“No Other Country Has Suffered So Much From Chemical Weapons”

NIAC president Trita Parsi reveals which country while discussing how average Iranians make sense of the Syrian conflict:

In his UN speech today, Obama made a point to include Iranians among those who have suffered attacks from chemical weapons (go here and here for Dish coverage of how the US was complicit in those attacks).

In other Syria-Iran coverage, we recently featured some remarkable footage showing Iranian military advisors leading Assad’s forces inside Syria. Along those lines, last week the WSJ published a detailed report on Iran’s military assistance to Assad, including ongoing efforts by the Revolutionary Guard to train thousands of Syrians within Iran. The report also explains how the regimes in Iran and Syria were originally linked:

Tehran’s alliance with Syria began shortly after Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979. Damascus under Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, was the first Arab country to back Iran’s revolutionary government. Tehran’s ayatollahs, in turn, recognized the Assad family’s Alawite faith, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, as a legitimate branch of their religion.

The Guards’ influence in Damascus grew significantly after Bashar al-Assad took power in 2000, according to current and former Syrian military officers. Operations between the Guards and Syria’s security forces started to grow more integrated, with Iranian advisers basing themselves in Syria. Iran’s government opened weapons factories and religious centers in Syria as well.