TEHRAN —
Syrian President
Bashar Al-Assad met with Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei
and President Ebrahim Raisi during a brief visit to Tehran on Sunday, Iranian
state television said.
اضافة اعلان
“Assad has left
Iran for
Damascus after meeting separately with the supreme leader” and the
president, the report said.
Iran is a major
ally of Assad, backing him alongside Russia in Syria’s more than decade-long
civil war.
Tehran has given
financial and military support to the Assad regime during the 11-year war, and
says it has deployed forces in
Syria at the invitation of Damascus but only as
advisers.
The relationship
between Tehran and Damascus are “vital for both countries and we should not let
it weaken,” Khamenei said, according to a statement on his website.
“We should
strengthen it as much as possible.”
Assad’s last reported
visit to Iran was in February 2019 — and that was the first one since the start
of the war.
Iran’s supreme
leader also hit out at
Arab nations that normalized relations with Tehran’s
arch-foe Israel under the US-sponsored Abraham Accords.
“While leaders of
neighboring countries hang out with those of the Zionist regime and drink
coffee with them, the people of these countries take to the streets and chant
anti-Zionist slogans on
Quds (Jerusalem) Day,” Khamenei said.
The UAE, Bahrain,
and
Morocco all normalized ties with Israel in 2020, breaking with decades of
Arab consensus that there should be no recognition of the Jewish state in the
absence of a peace agreement establishing a Palestinian state.
Israel has repeatedly
targeted targets in Syria with air strikes, focusing in particular on those
where Iranian and pro-Tehran forces are said to be deployed.
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