Syrian rebels call on new Iranian leader to drop Assad

Syrian opposition fighters called on Iran’s newly elected president to reconsider Tehran’s steadfast support for embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad Saturday.

Iran has been among Damascus’s strongest backers, sending arms, money and fighters in the regime’s two year battle against rebel forces attempting to oust Assad.

On Saturday, the Syrian National Coalition, an umbrella group of oppositionists, called on reformist Hasan Rowhani to reconsider Tehran’s support for Assad, “before it is too late,” according to an AFP report.

“For more than two years of the Syrian revolution, the Iranian authorities have stood against the aspirations of the Syrian people by continuing to support the criminal Assad regime politically, militarily and economically,” the coalition said in a statement. “The will of the Syrian people is invincible and will not fail because of outside intervention.”

Other members of the Arab world also expressed hope that Rowhani, who was considered the most moderate of the candidates, will shift away from buttressing Assad.

“We hope the new Iranian president will be a believer in a political solution in Syria,” an ambassador at the Arab League in Cairo told Reuters. “All that we read about Rowhani might be grounds for hope — but there is a great difference between election campaigns and what is said once in office.”

However, many watchers say that Rowhani will have his hands tied by the ruling clerical regime in Tehran, which will keep a tight handle on Iran’s foreign affairs.

“An Iranian president largely serves as head of government for the Supreme Leader,” Raz Zimmt, a research fellow at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University told The Times of Israel. “He has  no real prerogatives in foreign policy and his ability to provide solutions on the central issue, the economy, is limited.”

On Sunday, British paper The Independent reported that Tehran had decided last week to bolster Assad’s forces with 4,000 troops from its elite Revolutionary Guards. According to the report, Iranian officials have proposed opening up a new front against Israel on the Golan.

In May, Military Intelligence Chief Aviv Kochavi said Iran was bolstering Assad with a 50,000-strong force of Iranian and Hezbollah fighters.

The Lebanon-based terror group, which is considered an Iranian proxy has recently become heavily involved in the Syrian civil war, helping the regime pry the key city of Qusair from the rebels in a harshly fought battle earlier in June.

According to a report in the UK-based Sunday Times, Hezbollah fighters and members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are training Syrian troops to spearhead an offensive against rebel-held areas in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and economic heart.

Hezbollah is drawing on its experience of urban warfare in fighting Israel in southern Lebanon for over two decades, according to the report, published Sunday.

Though hundreds of Hezbollah combatants took part in the battle for Qusair, which has been seen as a major turning point in Assad’s favor, a Hezbollah commander told the paper that the group would only provide tactical support, and not boots on the ground, in the fight for Aleppo.

Elhanan Miller contributed to this report.