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NY Times Op-Ed, July 2 2017
How Iran Recruited Afghan Refugees to Fight Assad’s War
By ALI M. LATIFI
BAMIAN, Afghanistan — War and poverty have scattered Afghans across the
globe like pieces of shrapnel. Millions of Afghans came of age in
refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran or as workers in the Persian Gulf
nations. The migration continues. The past few years have added a new
lethal geography to the Afghan diaspora: the battlefields of President
Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.
Two years ago, Abdol Amin, 19, left his home in the Foladi Valley in
Bamian, one of Afghanistan’s poorest provinces, to find work in Iran.
Two million undocumented Afghans and a million Afghans with refugee
status already lived in Iran. His sister and brother-in-law lived in
Isfahan. He hoped to improve on his life of subsistence farming in
impoverished Bamian.
Two-thirds of the population in Bamian Province lives on less than $25 a
month. The intense poverty and the absence of opportunity forces
thousands of young Afghans from Bamian to travel illegally to Iran in
search of work. Many, like Mr. Amin, end up fighting other’s people’s wars.
Mr. Amin managed to earn a meager wage, about $200 a month, as a
bricklayer in Isfahan. Last year, he used his modest savings and went to
Iraq with a group of fellow Afghan refugees for a pilgrimage to Karbala,
the city where Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was killed
in A.D. 680.
Elated after his pilgrimage, Mr. Amin returned to Iran but couldn’t find
any work for three months. As often happens with Afghan refugees in
Iran, Mr. Amin was humiliated and discriminated against. He lived with
the constant fear of being deported. “Iran isn’t our country. It belongs
to strangers,” Mr. Amin said. “Either you suffer and try to make some
money or you die.”
Last winter Iranian authorities presented Mr. Amin with a proposition.
He could gain legal status in Iran and be free of the fear of
deportation. The Iranians offered him a 10-year residency permit and
$800 a month if he would go to Syria to “fight to protect” the shrine of
Sayyida Zainab, a granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad.
Around 2013, when Mr. Assad’s military was losing ground to the rebels,
Iran poured billions of dollars into Syria, brought in Hezbollah
fighters and began raising Shiite militias from Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and other places with significant Shiite populations. Iran does
want to protect the major Shiite shrines in Damascus, Aleppo and Raqqa,
but the use of foreign Shiite militias in the Syria war was simply
another element in the larger battle for control and influence in the
Middle East run by Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps’ elite Quds Force.
The relationship between Iran and Syria goes back to the Syrian support
for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. They also share an enmity toward
Israel, and Syria is the essential axis of transit between Iran and
Hezbollah in Lebanon. Most of the weapons in the Hezbollah inventory are
sent by Iran through Syria. Mr. Assad’s control over Syria allows Tehran
to resupply Hezbollah and work toward building a connection to the
Mediterranean Sea.
A few months after Iran asked Hezbollah to join the fighting in Syria
alongside Mr. Assad’s forces, it began raising other Shiite militias.
The Fatemiyoun Division (formerly Brigade), a militia of Shiite Afghan
refugees, was formed around early 2014 and trained by both the
Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah veterans. Its strength has been
estimated at 8,000 to and 14,000 men. The Iranian authorities maintain
the fighters are volunteers.
The initial recruits to the Fatemiyoun Division were initially Shiite
Hazara Afghans, who settled in Iran after the Soviet occupation, after
the civil war in the early 1990s and the subsequent Taliban rule. Their
recruitment had echoes of how Pakistan — the other major host of the
Afghan refugee population — recruited the Sunni Pashtun Afghan refugees
and their children to form the Taliban in the mid-1990s.
In the past few years, Iranians have expanded recruitment to
undocumented Afghans, like Mr. Amin, recently arrived from Afghanistan
in search of economic opportunity. Apart from the refugees’ economic
anxiety and precarious legal status, the Iranians exploit the Shia faith
of Afghan refugees to recruit them to fight for the Assad regime in Syria.
Iranian propaganda framed the Syrian war to these refugees as a Shiite
struggle for the defense and protection of the faith and its holy sites.
“The fighters have little or no knowledge of the political-security
context into which they are marching,” said Ahmad Shuja, a former
researcher with Human Rights Watch. “They do not speak Arabic, most of
them have never been beyond Afghanistan or Iran, many are barely
literate, most are devout Shiites.”
Mr. Amin, for example, believed that the Syrian war resulted from a
dispute between the Nusra Front jihadist group (which was officially
founded in 2012) and Mr. Assad. He had been made to believe that the war
broke out after the leader of Nusra (who, he said, was related to Mr.
Assad) wanted to build a store over a mosque. Mr. Assad, an Alawite,
rushed to defend the mosque and protect all religious sites, especially
the Shiite shrines, in the country. In turn, in Mr. Amin’s telling,
Nusra called for Mr. Assad’s downfall and the destruction of shrines.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah fighters trained Mr. Amin and
the Afghan recruits of the Fatemiyoun Division in using weapons and
tactical movement for a month. Some were trained as snipers; some were
trained in tank warfare. After the training they were flown to Syria and
sent to the front lines in Damascus and Aleppo.
Iranians and Mr. Assad’s forces used the Afghan recruits as the
first-wave shock troops. “We would be the first in any operation,” Mr.
Amin recalled. Several short memoirs by current and former Afghan
fighters in Syria published on the Telegram app, which Mr. Shuja
studied, recount the Afghans’ being sent to fight the most difficult
battles, and speak about heavy casualties among Afghan fighters and the
eventual victory after multiple assaults.
Afghans have fought in Damascus, Hama, Lattakia, Deir al-Zor, Homs,
Palmyra and Aleppo. In November and December, Mr. Amin was stationed in
Aleppo, where the Fatemiyoun Division had the job of helping the Syrian
Army retake the eastern part of the city from rebel groups. He and
hundreds of other young Afghans fought under the orders of the
Revolutionary Guard.
The foreign Shiite militias played a crucial role in supporting Mr.
Assad’s regime and provided the key ground forces in the decisive battle
of Aleppo. The victory in Aleppo turned the tide for Mr. Assad and for
Iran, bringing it closer to, as the Syria scholar Joshua Landis put it,
“the consolidation of this Iranian security arc, stretching from Lebanon
to Iran.”
Several hundred Afghans have died fighting Mr. Assad’s and Iran’s war in
Syria. The bodies of slain Afghan fighters were paraded around the
streets of Tehran and in Qom, in northern Iran, in elaborate ceremonies
before their burials. The Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, and General Suleimani have visited the families of Afghan
militiamen killed in Syria and expressed gratitude for the sacrifices
their sons made in defending the holy shrines and Islam.
In January, I met Murtaza, a 21-year-old Afghan at the Elliniko Airport
refugee camp in Athens. He had lived in Qom. “They never make a show of
the Iranian fighters who die in Syria, only the Afghans,” said Murtaza,
who claimed to have seen graves of hundreds of Afghans killed in Syria
in Qom. “It is their way of trying to convince the Iranian people that
only Afghans, and not Iranians, are dying in Syria.”
In June 2016, Haitham Maleh, a Syrian opposition leader, addressed a
letter to President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan requesting an end to the
influx of Afghan fighters. Afghan deaths in Mr. Assad’s war have forced
several Afghan clerics to speak out against the Iranian strategy. Even
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the warlord who recently made a peace deal with the
Afghan government, spoke about it on his return to Kabul. Some estimates
put the number of Afghans killed in Syria around 600. Mr. Amin said 15
of his friends were killed in Syria.
After being wounded in Aleppo, Mr. Amin returned to Bamian two months
ago with a 10-year Iranian residency in hand and promise of a home in
Iran, or in postwar Syria, if he would like to live there. A majority of
the Afghans who fought with him in Syria have stayed in Iran. He keeps
in touch with them on the Telegram app.
Bamian remains peaceful and poor; the roads leading to the province are
still dangerous. Mr. Amin has returned to his old life as a subsistence
farmer. “I came back because I wanted to see what would work out
better,” Mr. Amin told me. “If things are good here, I will stay. If
they get worse, then I will go back to Iran, but now I don’t have to
worry about deportation.”
Ali M. Latifi is a journalist based in Kabu
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