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Syria's New Regime Seizes Cargo of Iranian Weapons in Tartus

HTS General Security Service handles Iranian weapons
HTS General Security Service / Sana

Published Jan 19, 2025 3:49 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

Under the administration of former dictator Bashar al-Assad, Syria's government gave Iran a logistics pipeline to supply Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, the most powerful member of Iran's "Axis of Resistance" in the Mideast. Assad was ousted in December after 13 years of civil war, and Iranian forces fled the country; Syria's new regime, run by U.S.-designated terrorist group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has been expected to exercise some limited degree of new control over these smuggling routes. On Friday, HTS' security forces released images appearing to show the seizure of a cargo of smuggled Iranian weapons in the port city of Tartus - the first clear signal that HTS plans a public shutdown of an Iran-to-Hezbollah transfer route. 

The weapons in question were hidden beneath grain sacks in a truck, images provided by the HTS-governed Public Security Department show. The arms included folding-stock Kalashnikov rifles, belt-fed machine guns and three folded and crated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Open-source intelligence analysts have identified the drone model as the Iranian Shahed-101 loitering munition, a battery-electric, "silent" suicide drone known to be used by Hezbollah for attacks on Israel. 

 

 

The HTS security department did not detail the origins or the shipment route of the cargo it captured this week, but told state media outlet Sana that this particular consignment was intended for Hezbollah. As important as the intercept was in itself, publicizing it in this way is a demonstration by the new Syrian government of its determination to assert its sovereignty, and to avoid providing pretexts for external interference in the country.

For the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, the loss of its position in Syria is acknowledged by senior commanders such as Brigadier Behrouz Esbati to have been a ‘devastating defeat’ from which there can be no immediate recovery.  However, the IRGC’s position in Lebanon is not yet a lost cause; Hezbollah has been severely weakened, but remains a political force to be reckoned with, even as under newly-elected President Joseph Aoun the Lebanese state seeks to roll back Hezbollah’s political autonomy. The IRGC’s weapons supply organization Unit 190 will therefore be seeking new ways to replenish Hezbollah’s depleted weapons stocks; its established approach in these circumstances is to try different routes and smuggling strategies, accepting that some consignments will be intercepted, but also discovering which are the most successful.

The Lebanese authorities have already clamped down on direct flights by IRGC-affiliated and sanctioned Majan Airlines into Lebanon via Turkish airspace. But it will also seek to utilize established smuggling networks into Northern Lebanon overland from Turkey, and across the beach smuggling both directly into Lebanon and via Syria. In this regard, it may have been a counter-productive action on the part of Israel to destroy the Syrian Navy, as the Syrian navy, under new management, may have had some utility in clamping down on these smuggler networks.