On November 30, 2016, Syria watcher Tobias Schneider tweeted out pictures of an Iraqi Shia militiaman boarding an Iranian commercial airliner en route to Damascus. One selfie taken on the plane showed young men in military fatigues in the background. Another photo, likely taken when the militiaman arrived in Damascus, showed a large Syrian Arab Airlines Ilyushin-76 cargo plane on the tarmac. Three days later, the Facebook page of the Iranian opposition site Persian War News published pictures of another Iraqi fighter on his way to Syria’s battlefields.
The photos are undated but their authenticity is not in dispute. They are evidence of Iran’s ongoing airlift of fighters to Syria’s battlefields. And both sets of images show the same airplane staircase logo, that of Faza Andishan Arvand Company—the ground services operator at Iran’s Abadan International Airport.
A small city near the mouth of the Shatt-el Arab River, Abadan is a stone’s throw from the Iran-Iraq border and just across the river’s shallow waters from the Iraqi city of Basra. It is home to Iran’s largest oil refinery and was the scene of bitter fighting in the early stages of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). Since the summer of 2015, it has also been a regular stop for Iranian and Syrian aircraft flying between Tehran and Damascus and the key component of Iran’s giant effort to shift the balance of Syria’s civil war in favor of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In one social media posting, a militiaman even geotagged his selfie to Abadan.
Publicly accessible flight trackers detail a complex logistical operation that brought Iranian cargo to Syria at least 923 times between January 16, 2016—an important date, as it is when the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was implemented—and July 9, 2017.
Gathering such information was once the preserve of governments who could launch their own satellites. The digital age has made it possible for commercial websites to independently follow air traffic. While trackers cannot see what or who is flying inside the aircraft, the robust Iranian traffic crisscrossing Iraqi airspace to and from Damascus is easily recorded by anyone with a fast Internet connection and the patience to monitor that corner of the sky.
The airlift is the work of regional carriers like Pouya Air, Syrian Arab Airlines, and Mahan Air, but also includes the fleet of the Iranian national carrier, Iran Air. The operation, moreover, is not new. In 2011, Iran Air was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for its role transporting weapons and personnel to Syria. But the Iran nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA—lifted U.S. sanctions against Iran’s aviation sector and delisted Iran Air, enabling it to reach multi-billion-dollar deals with Airbus and Boeing for at least 180 aircraft.
What can be seen in the Syrian skies, in other words, is something that Western governments find inconvenient to acknowledge: that the biggest beneficiary so far of the JCPOA’s economic dividends is also an accomplice to ongoing war crimes. Further, there is a very real chance that Tehran may use Airbus’s and Boeing’s supply of planes, spare parts, and technical training to sustain its deadly effort to keep Assad in power.
That Iran Air frequently lands in Damascus is no proof of wrongdoing. But there is no innocent reason for frequent commercial flights from Iran to Damascus, an average of 11 a week, including two operated by Iran Air. Although the two flights are ostensibly commercial, they cannot be purchased on Iran Air’s booking website or through travel agencies. The Iran Air website does not even include Damascus among its destinations from Tehran, where the flights originate.
Flight tracking websites also show that Iranian aircraft flying to Syria rely on deceptive practices—switching off transponders for parts of their journeys, falsifying flight manifests, and concealing their destinations by broadcasting flight numbers associated with different itineraries—to hide the volume of traffic between Iran and Syria. Planes suddenly vanish from the screen in midair or broadcast flight numbers associated with a certain route—say, Tehran-Baghdad—while actually flying a different path and even leaving from different airports.
In many cases, aircraft returning from Syria are quickly repurposed for commercial flights once they get back to Tehran. The Iran Air plane (registration EP-IEE) that returned from Abadan to Damascus on March 23, for example, flew back to Tehran and departed on a scheduled flight for Istanbul the next day. A Mahan Air aircraft (registration EP-MNF) that flew to Damascus through Abadan on March 30 flew back to Abadan—likely carrying wounded fighters—then went on to Tehran and left on a scheduled flight for Ankara. Iran Air has flown to Syria at least 134 times since the JCPOA was implemented. This is what research could conclusively determine, which is likely fewer than the actual number of flights flown by the airline.
Nation-states with dedicated intelligence services have the resources to determine what is loaded on and off these planes. In 2011, when the Obama administration wished to squeeze Iran, it had no difficulty finding the evidence to designate Iran Air for its transportation of military equipment and personnel to Syria. But without political will, it is doubtful that intelligence-grade eyes in the sky will bother with an old Airbus A300 offloading cargo outside Damascus. And in 2017, the JCPOA’s success hinges on ignoring what Iranian airlines are carrying to Damascus, because the reimposition of sanctions, especially after the Airbus and Boeing deals, has complex political ramifications and the potential to undo the nuclear agreement itself.
For those without access to sophisticated satellite imagery and classified material, the anecdotal evidence provided from fighters’ smartphones inside Iranian and Syrian commercial aircraft reveals the purpose of the hundreds of nominally commercial flights connecting Iran to a war zone. Social media show Shia militias gathering in Abadan, whence Tehran’s regime airlifts them to Damascus. They show planes offloading men already in battledress and document the return flights that carry the wounded and dead back to Abadan. Choreographed funerals follow in the streets of Qom and Mashad, grim parades of sorrow with slogans to fuel the regime’s propaganda of martyrdom.
It’s been a cruel war in Syria, and statistics do no justice to the ferocity. More than half a million Syrians have lost their lives in a conflict that began in March 2011. The country has been emptied of its people, with half of the prewar population of about 21 million either internally displaced or seeking shelter in neighboring countries. The crisis has spilled over into Europe, which has seen an unprecedented wave of refugees. The Assad regime has made systematic use of chemical weapons, ethnic cleansing, and torture, and indiscriminately attacks civilian targets like hospitals and markets.
From almost the beginning of the war, Iran has provided financial assistance to Assad and military aid ranging from weaponry to additional manpower. It has played an even greater role in sustaining the slaughter in Syria since the summer of 2015, when it began coordinating its efforts to save the Assad regime with Russia’s. During a crucial visit to Moscow in July 2015, Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), laid out plans to defeat the insurgents who were close to seizing all of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. A surge of troops was needed. Shia militias were deployed under the command of IRGC officers. Initially, they were fighters from Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah and two brigades of Afghan and Pakistani Shia recruits. Eventually, Iraqi militias were sent into battle, too.
All these troops needed to get to Syria. And they needed resupply once in combat. The sea route from Iran to Syria is long (through the Persian Gulf, around the Arabian Peninsula, to the Red Sea and Suez Canal), and Iranian vessels carrying weapons to Hezbollah have been stopped many times as they sailed through the Mediterranean. Flying, on the other hand is quick—and since the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, there are no U.S. fighter jets to disrupt Iranian flights traversing Iraqi airspace. Damascus committed every civilian plane at its disposal to ensure the plan would succeed. Iran assigned the task to its commercial airlines.
The airlift has been instrumental in facilitating the atrocities against the Syrian civilian population and delivered vital support for the Assad regime. It has helped cement Hezbollah’s role as a state within a state inside Lebanon and build a multinational Shiite militia by carrying fighters from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to participate in joint military operations alongside Hezbollah and the Syrian army. These “international brigades” are fully integrated into the IRGC military structure. To make matters worse, this supply chain is greatly contributing to the Hezbollah/IRGC military buildup on the Israel-Syria border. The Israeli air force’s bombing raids against weapons convoys heading to Lebanon are a direct response to the increased flow of arms from Syria to Lebanon—and to Hezbollah’s acquisition of such advanced weaponry as Russian-made anti-ship missiles. All together this may presage a wider regional war.
Much of it could be avoided if the Trump administration chooses to reveal the evidence of Iran Air’s participation in the airlift and disrupts the air corridor established by Iran to prop up Assad. But the JCPOA makes such steps much more difficult.
We know that the Iranian airlift is almost as old as the Syrian civil war. Treasury’s 2011 sanctions targeted Mahan Air, Iran Air, and Iran Air Tours for transporting military equipment, including rockets and missiles, to Syria. Activities not covered by the JCPOA.
In March 2012, Yas Air (later renamed Pouya Air) was also designated for supplying arms to Iranian proxies in Africa and Syria. Alongside Yas Air, Treasury also listed 117 Iranian aircraft owned by Iran Air, Mahan Air, and Yas Air and even published aerial imagery of Iran Air cargo docking at the Damascus International terminal, proving the involvement of Iranian commercial aircraft in Assad’s war. Treasury went on to designate Syrian Arab Airlines in 2013 and Syria’s Cham Wings in 2016—both, again, for transporting weapons and fighters to Syria.
Mahan remains under U.S. sanctions as a material supporter of terrorism, and so do Cham Wings, Syrian Arab Airlines and Pouya Air. Iran Air, by contrast, has been allowed to rejoin the world market. What changed is that in the summer of 2015, President Obama agreed, as part of the JCPOA, to lift decades-old U.S. sanctions against Iran’s aviation sector, paving the way to the multi-billion-dollar deals that aircraft industry giants Airbus and Boeing signed shortly thereafter. The JCPOA did not include Cham Wings, Syrian Arab Airlines, and Pouya Air because they were deemed not to be ferrying civilian passengers between Tehran and Damascus. That Iran was still using its commercial fleet to sustain Assad’s brutal fight for survival was not going to stand in the way of President Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement.
One can only speculate why a deal supposedly focused on Iran’s nuclear activities and international sanctions would remove specific non-nuclear U.S. sanctions.
Tehran argued that the U.S. sanctions affected the safety and security of Iranian aircraft. Officials with Iran’s airlines have long claimed they have to ground numerous planes because they cannot purchase the equipment to service them.
It may equally have been due to guilt over an older Iranian grievance. President Obama showed that he bought into Iran’s lachrymose version of history when, in his 2009 Cairo speech, he acknowledged Washington’s role in the 1953 coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq (recently declassified documents prove his apologetic solicitude to Tehran both unwarranted and unnecessary).
Secretary of State John Kerry may simply have wanted to sweeten the deal to make sure the Iranians would not walk away—adding one more concession to the many that were piling up. He may have felt, moreover, it was a win-win situation, given that Boeing would benefit from the end to U.S. aviation sanctions against Iran.
Whatever the reasoning, all but four Iranian airlines can now buy planes, spare parts, and services on the global aviation market, and U.S. financial institutions can service these deals. For the first time since the Iranian revolution of 1979, Iran can build a modern fleet that will allow it to compete with Gulf aviation hubs such as Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Dubai.
Since the nuclear deal, Iran Air has gone shopping. Besides the headline deals with Airbus (for a reported 100 planes) and Boeing (for 80 more), it signed a deal with the Italian-French joint venture ATR for 20 regional aircraft. And there could be additional deals with Canada’s Bombardier, Brazil’s Embraer, and Japan’s Mitsubishi. Aseman Airlines, Iran’s third-largest carrier, reached a deal to lease seven Airbus jets in December 2016 and signed a deal with Boeing to buy 30 737 MAX single-aisle aircraft this spring. At the Paris Air Show in June, smaller Iranian carriers Zagros Airlines and the formerly sanctioned Iran Air Tours formalized deals to buy new planes from Airbus. This list will only grow. Iran’s transportation minister has said that the country is looking to buy as many as 400 to 500 aircraft in the next decade to replace its aging fleet.
Iran Air has already started to receive its new aircraft. Airbus delivered one A321 in January 2017 and two A330s in March. The first four turboprops from ATR joined Iran Air’s fleet in May. Boeing deliveries are expected to start in April 2018. The deals will help Iran’s war effort in Syria, whether directly through the supply of new aircraft that could be used to carry weapons to Syria or indirectly, through the supply of technical assistance, spare parts, and training that could help maintain the older aircraft involved in the airlift.
The JCPOA thus creates a dilemma for the Trump administration: Given the Iranian civil aviation industry’s involvement in the Syrian airlift, it is in the U.S. interest to impose sanctions on that industry to prevent Iran from exploiting global commerce to aid its illicit activities. But, simultaneously, the end of longstanding U.S. aviation sanctions against Iran has opened the potentially lucrative Iranian market to U.S. manufacturers. Boeing insists that its $16.6 billion deal with Iran Air, and possible future deals between the U.S. aviation industry and other Iranian airlines, means that tens of thousands of U.S. jobs are now at stake. Boeing claims the deals will “support nearly 100,000 U.S. jobs” despite the fact that, as my FDD colleagues Toby Dershowitz and Tyler Stapleton recently documented, Boeing has been outsourcing jobs overseas and laying off people as its assembly lines increasingly use automation to fulfill orders.
A multi-billion-dollar business transaction is a powerful incentive against any reimposition of sanctions. It also proves the hollowness of the argument that JCPOA advocates made in 2015 that the sanctions’ snapback mechanism would insulate the deal from Iranian cheating. The economic stakes make it much harder for any administration to reimpose sanctions on the strength of any but the most egregious violations. Just this week, the Trump administration certified Iran is in compliance with the 2015 deal, though it did slap sanctions on a handful of Iranian companies at the same time. President Trump has been strong on anti-Iran rhetoric and in his first six months in office his Treasury Department has sanctioned more Iranian entities than the Obama administration did in the previous four years. But the designations are meaningless in comparison with reimposing sanctions on the aviation sector.
Western negotiators reasoned that Iran wanted to fix its economy. Its thirst for trade and investment would empower those forces inside the regime that wished to improve relations with the world’s trading powers. Prioritizing jobs and infrastructure would, they thought, moderate Iran. Economic self-interest would make Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions—two sides of the same coin, really—subordinate to the desires of its ambitious middle class.
It is the opposite that has proved true. The Airbus and Boeing deals prove that a thirst for trade trumps Western nations’ interests to Iran’s advantage. Iran’s continuing use of civilian aircraft to sustain Assad’s killing machine in Syria is irrelevant when faced with multi-billion-dollar airplane orders.
Stopping the flow of weapons and militias is necessary if we want to frustrate Assad’s efforts to vanquish the rebels and cleanse the Syrian countryside of its Sunni inhabitants. It would also be a blow to Iran’s quest for dominance in the Levant.
Proving Iran Air’s participation in a military airlift on behalf of the IRGC, whose goal is to sustain the Syrian slaughter and arm Hezbollah, would make the airline eligible for renewed sanctions. Renewed sanctions would kill the big business deals signed with Iran Air and likely would trigger a chain reaction leading to the collapse of the entire 2015 agreement. Those who lobbied hard for the JCPOA knew full well that Iran suborned its civil aviation sector to its military adventurism in Syria. But acquiescence with Iran’s action in Syria was the political price to ensure multi-billion-dollar orders for the aviation industry. Instead of keeping Iran honest to its commitments by using aircraft deals as leverage, the Obama administration facilitated their smooth sailing through Treasury’s licensing process before it left office, leaving the Trump administration with a much harder choice to make, especially now that the contracts have mushroomed and deliveries have begun.
If Iran wanted, it could insulate its commercial industry from its activities by relying solely on military aircraft. This is what its partner in Syria does. Russia is supplying its forces there, but it uses only military-operated Ilyushin and Antonov cargo planes registered to its air force. Iran could do the same and rely on military cargo to conduct its military operations. The problem of its support for Assad and Hezbollah would not go away, of course. But it would mean that its fleet renewal—alongside access to spare parts, maintenance services, and technical training—would not be tied to such activities. Instead, Tehran prefers to use the JCPOA and the economic benefits it yields as a shield to protect its nefarious support for Assad and Hezbollah.
For the United States, there should be no half measures. Limiting sales to nonsanctioned entities will not prevent those involved in the airlift from benefiting from the upgrade of the Iranian air fleet. End-user licenses may not be honored. Trained technicians could easily transfer knowledge to their counterparts in sanctioned airlines or repair aircraft involved in the airlift. Spare parts supplied to licensed Iranian buyers can be resold to designated entities.
A firewall cannot be established between Iran’s commercial air traffic and its military airlifts to Syria. Iran uses its civil aviation sector to fulfill military needs. The JCPOA lifted decades of U.S. and international sanctions against Iran’s civil aviation sector exactly when the sector became vital to Tehran’s efforts in the Syrian war.
