Iran mocks Saudi offer to send ground troops to Syria

They organize next week in Brussels a meeting of defense ministers from 26 countries of the coalition and the Iraqi government to discuss this intensification.

US Defence Secretary Ash Carter said in January that several members of the US-led coalition against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria are doing “nothing at all” to help destroy the jihadists.

“They claim they will send troops [to Syria], but I don’t think they will dare do so”, IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted as saying on February 6 by the hard-line Fars news agency.

Saudi Arabia supports more moderate rebels against Assad’s forces.

Some regional reports also said more than 100 Saudi-backed militiamen had been killed, and 150 others injured in a ballistic missile attack in the central province of Ma’rib.

And on Friday, two Saudi officials told CNN that the kingdom plans to run in March a multinational military training exercise – involving as many as 150,000 troops – to prepare for future anti-ISIS operations.

Saudi Arabia has been part of the coalition since late 2014.

Al-Moallem’s comments capped a week that saw the collapse of U.N.-led efforts to launch indirect peace talks between the Syrian government and an opposition delegation in Geneva.

TASS earlier reported, citing The Guardian newspaper that Saudi Arabia offered to send ground troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organisation in coordination with Turkey.

Joining US and French outcries, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation head Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday that Russia’s intense air strikes, mostly targeting rebel forces, have undermined efforts to find a political solution to the war.

They Saudi higher ups have sensed this grave danger in their backyard and hence have made a decision to take fight to the ISIS in their home Syria before it is too late. For its part, Saudi Arabia is frustrated with the reluctance of its western allies to increase military support for the opposition – a fragmented mix of groups that ranges from liberal secularists to extremists linked to Al Qaeda.

Saudi soldiers exercise before a military parade at a military camp in Arafat, just outside Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013.

But he and other analysts said Saudi involvement would be limited, given its leadership of a separate Arab coalition fighting in Yemen for nearly a year and guarding the kingdom’s southern border from attacks by Iran-backed Yemeni rebels.

Jane Kinninmont, senior research fellow at London’s Chatham House, said Saudi Arabia is more interested in the war in Yemen than the struggle against ISIS. “We have serious grounds to suspect Turkey is in intensive preparations for an armed invasion of the territory of a sovereign state-the Syrian Arab Republic”, the Russian defense ministry said in a statement. Saudi Arabia must either get the approval of the Assad regime in Syria as Russian Federation is doing today – but this is an impossible request for Riyadh to make and it is likely that Damascus will reject it – or be authorised by the United Nations as it is in Yemen where Saudi forces are fighting with the approval of the Security Council.