FEARS RISE AT ISRAEL AND IRAN HOSTILITY

Europe urges calm as enemies trade strikes across Syria border

Israel targeted “nearly all” Iranian installations in Syria early on Thursday in response to rockets fired by Tehran’s forces at its military positions in the Golan Heights, risking a regional escalation that European leaders called a matter of “war and peace”.

The Iranian attack was the first carried out directly by the Islamic republic against Israel, and came after US President Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement between Tehran and world powers.

The two countries are archenemies and have been engaged in a shadow war across the Middle East for years, most recently under the cloak of the Syrian conflict.

The strikes killed 23 Syrian regime and allied fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK monitoring group. The Russian military said Israel fired 70 missiles, and that half of them were brought down.

The Quds Force, an external arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, was responsible for the rocket salvo, Israel said.

“We hit nearly all the Iranian infrastructure in Syria,” Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said. “They need to remember the saying that if it rains on us, it’ll storm on them. I hope we’ve finished this episode and everyone understood.”

The latest exchange of attacks has turned a regional crisis into a global issue.

The White House condemned Iran’s “provocative rocket attacks” from Syria and said it supported Israel’s right to defend itself.

European leaders called for calm as fears increased that the missile tit-for-tat could break into all-out war. French President Emmanuel Macron said there should be a “de-escalation”, as did Britain and Germany, who both condemned Iran’s attack.

“The escalation of the last hours shows us that it’s really about war and peace,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Theresa May called on Iran to “refrain from any further attacks and for calm on all sides”.

After Mr Trump announced Washington’s withdrawal from the deal that sought to rein in Iran’s nuclear programme in return for the lifting of debilitating international sanctions, Israel put its troops on high alert and readied for an Iranian attack. It said it had spotted irregular movement by Tehran’s forces in Syria and launched an air strike south of Damascus that killed at least 15 people, including eight Iranians, the Observatory reported.

Iran has established a significant presence in Syria in support of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. It has deployed thousands of allied militiamen, its top military advisers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, advanced weaponry and armed drones, some in close proximity to the Golan Heights.

Israel captured the Golan Heights in the 1967 war, annexing it in 1981 in a move not recognised internationally.

In 1974, Israel and Syria reached a ceasefire and disengagement deal that froze the conflict lines with the plateau in Israeli hands.

Israel has said it will not allow Iran to develop infrastructure on its shared borders with Syria or Lebanon.

The strikes came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Russian capital.

Mr Putin has expressed “deep concern” over Mr Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, a decision Mr Netanyahu supported.

Mr Netanyahu told the Russian leader that “it is the right of every state, certainly the right of Israel, to take the necessary steps in order to protect itself from [Iranian aggression]”.

Nothing better illustrates Iran’s latent hostility towards the West than the way the regime has responded to US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal this week.

From the earliest days of Iran’s Islamic revolution, the ayatollahs have delighted in baiting America – the country they like to refer to as “the Great Satan” – at each and every opportunity.

The storming of the American Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shortly after the revolution’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had seized power and subsequently holding hostage 52 American diplomats and citizens for 444 days, has been the most graphic manifestation of Tehran’s visceral anti-Americanism.

But after former US president Barack Obama invested so much personal political capital in trying to secure the 2015 deal to limit Iran’s nuclear programme, there were genuine hopes in the US and Europe that this might signal a change of attitude in Tehran.

The reality, of course, is that there was never any substantial change in the regime’s deep-rooted antipathy towards the West and its allies, an attitude that surfaced in spectacular fashion within hours of Mr Trump announcing his decision to end Washington’s involvement in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), to give the accord its proper title.

For no sooner had Mr Trump announced his decision than a group of Iranian MPs were photographed burning the US flag in front of the speaker’s chair at the Majlis, the Iranian parliament.

Shortly thereafter Tehran signalled its intention to maintain its aggressive posture towards the rest of the region by reportedly firing an estimated 20 rockets from positions held by the IRGC at the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Given the hawkish mood towards Iran that now prevails in Washington, the ayatollahs know better than to provoke a direct military confrontation with the US by, for example, harassing Gulf-based American naval vessels attached to the 5th Fleet.

Attacking the Israelis, therefore, who are one of the Trump administration’s closest allies in the region, was seen as a preferable alternative – the missile strikes presented a useful means of asserting Iran’s growing military strength in the region without running the risk of a direct engagement with the US.

It is a strategy that it is not without risk, especially as the Israelis have made no secret of their desire to destroy the network of military installations that Iran has recently constructed in Syria.

Israel responded to the missile strikes on the occupied Golan Heights by launching its heaviest air strikes in years, with the threat of more to come if Iran continues to maintain its aggressive posture on Israel’s doorstep.

What is clear from Iran’s response so far to Mr Trump’s decision is that it remains an implacable foe of the West.

It is an outlook that has not changed one jot, despite all the benefits the regime received as a result of the nuclear deal.

In truth, Iran’s primary motivation in agreeing to the nuclear deal in the first place was not to defuse regional tensions.

It was simply to lift the punitive economic sanctions that had been imposed in response to Tehran’s continued failure to co-operate fully with the UN-sponsored International Atomic Energy Agency – the body charged with monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities, which the Iranians have always claimed were for peaceful purposes.

It should not be forgotten that the main reason Hassan Rouhani became Iran’s seventh president back in 2013 is that he campaigned on a promise to improve relations with the West and get the punishing sanctions lifted, thereby reviving the country’s economic fortunes. After initial misgivings, even the hardliners around the Iran’s all-powerful Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ended up backing Mr Rouhani’s initiative.

This was because custodians of the Islamic revolution, such as the IRGC, who control an estimated 60 per cent of the Iranian economy, realised that their economic prospects would be better served by having the sanctions lifted than maintaining their confrontational posture towards the West.

Indeed, it is estimated that the regime has received an estimated $150 billion as a result of assets being released once the deal was signed back in 2015.

For ordinary Iranians, though, the tragedy of the past three years is that, rather than spending this largesse on rebuilding Iran’s struggling economy, much of this money has instead been used by the IRGC to fund its expansionist agenda throughout the rest of the Middle East.

Billions of dollars have been spent on deepening Iran’s involvement in countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, where it is sponsoring Houthi rebels, who have fired dozens of missiles at civilian targets in Saudi Arabia – most recently on Wednesday.

One of the primary complaints articulated by the anti-government protesters who took to the streets in several Iranian cities earlier this year was that the regime was spending too much money on financing its overseas military adventures, and not nearly enough on the well-being of its own people.

Thanks to the repressive measures the regime adopts whenever opposition emerges to its policies, the voices of the protesters are no longer heard.

But that does not mean they will not return if, as seems likely, the regime continues to spend billions of dollars in pursuit of its sinister agenda of achieving regional domination.

What is clear from Iran’s response to Mr Trump’s decision is that it remains an implacable foe of the West