Iran, Russia refute claims that Syria-aimed missiles hit Iran

PanARMENIAN.Net - Russian and Iranian officials dismissed the claim that Russian missiles hit Iran, the New York Times reports.

Four cruise missiles in a barrage of 26 fired by Russia’s warships in the Caspian Sea at rebel targets in Syria crashed in a rural area of northern Iran instead, senior United States officials said on Thursday, October 8.

Russian and Iranian officials dismissed the claim as a nonsensical propaganda ploy, as the Kremlin intensified military coordination with the newly emboldened forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to turn the tide of the war.

News of the apparent crashes, which were first reported by CNN, came as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter sharply criticized what he called Russia’s “unprofessional” conduct in its incursion into Syria. Speaking at a NATO news conference in Brussels, Carter said that Moscow had fired the cruise missiles with no advance notice.

In Moscow, Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian military operation in Syria, denied that any of the missiles had fallen short of their targets.

Konashenkov said sarcastically that if the report were true, “We would have to admit that the sites of the terrorist group Islamic State in Syria, located far apart from one another, just blew up on their own.”

He also chastised Carter for his statement about Russian casualties, describing it as cynical and inappropriate. An Iranian official, Hamidreza Taraghi, who is close to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, laughed at the report that missiles had crashed, calling it “complete nonsense.”

Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency described the report as part of the West’s “psychological warfare” against the Russian-Iranian alliance with Assad.