Iran opened its airspace to Russian military planes flying into Syria after the denial of overflight permission by NATO countries in the region, a Russian diplomat in Tehran told the Tass news agency Wednesday.
The move by Iran allows Russia to continue flying humanitarian aid to Syria, one senior Foreign Ministry official said, and another noted that Russia “has never made a secret” of its arms sales and military collaboration with the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The airspace dispute and Moscow’s claim of alliance with the embattled Assad were the latest developments after the Obama administration’s accusations last week that Russia appeared to be expanding its military presence in Syria and may be preparing to send troops to back Assad.
U.S. intelligence sources last week told the Los Angeles Times and other media that recent satellite imagery shows a significant buildup of Russian arms and equipment in Syria’s Latakia province, Assad’s ancestral home.
Russia has been a loyal ally of the Syrian president throughout the 4 1/2 -year civil war and the seizure of huge areas of Syria by Islamic State extremists.
U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday to warn that any military buildup on Assad’s behalf risks more protracted fighting and bloodshed in the country from which more than 4 million have fled.
The two top diplomats spoke again Wednesday, Tass reported, casting the second conversation as more of a collaborative discussion of how to end the war in Syria and cooperate in the shared aim of driving out the Islamic State.
“The conversation focused on the problem of peace settlement of the conflict in Syria and certain aspects of Russian-American bilateral relations,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “A road to it lies through a dialogue between the government in Damascus and the opposition.”
U.S. concern about an expanding Russian presence in Syria reportedly led to Washington asking NATO allies to close their airspace to Russian military planes bound for Syria.
Bulgaria, a NATO member state that was part of the Kremlin-dominated Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, on Tuesday confirmed that it had barred Russian military aircraft from overflying its territory due to concern that the planes could be carrying weapons or troops.
A spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry also confirmed that it had been asked by Washington to deny airspace use to Russia.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the U.S. claims of a Russian military buildup in Syria “a strange hysteria,” but noted that the Kremlin has a long and open history of military aid to Damascus.
