Iran allowing Syria-bound Russian planes to use airspace

World Saturday 11/February/2017 19:56 PM
By: Times News Service
Iran allowing Syria-bound Russian planes to use airspace

Dubai: Iran has again allowed Russian planes to use its airspace during recent operations in Syria, a senior Iranian security official was quoted as saying on Saturday.
In August, Russian aircraft for the first time used an Iranian air base to conduct strikes in Syria. The Russian military said its fighters had completed their tasks, but left open the possibility of using the Hamadan base again if circumstances warranted.
Iran's Foreign Ministry said then that Russia had stopped using the base for strikes in Syria, bringing an abrupt halt to the deployment that was criticised both by the United States and some Iranian lawmakers.
Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's National Security Council, on Saturday told the semi-official news agency Fars: "Their (Russians') use of Iran's air space has continued because we have a fully strategic cooperation with Russia."
"In the recent cases, Russian fighter planes have only used Iran's airspace and have not had refueling operations," Shamkhani added.
The agency said Shamkhani was commenting on media reports that Russia's Tupolev-22M long-range bombers had used Iranian airspace and a base in the country on their missions in Syria, where both Tehran and Moscow back President Bashar Al Assad's government.
It was not immediately clear if the recent missions were linked to Russian air strikes on Thursday that accidentally killed three Turkish soldiers during an operation against IS in Syria, according to the Turkish military.
Meanwhile, a senior Iranian oil official said power supply has been restored within hours of an outage in southwestern Iran that hit crude oil production by 700,000 barrels on Saturday, and efforts are underway to compensate for the output drop.
It was not immediately clear if oil exports would be affected by the electricity outages, which have been frequent in the oil-producing Khuzestan province.
Part of the output cutback in the Karoun area was planned and aimed at storing about 300,000 barrels produced by the West Karoun fields, Bijan Alipour, managing director of the National South Oil Company, said in a statement. He did not elaborate.
"As power supply has been reestablished, processing plants have resumed production according to schedule and the reduced hours will be compensated as much as possible," Alipour said in the statement, posted on the state-run company's website.
Iran produces about 3.7 million barrels per day of crude oil, some 1.5 million bpd of which are used at home.