Children's toys and lethal weapons
How Russia and Iran funnelled arms through Syria — and to whom. BBC Russian investigates.
By Sergei Goryashko, Anastasia Lotareva.
The toppling of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad late last year removed virtually overnight one of the most important props to Russia’s influence in the Middle East.
It also seriously compromised the shadowy environment in which Moscow and Tehran had deepened their relationship – signed into a ‘strategic partnership’ last month – while channelling clandestine supplies of arms around the region.
The BBC lifts the lid on the logistics involved in the shady weapons trade during Assad’s rule - and asks what might follow now that he has gone.
Exploding blankets
Russia’s propaganda channel RT aired an extraordinary video on October 1, 2024: for a full five minutes, without any commentary, the camera recorded the goings on at the airport in the Syrian coastal city of Latakia.
The facility bore the name of Assad’s older brother Basil until the overthrow of his sibling’s regime, and since 2015 was the main base for Russian armed forces deployed in the country.
The video starts with a lingering shot on the name of the airport’s before showing a Boeing cargo plane bearing the logo of the Iranian aviation company Qeshm Fars Air, just as it touches down on the runway. The footage then shows the plane being unloaded.
A large number of sacks are taken off the aircraft, with two men in camouflage uniforms that bear Russian military police insignia filming the process on their mobiles. Sacks are slashed open for the camera to reveal bundles of green blankets. The footage ends there.
An official at a subsequent briefing said Syria welcomed the shipment as humanitarian aid from Russia for “refugees and displaced persons”.
Two days later, the story took a dramatic turn. International media reported an Israeli airstrike on Russia’s nearby Hmeimim military base the night before. Video of the aftermath showed not only the resulting blaze but also what were identified as secondary explosions.
“Everyone knows that blankets can detonate, too,” sarcastically remarked a BBC source familiar with matters at Hmeimim who requested anonymity. When we asked if Iran was shipping weapons using the Russian military channels in charge of distributing ‘aid’, our source commented “What do you expect me to say? Those ‘blankets’ exploded so fiercely that they nearly took out Hmeimim completely.”
The Qeshm Fars Air company is headquartered at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. An aviation expert told us it is officially a private entity, but like many such companies, is in reality controlled by the Iranian state.
The airline was first alleged to be involved in shipping weapons for Hezbollah militant use in Lebanon in 2018. Fox News cited unnamed western intelligence sources who noted strange flight routes, suggesting an effort by Iran to evade surveillance.
One flight via Damascus took an unusual path over northern Lebanon; the intelligence sources suggested it was ferrying components for the manufacture of Iranian-designed precision-guided weapons within the country. Another flight, direct to Beirut from Tehran, also mapped an unconventional flightpath.
Fox News stated that Qeshm Fars Air was linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IGRC, whose representatives were on the board of the company. The airline was shut down in 2013 but resumed operations in 2017 – for arms smuggling purposes, according to Fox.
Other western observers have noted links between Qeshm Fars Air and the IGRC. Its two cargo planes were sanction by the US in 2019, and secondary sanctions were imposed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the breaching of restrictions related to Russia. One of the two Boeings owned by the company has been grounded for the past three years, but the second – which was filmed delivering ‘humanitarian aid’ to Latakia in October – made four flights to the airport last year.
Nikita Smagin is an expert on the region – and recalls even flying aboard a Qeshm Fars Air passenger flight in the past.
“It was logical for Russia to let the Iranians use its aircraft,” Smagin says of the cargo shipments to Lebanon. “Otherwise Israel would have been at liberty to strike and intercept them.”
Hmeimim is not Iran’s key transit hub into Lebanon, he says. “Iran had a land-based logistics corridor which Israel attacked regularly. But most of what passed along it reached Syria and Lebanon anyway – and not via Russian bases.” He considers the latter to be relatively insignificant routings for such shipments.
As for the situation now, “Iran has lost virtually everything in Syria, because the country has moved out of its sphere of influence. In theory, isolated shipments could still go via Hmeimim,” Smagin says. “But if Russia permitted this, it would sharply reduce its chances of reaching an agreement with Syria’s new authorities."
Russia’s overriding interest today is to retain its military presence in the country, Smagin says. In return, it may agree to keep servicing the Soviet-era defence equipment that remains in Syria.
The Boeing 747-281F (EP-FAB) operated by Qeshm Fars Air has also made several flights to Africa: to Eritrea (landing with its transponder turned off) and Port Sudan. Both countries are significant customers in the arms trade, not least with Russia.
Almost half of Sudan’s arms imports were sourced from Russia as long ago as 2017. Khartoum signed a deal with Moscow to establish a Russian naval base on the Red Sea capable of docking nuclear-powered vessels.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Eritrea voted against a UN resolution condemning the aggression and the annexation of the Donbas ‘people’s republics’. Sudan abstained.
A Russian ‘human shield’
Sarit Zehavi is a retired lieutenant-colonel of the Israeli Defence Forces specialising in military intelligence. She now runs the Alma research centre. “We first noticed certain Iranian aircraft, known for shipping weapons around the region, at the Hmeimim airbase in early 2023”, she says.
“Israel had struck other airports in Syria, at Damascus and Aleppo, and they couldn’t land there. So they found an alternative,” Zehavi adds.
She says her research centre warned when the first Iranian planes landed at Hmeimim that it might become a hub for weapons shipments - with the Russians serving as a human shield against Israeli attack.
"When we saw Iranian drones in Ukraine, we immediately wondered how Russia would pay for them,” Zehavi says. “The first thing that came to my mind was Syria - that Russia would compensate Iran by offering it advantages there."
Iran presumably expected that using the Russian bases would give it immunity from Israeli airstrikes. It is not possible to say if there was a formal, contractual agreement. But Zehavi notes that Israel has no interest in attacking Russia in Syria - and that a hotline between the IDF and Russian military exists to avert such risks. No Russian has been harmed in Israeli attacks, she notes: proof that the system works.
Collaboration between Iran and Russia in arms deals is not new, Zehavi notes. What is different now, however, is that Russia is acting in the role of purchaser, rather than supplier. Iran, Russia, as well as China, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela - countries slapped with sanctions – are trading among themselves to create an alternative economy to bypass them.
The Assad regime played a key role in the so-called Axis of Resistance, a coalition of Shia interests. But power in Syria has now passed to military factions hostile to Iran. What will become of the Russian bases, and Tehran’s other means of distribution in Syria, is a crucial, and still open, question.
"Kornets" in the play room
The room in the video was littered with bags, boxes and toys lying around on the floor – as though the owners had abandoned their things and hurriedly moved out. A soldier stands in the shot. There’s a Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed toy nearby. The camera then pans to a broken partition in one corner of the room. The video was published by the IDF in early November last year.
“We entered a child’s room which had a false wall,” one participant in the raid told the BBC, on condition of anonymity. “We broke the wall down, and that’s when we uncovered the first find.”
It was a cache of Russian-manufactured arms. The raid was at a two-storey villa in southern Lebanon, conducted during operations against Hezbollah targets over the autumn.
“It was a classic Arab village, that looked as bad as they come,” he said. He and his comrades arrived just after Hezbollah had retreated. In a relatively poor settlement, however, they found affluent homes – villas with several storeys, garages, sometimes even underground swimming pools. These were the first buildings to be searched.
Amid the “gypsy-baroque” décor, the IDF soldiers not only found Kalashnikov rifles, roughly 10-15 years in age, but warheads for the Kornet anti-tank missile system. Weapons caches were discovered in every second such building – the ones with nice furniture, and wall-mounted televisions.
The soldier who spoke to the BBC assumes they were Hezbollah residences. There were portraits of Hassan Nasrullah, the movement leader killed in September, as well as mines, grenades, RPG warheads, ammunition, canned food – and the Kornet missiles.
“This sort of weaponry is for attacking towns, not for clashes with the IDF,” the solder said. “On average, each house probably had enough weapons for a squad of five or six men.” The retreating militants had taken the Kornet launcher – but left the box it came in. It is visible in photographs seen by the BBC.
Two variants of the Kornet system are shown in the photographs. One uses a tandem warhead that penetrates armour and detonates a second time inside the vehicle. The other, with a high explosive missile, targets infantry. In both cases, the range can be more than five kilometres. As the crow flies, from these villages to Israeli towns is three kilometres, the soldier said.
He suggested that the Kornet missiles were abandoned because they are not easy to move around discreetly. Each weights 29 kilos. It was probable that the arsenal was delivered to southern Lebanon from Syria by road. By the autumn, the roads in question were being targeted by the Israeli air force.
Our source was certain that the weapons he and his comrades discovered were new. They were tightly packed in nylon with moisture-absorbing sachets and humidity indicators. The instructions for use were in both Russian and Arabic.
“Here’s a funny detail,” the solder adds. “The Arabic instructions used photos of Israeli soldiers and tanks when explaining how to fire the weapon. There even use pictures to show how to kill people.”
Routes of the Kornets
The soldier we spoke to thought the weapons arrived in Lebanon from Syria. The IDF soldiers found Syrian money at the houses, supporting his suggestion. The money is now virtually worthless.
But the stamps and seals found with the weapons, from the Russian munitions export agency, are more worthy of attention, and mean the Kornets were sold to an official receiving organisation, the BBC source says.
“The first organisation that comes to mind in this situation is the Syrian army, the army of Assad. As we know, it had close ties with Syrian Hezbollah, which in turn has close ties with Lebanese Hezbollah,” he says.
A western intelligence source, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity, confirmed that most of the Russian weapons discovered by the IDF in Lebanon originated with the Syrian National Army.
A report in the Wall Street Journal, also quoting anonymous sources, said some Kornet missiles found in southern Lebanon had been manufactured as recently as 2020, and had been sourced from Russian stockpiles in Syria. Prior to their discovery, the assumption among the Israeli military leadership had been that Hezbollah only possessed old Soviet-era stock.
The Kornet system is among the most effective items in Hezbollah’s arsenal, and has likely accounted for some of the more than 80 IDF personnel killed between October 8 2023 and the ceasefire last November.
The head of Israeli military intelligence in 2005 was the first to state that Russian weapons were being transferred to Hezbollah through Syria. Kornet systems were in their hands in the early 2000s, and the anti-tank missiles were used in combat during the war in 2006.
Russia’s then defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, called the claims “complete nonsense.” Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, said there were stipulations in place preventing armaments from being transferred to third parties, and said he would investigate.
Hassan Nasrallah, the late Hezbollah leader, openly said in 2013 that Kornets used in the war had been supplied by Syria.
When Palestinian militants launched an anti-tank missile at a school bus in 2011, Israel reportedly sent a note of protest to Moscow demanding how such weapons found themselves at the disposal of Hamas.
Nikita Smagin says the Assad regime was supplying Russian weapons to Syrian Hezbollah to the very end; with the arms then transferred to Lebanon. Russia simply turned a blind eye.
“They couldn’t not know that items were leaking through. But either there was nothing they could do about it, or they chose not to,” Smagin says.
Up until 2022, Russia valued its relationship with Israel too highly to begin openly allowing weapons supplies to Hezbollah, Smagin notes. Whatever Hezbollah got hold of to that point was thanks to oversight, or sheer fluke.
"Then the situation obviously changed, and Israel’s opinion was given less weight. But still, there is no confirmation that Russia directly supplied weapons to Hezbollah," Smagin says. "Many expected Russia to start such supplies, but I haven't seen any evidence of it."
Hezbollah was a key ally of the Syrian army, and acted in coordination with the Russian forces stationed in Syria. But the heavy losses they sustained in Israeli strikes seriously weakened the movement. In turn, this was one of the factors that led to the precipitous toppling of Bashar al-Assad himself.
Thereafter, the Israeli air force acted rapidly to target remaining arms depots in Syria. Up to 80% of Syria’s arsenal is said to have been laid to waste. There is little remaining that the new authorities in the country could transfer to Hezbollah, even if they wanted to.
Read this story in Russian here.
English version edited by Chris Booth.
Israel was foolish, immoral, and short-sighted to ever think the Russians could be their allies. Russia is taking the side of the Arab countries, including Hamas and Hezbollah, in their war against Israel. Russia regards Israel as part of the Western alliance they want to destroy.