sees both of these as direct threats to the country’s existence.So far as Israel is concerned, 2009 is the year that, given Iran’s current rate of progress with uranium enrichment, will decide whether the mullahs succeed in their dream of becoming a nuclear power. Given the repeated statements President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has made about destroying Israel, the Israelis are rightly concerned that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute a grave threat to its future survival.
At the same time the Israeli authorities are deeply alarmed by Iran’s continued support for radical Islamic groups located on the country’s northern and southern borders, both of which are committed to Israel’s ultimate destruction. Both the radical Shia Hizbollah militia in southern Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza are funded and equipped by the Iranian regime, whose Revolutionary Guards travel regularly to the region to brief the groups on strategy.
Even more detail is provided by a recent article in The Cutting Edge News.
Those 40 km missiles Hamas is unleashing against Israeli cities are certainly not “amateur rockets… nagging the residents” of Israeli cities, as a Palestinian journalist recently wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.
The press calls the rockets “Grads” or “Katyushas,” the Russian name given several generations ago to the original Soviet-made surface-to-surface missiles. Today, it would be more correct to label some of the missiles by their real name, the “Arash,” the name given to them by their Iranian manufacturers. The long-range 120 mm mortars raining down on Israel are also Iranian in origin. The mortars are equipped with auxiliary motors to increase their range from six to ten kilometers.
The longest range “Grads” were manufactured in China and but (sic) many of these too were smuggled to Hamas via Iran. Visitors to Sderot’s rocket heap museum of spent missiles can view Iranian-made weapons for themselves.
Analysis:Most of the media is focusing on the death and destruction suffered by Gazans, many of whom are not guilty of any actions against Israel. But that focus benefits Iran as it continues to orchestrate a swirling maelstrom around Israel while continuing progress on the enrichment of Uranium. As both the Telegraph and The Cutting Edge News note, Israel recognizes the larger threat posed by this plan. The challenge for Israel is to find an effective strategy to counter Hamas in Gaza while retaining sufficient credibility to convince allies of the Iranian encirclement (threats from Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, and, in the future, nuclear armed rockets) strategy.
What Really Scares the IRGC?
January 11, 2009 by Steven OHern · Leave a Comment
The IRGC is so concerned about the danger posed by the free exchange of information available on the internet and via text messaging, that it seeks to dominate Iranian net-thought with a force of 10,000 bloggers. Blogger Hamid Tehrani has posted an interesting and well written post in the Internet & Democracy blog.
Tehrani describes the effort:
IRGC’s official press organ, Sobh Sadegh, writes that it considered the Internet and other digital devices including SMS as a threat to be controlled. It announced that the 10,000 blogs will promote revolutionary ideas. IRGC considers the Internet as an instrument for a “velvet revolution” and warned that foreign countries have invested in this tool to topple the Islamic Regime.
As Tehrani notes, the Iranian government (i.e. the IRGC, as the Supreme Leader’s tool) already controls all “old media” – newspapers, radio, and television. But the internet, filled with blogs by anonymous Iranians presents a real threat. For that reason, the IRGC seeks to have the Basij raise a force of 10,000 bloggers.
Analysis: Iran’s clerics and the IRGC know that Iranians are thirsty for objective news and information. The lesson from Iraq is not lost on Iran’s rulers. Iraq’s people, as soon as they were unshackled from Saddam Hussein’s restrictions, purchased satellite dishes and cell phones by the ton. Internet cafes sprang up in many neighborhoods. Once a repressed people have experienced unrestricted access to information, they are loathe to return to big brother’s (or Supreme Leader’s) version of the news.
Iran’s Involvement in Gaza Gets Noticed
January 7, 2009 by Steven OHern · Leave a Comment
As Israel’s incursion into Gaza continues, Iran’s connection to events in Gaza is being noticed by various media outlets.
The best I’ve seen is Reuel Marc Gerecht writing in today’s Wall Street Journal. Mr. Gerecht, a former CIA officer concisely summarizes Iran’s intervention in Gaza and describes it as part of a larger strategy for the region.
The mullahs have a chance of supplanting Saudi Arabia, the font of the most vicious anti-Shiite Sunni creed, as the most reliable backer of Palestinian fundamentalists. Even more than the Lebanese Hezbollah, which remains tied to and constrained by the complex matrix of Lebanese politics, Hamas seems willing to absorb enormous losses to continue its jihad against Israel. Where Saudi Arabia has been uneasy about the internecine strife among Palestinians — it has bankrolled both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas — Iran has put its money on the former.
. . .
Through Hamas, Tehran can possibly reach the ultimate prize, the Egyptian faithful. For reasons both ancient and modern, Egypt has perhaps the most Shiite-sympathetic religious identity in the Sunni Arab world. As long as Hamas remains the center of the Palestinian imagination — and unless Hamas loses its military grip on Gaza, it will continue to command the attention of both the Arab and Western media — Egypt’s politics remain fluid and potentially volatile. Tehran is certainly under no illusions about the strength of Egypt’s military dictatorship, but the uncertainties in Egypt are greater now than they have been since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.
Alireza Jafarzadeh, Foreign Affairs Analyst for FOX News, begins a post on a FOX News blog with a paragraph that leaves little doubt of Jafarzadeh’s opinion as to who is responsible for the violence in Gaza.
The loss of innocent lives in Gaza is deplorable. Behind the horrific scenes, a culprit of the current crisis crouches unscathed—-the ruling regime in Iran. This beast, which seeks to establish an “Islamic” empire by exporting its brand of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region, has in many ways been nurtured and emboldened by the appeasement policies of the past three decades. And for those wrong-headed policies toward the ayatollahs’ regime, the West shares in the responsibility for the bloodshed and carnage inflicted on the Middle East.
Analysis: The violence in Gaza furthers the goals of Iran and the IRGC. Israel’s reaction to the rocket attacks, while understandable, subjects Israel to condemnation from much of the world, especially when innocent lives are demonstrably lost such as in the recent attack on the United Nations sponsored school. As Gerecht notes in his op-ed, Shia Iran works across sectarian lines, freely sponsoring Sunni Hamas. Iran’s leaders continue to focus on reducing the influence and power of its two main enemies, the United States and Israel.
