TEHRAN: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has held meetings with Iran’s supreme leader and the country’s president during a surprise visit to Tehran, a key military backer of the Syrian regime.
Assad met with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi after making an unannounced visit to the Iranian capital on Sunday morning and then left for Damascus the same day, according to Nournews, an outlet affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).
The supreme leader’s website confirmed the meeting. Its readout of the rare sit-down quoted Khamenei as telling Assad that his “victory in an international war” has increased the credibility of Syria, and that Iran wishes to boost bilateral ties.
“Today’s Syria is not Syria before the war, even though there was no destruction back then, but now the respect and credibility of Syria is much more and all look to it as a power,” Khamenei was quoted as saying.
Khamenei also took aim at countries in the region which have normalised ties with Israel or hold high-level meetings with its officials, saying this is while their own people are chanting anti-Zionist slogans on Quds Day. This is the Syrian president’s second trip to Tehran since the start of Syria’s war in 2011. He had previously met the Iranian supreme leader, his biggest regional ally, in February 2019. At the time, Qassem Soleimani, the commander-in-chief of the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), had accompanied Assad on his visit.
Soleimani was assassinated by a United States drone attack in Iraq in January 2020 under former President Donald Trump. –Agencies
