In a new escalation of its sectarian involvement in Syria, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is reportedly training and sending scores of Afghan refugees (mostly Shi’ites) to fight alongside President Bashar al Assad’s forces in Syria. According to a report by Afghanistan’s leading daily Hasht-e Sobh, the IRGC has deployed 120 Afghan fighters to Syria over the past two months alone, of whom 28 have been killed and 8 others wounded. Those killed were buried in the Behesht-e Reza cemetery in the Iranian city of Mashhad, and the wounded were treated at an undisclosed IRGC hospital. Based on statements by five Afghan militants who recently returned from Syria to Mashhad, the report adds that the Iranian government recruits Afghan refugees by offering them permanent residency in Iran and other inducements. There are about 2.5 million Afghans living in Iran, a third of them registered refugees and the remainder economic migrants. Last November, the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency also reported the death of 10 Afghan refugees in Syria. Officials from Bonyad-e Shahid (the Foundation for Martyrs) participated in the burial ceremony for two of the “martyrs” in the Iranian holy city of Qom, which indicates that the Iranian government pays compensation to the families of the victims, as it did for Iranians killed in the Iran-Iraq war. Later that month, Sayed Hamed Iqtedar, an Afghan journalist who fled Syria, told Afghanistan’s Bokhdi News Agency: “Thousands of Afghans are present on both sides of the Syrian war… and tens of them have been killed or injured.” Iqtedar added that Afghans coming from Iran to Syria are fighting for money, while others fighting on the rebel side are sent by jihadist groups in Afghanistan. The Afghan government is reportedly probing these cases. The IRGC’s use of Afghan refugees for its terror agenda should surprise nobody. Over the past decade, the IRGC’s secretive Quds Force has provided training, funding, and weapons to the Taliban to expedite the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. Afghan government officials have repeatedly accused the Quds Force of training Afghan citizens in terrorist camps in the Iranian provinces of Khorasan, Kerman, Sistan va Baluchestan and Khuzestan. The IRGC has assigned the Ansar Corps, a Quds Force sub-command based in Mashhad, to run operations in Afghanistan. In August 2010, the Department of Treasury sanctioned the commander of the Ansar Corps, Mossein Musavi, and another senior Quds Force officer, Colonel Hasan Mortezavi, for providing monetary and material support to the Taliban. Syria’s sectarian conflict – between a Shi’ite axis of Iran-Hezbollah-al Assad and rebel groups backed by regional Sunni governments – has inflamed longstanding tensions between Islam’s two largest sects and has destabilized the Middle East. The conflict’s spillover effects have already pushed Iraq and Lebanon to the brink of new civil wars. But the IRGC’s use of Afghan refugees in its sectarian struggle against regional Sunni monarchies is likely to have serious implications for Afghanistan and for South Asia more broadly. Sunni violence against Shi’ites in Pakistan has reached its highest point: there were almost 700 sectarian killings in Pakistan last year, a 22% increase over 2012. And as foreign troops are leaving Afghanistan by next year, Afghanistan is also likely to turn into a proxy battlefield between Shi’ite Iran and a Sunni alliance of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Taliban.

• published: 17 Oct 2014
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