Members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) gather around the coffins fellow IRGC members who were killed by a suicide car bomb, during their funerals in Isfahan, Iran, Feb. 16, 2019. Photo: Morteza Salehi / Tasnim News Agency / via Reuters.

The Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is delivering weapons to a regime accused of committing genocide against a Muslim minority group, a new report on Thursday claimed.

An investigation by the Asia Times news outlet found that Iranian planes had been landing in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, where the military seized power and suspended democracy in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup.  The Iranian arrivals “raised speculation of secretive military-to-military cooperation, including possible sensitive Iranian weapons sales amid rising international calls to impose an arms embargo on the rights-abusing junta.”

The paper reported that “diplomatic sources based in Southeast Asia who requested anonymity said that an Iranian delegation that landed in Myanmar on January 13 was either the second or third to visit since the military seized power.”

Iran has provided extensive military backing for terrorist groups around the region, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen and Shi’a Islamist militias in Iraq. However, Iran is not known to have had military ties with Myanmar, which relies mostly on Russia and China as well as India for its armaments.

In 2017, Myanmar’s army launched a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Muslim Rohingya minority, murdering thousands of civilians, carrying out mass rapes and other abuses and driving a flood of refugees into neighboring Bangladesh. Among the countries protesting the slaughter at the time was Iran, several of whose leaders called for the creation of a “Joint Islamic Army” to defend the Rohingya.

According to air traffic tracking data seen by the Asia Times, a plane owned by the Iranian cargo airline Qeshm Fars Air flew from Mashhad, Iran’s second-biggest city, to Myanmar last Thursday. The plane returned to Iran from Myanmar the following day.

Qeshm Fars Air was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in 2019 for allegedly transporting weapons to Syria on behalf of the Quds Force (IRGC-QF), the foreign wing of the Revolutionary Guards.

Operating as a commercial airline between 2006 and 2013, Qeshm Fars Air shifted focus in 2017.  According to the US, its fleet of two B747 aircraft have operated regular flights to Damascus, delivering cargo, including weapons shipments, to the Syrian regime on behalf of the IRGC-QF.

A representative of Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG) — created in response to last year’s coup — expressed concern about the military government’s relations with Iran.

“Military relations between [Myanmar’s] military junta, which seeks to adopt a military authoritarianism, and a country like Iran can be said to be a worrying situation, not only for atrocities against the Myanmar people but also from a regional and international security perspective,“ Zin Mar Aung, the NUG’s Foreign Minister, told the Asia Times.

More than 1,400 civilians have been killed by Myanmar’s security forces since the coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a human rights group. Reports of military torture, rape and executions are commonplace on Myanmar social media.