Iran Arms Russia in the War in Ukraine

In 2015, General Qassem Suleimani, the architect of Iran's foreign military strategy, travelled to Moscow to see President Vladimir Putin. He had a pitch--and a plea. During their two-hour meeting, Suleimani rolled out large maps of the battlefield in Syria, which was in the fifth year of a civil war with disparate rebel groups and had lost control of a third of its territory to ISIS jihadis. The stakes for Russia were high. For decades, Syria had been its only steadfast ally among the twenty-two Arab countries.