US senior official estimates 80% of Assad fighting force is Iranian sourced

Qassem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s foreign operations arm.

ORIENT NET, 08 December 2017-- Senior members of the Trump administration upped the ante against Iran over the weekend, revealing a warning sent to Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani and promising a regional strategy to roll back Tehran’s proxies across the Middle East.

CIA chief and national security adviser say Tehran is stepping up campaign for influence in the region.

CIA director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser HR McMaster spoke at length about Iranian expansion in “weak states” in the Middle East at the 2017 Reagan National Defence Forum in California on Saturday.

Mr Pompeo, who leads the list of contenders to possibly replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, confirmed that he sent a letter recently to Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s foreign operations arm.

'I sent a note. I sent it because he had indicated that forces under his control might in fact threaten US interests in Iraq,' the CIA chief said.

Last week the semi-official Iranian news agency Fars quoted Mohammad Golpayegani, a senior Iranian official, as saying that a CIA representative sent a letter to Gen Soleimani when he was in the Syrian town of Albu Kamal last month, supervising the battle against ISIL.

“What the Iranians have done across the Middle East is fuel and accelerate cycles of violence so that they can take advantage of chaos and weak states to make them dependent on Iran for support,” the national security adviser said.

He assigned blame to the Obama administration without mentioning it by name. “In recent years, what we can say in retrospect, it was unrealistically hopeful [US] strategy that, given the nuclear deal - that this president called worst deal ever - that this deal will result in an Iran that would integrate effectively in region. The exact opposite happened,” Mr McMaster said.

Mr McMaster accused Iran of seeking “hegemonic aims' in the region.

He said Tehran was 'using a campaign of subversion in Iraq' and providing support for president Bashar Al Assad of Syria, where 'about 80 per cent of Assad fighters are Iranian proxies in Syria to establish a land bridge over into the Mediterranean”.