Advertisement – story continues below

Syria appears to be getting its own version of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. With all eyes on Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest town, which is currently the scene of a decisive bloody battle between the Islamist Jaish al-Fatah rebel coalition and the Russian/Iranian backed Bashar al-Assad coalition, something huge is going on that is changing the face of the Middle East.

As Western Journalism has reported on several occasions, Iran is using the three major wars in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria and Yemen) to advance its agenda of establishing what the news site NOW Lebanon dubbed a new “Iranian Empire.”

Last week, the Iraqi government adopted a law that legalized the Iranian-financed and -trained Hashd al-Shaabi militia and made the umbrella organization of Shiite popular mobilization units part of the Iraqi security forces. The Hashd al-Shaabi militia is currently assisting Iran in turning Iraq into an Iranian client state while officially fighting the Islamic State. On Wednesday, NOW Lebanon, citing the Hezbollah-affiliated Arabic news site as-Safir, reported that Iran is doing something similar in Syria.

NOW wrote that the al-Assad regime has decided to form a “Fifth Corps” of the Syrian army that will be led by senior Hezbollah commanders and most likely will include “a new force of elite troops within Hezbollah.”

Advertisement – story continues below

“The Fifth Corps is not just a new force being added to the system of Syrian army forces and allied units, it is an important turning point for the ties between allied forces within the same axis,” NOW quoted as-Safir as saying.

The Lebanese newspaper was referring to “the wide array of militia units, including Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed Shiite units, that fight on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime.”

NOW reported that “the Fifth Corps could be the ‘nucleus’ for a ‘Syrian National Mobilization,’ a reference to the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Front umbrella front of militias given official sanction by the government.”

So just like Iraq, Syria appears to be getting its own version of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

It is another sign that Iran is advancing toward realizing the dream of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini by establishing a new Islamist “Persian Empire” in the Middle East and beyond.

“The only means that we possess to unite the Muslim nation, to liberate its lands from the grip of the colonialists and to topple the agent governments of colonialism, is to seek to establish our Islamic government,” Khomeini said at the outset of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Iran will no doubt preserve the puppet governments of al-Assad in Syria and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in Iraq, while the integrated Iranian-backed militias will maintain their independence and will obey Iranian orders just like Hezbollah in Lebanon. This model is based on the ancient Persian Empire, where local kings had to pledge allegiance to the Persian shah (emperor) who became “king of the kings” (shanshah).

The role of shanshah would now be fulfilled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and just like in ancient Persia he will control the whole area from the Iranian border to the Mediterranean Sea in Lebanon.

The next step would probably be to expand Iranian control to the Persian Gulf, where Iran already controls Yemen via Ansar Allah, the Shiite Houthi militia that formed an alternative Yemenite government this week, and has set its sights on Saudi Arabia, where the Houthis are waging a missile war, and other Gulf states such as Bahrain and Qatar.

The only powers who saw this coming were Middle Eastern countries and especially Israel, which has unceasingly warned that Hezbollah and Iran had to be stopped and didn’t hesitate to take action when Iran transferred weapons to its proxies in the Middle East or took other actions that could advance its agenda of regional and eventually world domination.

Just Tuesday night, Israel took action against an Iranian arms delivery to Hezbollah when Israeli fighter jets fired missiles from Lebanese airspace into Syria. Arab and Iranian media reported that the Israeli war planes struck two targets with four missiles in the vicinity of Damascus. Two missiles hit a convoy of vehicles believed to have belonged to Hezbollah and to be transferring Iranian weapons to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. The other two missiles hit a military compound of the Syrian army near Damascus.

The Obama administration, meanwhile, was busy trying to persuade Congress not to renew sanctions against Iran when the current sanctions regime expires at the end of the year.

“I wouldn’t advise that for a number of reasons,” Secretary of State John Kerry said at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the budget of the State Department.