As you might have heard, the opposition in Syria is in serious trouble.
Last summer, Bashar al-Assad’s army was on the ropes, as the SAA fought a multi-front war against a dizzying array of rebel forces including ISIS. Then Quds commander Qassem Soleimani went to Russia. After that, everything changed.
Tomorrow, John Kerry will meet Sergei Lavrov and several of his other counterparts from Europe and the Mid-East in Munich in a last ditch effort to revive Syrian peace talks, which fell apart amid an intense Russian air assault on rebel positions in Aleppo.
Iran enjoys trolling the United States. In fact, it’s something of hobby for the Ayatollah, who has maintained the country’s semi-official “death to America” slogan even as President Rouhani plays good cop with Obama and Kerry.
Mohammad Ali Jafari, head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps has warned that it would be suicidal for Saudi Arabia to intervene militarily on the ground in Syria. They never will because they know that they will be defeated says the general. Saudi Arabia is willing to send special forces or ground troops into Syria if the U.S. led coalition to fight the so called Islamic State starts ground operations.
Two days ago, a Saudi military spokesperson told AP that the kingdom is ready to send ground troops to Syria “to fight ISIS.”
That served as confirmation of what we’ve been saying for months and represented an affirmative answer to the following question that we posed in December: "Did Saudi Arabia just clear the way for an invasion of Syria?"