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Top Israeli Diplomat: "Iran Wants to Turn Syria into a Province of Iran"
(Business Insider) Armin Rosen - Iran is "a country of 80 million seeking to get nuclear weapons," Israeli diplomat Dore Gold told the Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington on Jan. 11. Gold said that he "firmly believes Iran wants to turn Syria into a province of Iran." Citing Iranian promotion of Shi'ite Islam in the country, Gold said Iran is "involved in creating a social and political change that incorporates Syria into the Iranian state." Gold said that Iranian religious outreach in Syria wasn't just "a question of building Shi'ite mosques. It's a question of a permanent deployment against Israel from the north. That's something we cannot accept." Philip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland and a leading expert on Shi'ite militia movements, noted, "The revolutionary ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran has a very long-term goal to incorporate many states/groups into a broader political project." Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran's Islamic revolution, "was not a supporter of Iranian nationalism and wanted a true and total pan-Islamic government under his religious guidelines/ideology."