Russia use of Iran base boosts Syria raids: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Dmitry Babich, with the Voice of Russia Radio Station, to discuss Russia’s use of an Iranian airbase to launch airstrikes against terrorists in Syria.

Here is a rough transcription of the interview:

PressTV: You of course know about the outcry that came from the Americans when they heard that Russia was going to use an Iranian air base simply for refueling. How do you feel that these operations are going? Has this made the fight against Daesh on the part of Russia and even Iran that much more effective? 

Babich: I think certainly it made the fight against the Islamists, the extremist forces in Syria a lot more effective and that is why we have that outcry in the West.

It is interesting that calls for truce, for a pause in the fighting, they usually come not at the moment when the terrorists are making advances. These calls come from the West at the moment when Russia, Iran and the Syrian government troops, when they start to have successes, beating back the so-called Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra, whatever new name it takes, and other terrorist formations.

So now we have exactly the same situation. There is a very bad fight going on for Aleppo because quite clearly in the last few months using the truce, the extremists from the Sunni organizations, they have gathered their forces, they regrouped and they are now waging a war in Aleppo. If they lose Aleppo, they will lose the war. So the United States and the European Union, they understand it and that is why they have this hysteria about Russia using a base in Hamadan for refueling.

Let me remind you that the United States had been using bases in Saudi Arabia, in Oman, in Turkey, for decades and they did not expect any protests from Russia or from any other countries about the use of these countries for their purposes.  Now when Russia for the first time in many years has used another country for launching airstrikes against the terrorists, we suddenly have this wave of protest from the West, it just shows you very clearly whose side the West is on in this fight. The West is certainly not on the side of what it calls moderates. The people who are fighting the government troops in Aleppo who are using civilians as human shields, they are certainly not moderates. That is a lie.

PressTV: So then in a sense the West has a bit of a PR problem, doesn’t it, because Moscow has been very clear about its objectives throughout but the West’s objectives have been sort of confused, haven’t they?

Babich: Well the West’s objectives are simply not possible to fulfill because the West keeps talking about some kind of moderates that should win the war in Syria. The West does not want the so-called Islamic State to win the war, they do not want the Syrian government to win the war but who has seen all these moderates? Where are they? It is a rule of any civil war that usually you have to choose between two sides. There are not three or four sides that you can choose from and usually the radicals on both sides become prominent. This could be avoided but the United States and the European Union by encouraging an armed insurgency against the legal government in Syria, imperfect as this government was, the United States and the EU made this civil war possible, their policy led to this civil war.

So now they want someone else, not the Islamists and not Mr.Assad’s government to win it and this is simply impossible. We have seen it during the last five years despite huge money injections, despite the arms coming from various countries, the so-called moderate rebels do not win the war in Syria, they very often joined the radical Islamists or they joined the government forces.

So basically the United States and the EU just do not want to realize and they do not want to acknowledge that they made a mistake, a criminal mistake, that they ruined a flourishing Middle Eastern country for nothing, for their own illusions. So this is a very terrible truth that Washington and Brussels simply do not want to acknowledge.

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