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Iran is reportedly sending commanders from its elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps along with hundreds of its soldiers to Syria, in an effort to provide aid to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's troops. It is being learnt that Tehran has stepped-up efforts to aid the Syrian military with cash and arms, which indicate that regional capitals are being drawn deeper into Syria 's conflict. A commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) appeared to offer Iran 's first open acknowledgment of its military involvement in Syria . "Today, we are involved in fighting every aspect of a war, a military one in Syria and a cultural one as well," the Wall Street Journal quoted Gen. Salar Abnoush, commander of IRGC's Saheb al-Amr unit, as saying to volunteer trainees in a speech. Syrian opposition members and rebel fighters have claimed that Assad's regime is increasingly relying on a core of loyalists to conduct operation. Syria's uprising has placed Iran in a foreign-policy predicament, as Tehran didn't support the protesters in Syria, its closest ally in the region, the conduit between it and the Lebanese Shiite militant and political group Hezbollah, and a gateway for Iranian influence in the Arab world, the paper said. Iran's most influential voices, including its supreme leader and the political and military power structures, have steadfastly supported Syria's president and, like Assad, have blamed the country's violence on foreign meddling and terrorists. "One of Iran 's wings will be broken if Assad falls. They are now using all their contacts from Iraq to Lebanon to keep him power," the paper quoted Mohsen Sazegara, a founding IRGC member who now opposes the Iranian regime and lives in exile in the US, as saying.

Iran deploying troops to Syria