I'm John Datchel with my colleague Gregory Copley Defense and Foreign Affairs.

Iran, watching its land bridge from Tehran to Beirut, snapped in half by the investiture of Damascus,

by surrogates, guerrillas working at the behest of the Syrian military.

That's why all those trucks you see in the Malang Convoy are Syrian military.

At the same time, Iran is watching this, knowing that it has been running a war against Israel,

and now it has to deal with surrogates of Iran.

And the question here is, Gregory, how does Iran react to the Turkish advance,

not the Israeli advance, to the Turkish advance along its borders?

Well, this is almost worse for Tehran than the war in which Iran has been conducting with Israel.

It really, for the first time, does make it difficult for Iran to do what it has been always attempting for the past 3,000 years to do,

which is to maintain an open access from Iran across Iraq and what is now Syria and so and Lebanon to the Mediterranean.

This has been the objective of historical Persian and leader Iranian administrations.

And now that's cut off.

I think you and I have been discussing earlier about the fact that the Iranian clerics were

taken by surprise at the speed with which Turkey moved to dominate and control Damascus and get

rid of President Assad. There is an incredible amount of finger pointing and name calling and blame association in Tehran

at the moment over what happened, and they've still let no one to fix the problem.

They're talking about getting rid of the head of the Al-Quds Brigade, talking about

getting rid of the head of the Revolutionary Guarduds Brigade, talking about getting rid of the head of the Revolutionary

Guard itself, the parent body, but neither of those is going to solve the problem.

And it's ironic that they're in this situation largely because they lost their commander

in the region who was fully capable of sensing where things were going.

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