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February 20th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
“The presence of Iranian warships in the high seas is Iran’s natural right,”
Vahidi was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.
The deployment comes amid heightened tensions between Iran and Israel, fuelled
by a longstanding dispute over Tehran’s nuclear programme. Speculation has
been rising that Israel might launch air strikes against Iranian atomic
facilities.
The Israeli foreign ministry has said it “will closely follow the movement of
the two ships to confirm that they do not approach the Israeli coast.”
The first time Iran sent warships into the Mediterranean, in February 2011, it
provoked strong reactions from Israel and the United States, with the Jewish
state putting its navy on alert.
During the 2011 deployment, two Iranian vessels, a destroyer and a supply
ship, sailed past the coast of Israel and docked at the port of Latakia in
allied Syria before returning to Iranian waters via the Red Sea.
As Syria teeters on the brink of civil war, there are fears the Islamic
Republic is poised to increase its sphere of influence in the region. Tehran
is one of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s few friends left in the Middle
East, but it is a powerful one.
“Syria is at a critical point,” said Nabil Abdel Fattah, a political
analyst with the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in the
Egyptian capital.
The situation there “risks creating waves of instability in the region,
like in Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Turkey or Jordan,” its neighbouring
states, he told AFP.
In Syria on Monday, activists voiced fears of an all-out assault on Homs, with
the embattled regime building up troops around the flashpoint city and
activating a security alert in Damascus after surprise protests.
The reported buildup comes as the top US military officer, General Martin
Dempsey, warned any intervention in Syria would be “very difficult”
and that it was “premature” to arm the unrest-swept country’s
opposition movement.
Activists and Syrian state media reported that at least 14 people were killed
on Sunday, adding to the more than 6,000 people who have died in the Syrian
government’s 11-month crackdown on dissent.
“Infantry troops arrived yesterday (Sunday) in Homs,” Rami Abdel
Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told
AFP on the phone Monday.
A Homs-based activist voiced fears of an imminent attack on Baba Amr, the main
rebel stronghold in the central city, speaking of “unprecedented
military reinforcements coming from Damascus.”
“News has been leaked to us from army officers about a bloody attack that
will burn everything in Baba Amr,” Hadi Abdullah of the General
Commission of the Syrian Revolution said on Sunday.
“We were expecting the attack two nights ago, but it could have been just
delayed because of the snowstorm,” he said.
Abdullah said regime forces pounded the defiant city for the 15th straight day
on Sunday, with Baba Amr being shelled at the rate of four to five rockets a
minute.
Source: agencies
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