I'm John Batchel with my colleague Bill Rajo, the senior fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy,

keeping the Long War Journal, and Edmund Fitton Brown, former ambassador from the UK to Yemen, many years at the UN,

watching the wars in the Middle East, now very active in all fronts, and now with the FDD.

Bill, you have a question for your colleague, Edmund.

Yes, Edmund. As far as the militia, the Iranian-backed militias go throughout the Middle East in Syria,

or I'm sorry, no longer Syria, really, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in the, as you mentioned,

the Houthis in Yemen, etc. How would they be impacted by the

fall of the Iranian regime? Could these militias effectively survive a collapse of the Iranian regime?

So I think they would be heavily impacted Bill.

You know, this is this whole sort of, they like to call themselves the axis of resistance.

And this has all been established as part of a sort of an Islamic Republic and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps means of asymmetric warfare against the Arab countries of the Middle East, against Israel, and of course against the United States and the wider

Western world. And if you look at the way that these militias have been built up, it has been with intense

hands-on support from the Iranians, primarily through the Agency of the Islamic Revolutionary

Guards Corps, the IRGC. And so the Houthis, you know, have become as powerful as they are in Yemen because of massive Iranian supply and training and mentoring and intelligence feed.

You know, when the Houthis were attacking ships in the Red Sea, they were being supported, actively supported in real time by an Iranian spy ship in the region.

In the Iraqi militias, all of them, of course, you know, they all go to Iran on pilgrimage.

They're all agents of the IRGC.

And, you know, one of the reasons that they've become, they wield outside as power in Baghdad is

because the Baghdad regime is afraid of Iran. You know, Iran is a large, powerful, and very

predatory neighbor, which, you know, since the days of Saddam Hussein, you know, Iraq is now

afraid of. In the case of Lebanese, his Bala, I mean, of course, you know, you go back to the,

this is the one that is the longest standing of all, where, you know, you can trace endless

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