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Syrian Regime "Importing Snipers" for Protests
(Times-UK) Nate Wright and James Hider - Syria is deploying large numbers of Hizbullah and Iranian snipers as "military consultants" to murder anti-regime protesters, a senior government defector has told The Times. The salaries of the marksmen are paid through a slush fund replenished with U.S. dollars flown in from Iran, according to Mahmoud Haj Hamad, who was the treasury's top auditor at the Defense Ministry until he fled Syria last month. Hamad said: "At the beginning there were hundreds, then when things started to get worse they started to bring in more outsiders. The numbers were huge - in the thousands." The foreign reinforcements are prized by the regime for their street-fighting abilities, having crushed dissent in Iran and Lebanon. Ministry colleagues told him that two Iranian warships that passed through the Suez Canal during the Egyptian uprising were loaded with weapons for use against dissidents, and offloaded at the seaport of Latakia.