Originally posted by Viking
How can anyone believe that Sunni-Arab Syria can be in "camp" with Shi'ite-Persian Iran?
There's one born every minute.
Iran and Syria are traditional allies, because of a common enemy: Saddam Hussein.
When Saddam was the "good guy" some decades ago and even US politicians like Rumsfeld travelled to Bagdad to shake the hand of this butcher, Iran and Syria were the enemy of Saddams Iraq.
Iran - simply because it was attacked by the invasion attempt of Saddam.
Syria - because there was a deep hate between Saddam and Assad.
Also its important to know that the Assad family are members of the alewite minority.
During the Iran- Iraq-War Syria was one of the few arab countries which helped the non-arab Iran.
When the US-trained iranian pilotes performed their devastating attack against the iraqi airbase H3/Al Wallid (10 F-4E Phantoms of the IRIAF destroyed around 50 iraqi planes on the ground, including french build Mirage fighters and heavy Tupolev bombers.) one iranian F-4E was damaged and hat to fly to syrian territory. The following iraqi fighters were pushed away by syrian MiG´s which then escorted the iranian F-4 to a syrian air base. After the iranian plane was repaired it was allowed to fly back to Iran.
The other arab countries considered the syrian help to a non-arab country as treachery and isolated Syria. So they pushed Syria closer to Iran and in these years until today the cooperation of both countries developped.
So indeed there is the strange situation that the sunnite Syria and the shi ite Iran are working together.
But thats how political decisions create strange allies. In the Azerbeidjan-Armenian-War there was a similiar situation: The islamic Iran supported the christian Armenia instead of the muslim Azerbeidjan.
