Tracking the Iran-Backed Naval Fleet Fueling Assad

It's hardly a secret that the Iranian regime views the current grinding war in Syria as more of a domestic than a foreign-policy concern. Its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force has been training and financing a host of Shiite and Alawite sectarian militias in Syria to fight a war that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's conventional military and traditional paramilitary proxies have been unable to win on their own. Without the direct military intervention of Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Qusayr and Homs this year, those territories would still be under rebel control. Not for nothing has Mehdi Taeb, a confidant of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, famously described Syria as Iran's "35th province," the loss of which would spell the fall of the Islamic Republic.