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Syria foils attempt to smuggle weapons to Hezbollah from Iraq: SANA

Syrian authorities have foiled an attempt to smuggle a shipment of advanced weapons over the border from Iraq.

State news agency SANA reported, quoting an unnamed Interior Ministry source, preliminary investigations show the arms, including missiles, were intended to be delivered to Lebanon’s Hezbollah through Syrian territory.

However, the truck was stopped while it was already in Syria, not at the Iraqi-Syrian border.

The incident prompts us to consider it a claim.

The "discovery" may be a Israeli false flag operation in an attempt to defend their refusal to leave from Lebanon.

Hezbollah denies ‘fabricated’ Syria weapons seizure report

Hezbollah has strongly denied reports on the seizure of weapons by Syrian forces on the Syria-Iraq border, in an official statement reported by Iran’s Tasnim news agency.

The group’s media relations office called the accusations “fabricated and baseless narratives aimed at tarnishing the image of the resistance movement”. The statement said the reports served US and Israeli objectives in the region.

Syria weapons seizure result of growing US pressure on Damascus

The seizure of weapons by Syria on the border with Iraq is part of a broader reshaping of the region that has occurred over the last couple of years, particularly after the fall of Syria’s Assad regime.

It used to be a very popular land route for Iran to allegedly traffic weapons and cash to its Hezbollah partners in Lebanon. When the Assad regime was in control, the supplies went from Iran, across Iraq, through Syria, and then into Lebanon.

But since the new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, took power in Syria, he has been cracking down on that cross-border smuggling. Not long after the war broke out in Lebanon in March, Syrian authorities announced they had located and destroyed tunnels in the mountains between Lebanon and Syria that Hezbollah had been using to traffic weapons.

The drying up of that route has proved to be a difficulty for the Lebanese-based group in getting resupplies of weapons and hard cash that would ordinarily be making its way to southern Lebanon. That would then be used to fight against the Israeli military.

Syria’s president is under a lot of American pressure to take even more action, not just in stopping the Hezbollah smuggling routes, but also to intervene militarily inside Lebanon. Up to this point, al-Sharaa has resisted that pressure, saying that it’s not something that he’s interested in.

Hezbollah, for its part, has denied that it is active on Syrian territory, and it has described these allegations as fabricated.