PHOTO: Supreme Leader’s top aide Ali Akbar Velayati with Syria’s President Assad, November 2015

Iran’s regime has declared that the future of Syria’s President Assad is no longer a matter for international discussion.

The Supreme Leader’s top aide, Ali Akbar Velayati, said on Wednesday that Western countries were no longer seeking the removal of Assad from power, after 5 1/2 years of conflict. He told a press conference alongside Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende:

The view of Westerners, including Norway, regarding Syria has changed. Presently there is not a debate on [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad leaving or overthrowing the Syrian government. This an important development.

Iran has been Assad’s most ardent defender, insisting that the question of his rule is a “red line” which cannot be crossed. Tehran has escalated its military intervention, alongside Russian airstrikes, since early 2016 to prevent the collapse of the Assad regime’s forces.

Velayati defended the latest Russian-Iranian move with the deployment of Moscow’s long-range bombers at a base in Hamedan in western Iran, saying that the cooperation is “strategic and comprehensive”.

However, some Iranian legislators were not as positive about the deployment, saying that the Islamic Republic’s Constitution had been violated through the presence of a foreign military base.

Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani rejected the criticism, saying that Russia had not taken control of the Hamedan complex: “Iran and Russia enjoy close views on the solution to the crisis of terrorism in the region and [have] close cooperation, but no military base has been granted to Russia or any other country at all.”

The head of Parliament’s National Security Committee went even farther. Alaeddin Boroujerdi denied — despite the prominent claims of both Russian and Syrian State media about bombing operations from Hamedan — that Moscow’s warplanes had been deployed:

The Hamedan air base has not become a Russian base, and no aircraft has been stationed there. The only thing that happened is that the Russian aircraft were given permission during a flight to use this base for refueling.