This Iranian Airline is One of the Assad Regime’s Lifelines

It's hard to fly to Damascus these days.

Even if Russia's military intervention in the country has the ruling Assad regime breathing easier after months of infighting, manpower shortages, and territorial losses, Syria's government is still one of the most diplomatically isolated in the world.

Syrian Airlines, the country's flag carrier, is under European Union sanctions that prevent it from flying to most European destinations. The chairman of Cham Wings, one of Syria's two independent carriers, is under US sanctions as well. FlyDamas, Syria's only other passenger airline, launched in April but its website is under construction.

Still, these limited commercial air travel options provide Syrians in regime-controlled areas with access to the outside world, allowing the Assad government to maintain some limited sense normalcy amid the country's violent disintegration.

And it gives Assad and his international supporters continuing cover for aerial resupply of the regime — particularly through an Iranian commercial airline that also flies to a number of European Union countries.

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As Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies explained to Business Insider, Iranian-based Mahan Air has operated a number of flights between cities in Iran and Syria.

The flights don't leave on a set schedule, and the planes sometimes don't broadcast their actual destination — or any destination at all, as in the case of this October 8th Mahan flight from Baghdad to Damascus that Business Insider observed:

“A few times they have broadcast the Tehran Baghdad route then actually flew on to Damascus,” Ottolenghi told Business Insider.

In another instance, an aircraft broadcasting the code for a Tehran-Damascus flight landed instead in Latakia, a strategic city in the regime-controlled Syrian coast.

Ottolenghi spotted a flight on September 19th flying under a Tehran-to-Damascus flight number that instead landed in Abadan, a city in an Arabic-speaking section of Iran that is also home to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base:

On September 4th, Ottolenghi documented a Mahan plane that flew from Tehran to Abadan before taking off for Damascus.

At some point, it switched its transponder off, and then reappeared near Latakia, its eventual destination:

“It’s not that Mahan Air flies to Damascus every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,” Ottolenghi says. “It happens on random days and at different hours.”

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