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Afghanistan\u2019s government sees members of the Fatemiyoun Division \u2013 who have mostly joined Shia paramilitary forces in Syria due to poverty \u2013 as a threat. Afghanistan\u2019s officials hold that Iran has created a secret army of Hazaras Shias so that they become active upon America leaving this country. One of the soldiers said that the IRGC, in the proxy war in Syria, has used them as self-sacrificing forces, and now upon returning to Afghanistan, their lives and livelihoods have become worse than before.
\nMehdi, a little after becoming 17 years old, was so poor that he couldn\u2019t even buy a pen and a notebook for attending school. He left his home in Afghanistan and went to Iran, hoping that he would find a job and go to Europe. But eventually, he ended up in war zones, in the middle of the Syrian civil war \u2013 a war that was 2,000 km away from his home and had nothing to do with him. Mehdi was one of the 10,000 Afghan men who was recruited, trained and paid to defend the ally of the Islamic Republic \u2013 Bashar Assad, the Syrian President.
\nIn Syria, Mehdi was sent to one of the bloodiest war fronts, where he was surrounded by his friends\u2019 corpses and under the fire of ISIS, the fighters were so close that they could hear the voice of their friends saying \u2018Allah Akbar\u2019 before any deadly explosion.
\nWith the outbreak of the war in Syria, Iran launched an extensive operation to recruit Shias in the region and it created a network of Shia paramilitary forces to prevent the fall of Assad\u2019s government. They were Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Lebanese. Now with the Syrian war coming to an end, the question is: what will the Islamic Republic do with these trained forces?
\nAfter the rise of protests in Syria, the IRGC forces went to Syria to back Assad\u2019s forces, but the Islamic Republic started creating a coalition of paramilitary forces \u2013 the most well-known and powerful is the Lebanese Hezbollah.
\nNevertheless, the biggest paramilitary force has been recruited from Afghans, known as the Fatemiyoun Division. Experts estimate that this group consists of 15,000 fighters. During the years, thousands of Afghans have been militarily trained and have fought in this Division. Most of them have been from the Hazara ethnic group that is considered among the poorest in Afghan society.
\nOne of the senior officials in Afghanistan\u2019s Interior Ministry \u2013 who is close to the government\u2019s intelligence department and didn\u2019t want his name to be disclosed \u2013 said that about 10,000 fighters from this Division have come back to Afghanistan, including Mehdi and other fighters who have been recruited from Afghanistan\u2019s poor Shia community.<\/p>\n
Fatemiyoun and its domestic security threat in Afghanistan<\/strong><\/span> The story of poverty and violence<\/strong><\/span> Afghanistan\u2019s government sees members of the Fatemiyoun Division \u2013 who have mostly joined Shia paramilitary forces in Syria due to poverty \u2013 as a threat. Afghanistan\u2019s officials hold that Iran has created a secret army of Hazaras Shias so that they become active upon America leaving this country. One of the soldiers said that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[164,2879,3011,3013,1058,3012,554],"class_list":["post-6408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reports","tag-afghanistan","tag-fatemiyoun","tag-fatemiyoun-fighters","tag-fatemiyoun-fighters-return-to-afghanistan-no-end-to-the-nightmare-of-war-and-poverty","tag-fighters","tag-no-end-to-the-nightmare-of-war-and-poverty","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6411,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6408\/revisions\/6411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNevertheless, everyone at home looks at them with doubt and suspicion. Afghanistan\u2019s security officials hold that Iran is still controlling them, and this time, they are acting as a secret army to develop Tehran\u2019s influence in continuous conflicts in Afghanistan.
\nMehdi says: \u2018we are scared here. They say we are all terrorists.\u2019 Mehdi is now 21 years old and has returned to Herat, his birthplace. Scared that his identity might be disclosed, he avoided talking to the AP reporter in his house or in a public place and was only ready to talk in a car parked in a distant neighborhood whose residents are mostly Shia. Even there, he covered his face with a scarf, suspicious of any vehicle passing by.
\nAfghan fighters who have returned from Syria are threatened by different groups. They are threatened to be arrested by Afghan\u2019s intelligence forces who see them as traitors. They might also face deadly violence by ISIS in Afghanistan, as it sees Shias as apostates and it has repeatedly announced that it would kill them.
\nOne of the local elders says: \u2018merely knowing them can put us in jail. He said 8 men from his village were killed in the Syrian war, but their bodies hadn\u2019t returned to Afghanistan and they have no graves in Afghanistan; \u2018they are all buried in Iran\u2019.
\nAfghanistan\u2019s government and many experts believe that Iran intends to mobilize these people to consolidate its influence in Afghanistan, given that the US wants to pull out its forces from Afghanistan to end the war with the Taliban.
\nBill Roggio, the Chief Editor of the Long War Journal, a website that covers the US longest war, warns against the continuation of terrorism in Afghanistan: \u2018Expect Iran to reconstruct its paramilitary groups someplace in Afghanistan. Iran will not discard these people over whom it has invested money, time and expertise.\u2019
\nEven now, Afghanistan faces a crisis of an over overabundance supply of active armed forces, many of which have been formed based on ethnic differences. These groups include paramilitaries that are loyal to warlords in this country \u2013 warlords who stand by the government are mostly against each other. On the other hand, Sunni groups as well are active in Afghanistan: the Taliban rules over half of the country, and ISIS too is an enemy that has tenaciously tolerated brutal bombing campaigns by US fighter jets.
\nMichael Kugelman, the Asia program\u2019s Deputy Director at the Wilson Center in Washington, says that Iran will probably intend to use the excuse that Afghan Shias need a defender to mobilize the Fatemiyoun inside Afghanistan. If Afghanistan becomes more unquiet, \u2018Iranians will have a strong motivation to help Shia forces \u2013 Shias who will face a serious threat by the Taliban and particularly ISIS\u2019.
\nAccording to a senior official of Afghanistan\u2019s Interior Ministry, Iran is already helping the Fatemiyoun forces who live in Kabul and it backs the Hazara-dominated region of Bamiyan. He says Afghanistan intelligence forces have identified an Iranian senior official who \u2018administers the forces that have returned to Afghanistan\u2019, giving them money and weapons and creating a framework for them to rapidly mobilize if necessary.
\nHe said Abdulghani Alipour, one of the Hazara\u2019s warlords who is called the \u2018commander of the sword\u2019, too, helps Iran in this issue. Last year, he was arrested for creating an illegal military group but was released after protests by thousands of Hazaras.<\/p>\n
\nReza Ghassemi, a researcher at the Afghanistan analyst network, an independent research group located in Kabul, says that many of those who joined the Fatemiyoun Division did so due to despair and poverty, and not due to loyalty to Iran: \u2018the first problem is that they don\u2019t see any future for themselves in Afghanistan\u2019.
\nWhen Mehdi went to Iran in 2015, he started working as a construction worker to save his money to go to Europe. When he managed to do so, European borders were closed. \u2018I was so desperate. I had come to Iran so that I could go to Europe for education and a better life. But I was still there and had nothing\u2019.
\nOne of his Afghan friends had suggested going to Syria together. If they fought for Iran, they would be paid $950 per month. At that time, Mehdi\u2019s income was barely $150 per month.
\n\u2018I thought about that suggestion and like the anger of a roaring river, I strengthened my heart. I made up my mind: live or die, I will go.\u2019<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2019\/04\/fatemiyun.jpg\")
\nThey registered and were sent to a recruiting center in Tehran. Then the officials gathered his personal information including the names of his father, and his relatives as well as his place of residence in Herat: \u2018They told me as I might die, they want all my information (so they can inform my family).\u2019
\nThe day after, along with other Afghans recruited by the Fatemiyoun, they were taken to Yazd and had military training for 27 days under the IRGC supervision. As a result of Mehdi\u2019s wonderful ability in aiming, he was trained to be a sniper. At the end of the training period, 1,600 new fighters were transferred to Damascus.
\nIn Damascus, they opened a bank account to get their salary from the Iranian government. Then they were taken to Zaynab\u2019s Shrine so that they could pray one last time before being deployed. The day after, they were taken to Aleppo by bus and were immediately deployed to the frontline.
\nThere, Mehdi faced Al Nusra forces, Al Qaeda\u2019s wing in Syria and had one of the toughest days of his life. That conflict showed the international nature of the Syrian war. On the one side, the Al Nusra Front with paramilitary forces from Syria, Iraq, Chechen, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and jihadis from other countries; and on the other side, there were forces of the Syrian Army along with troops from Iran, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and Shias from Iraq and Afghanistan, backed by Russian fighter jets. They were fighting over a piece of land (city of Khan Toman close to Aleppo). The conflict took months and hundreds of people were killed from both sides. Only in one day, 80 people from the forces backing Assad were killed including 13 Iranians and tens of Afghans, Iraqis and Lebanese. At the end of that day, Khan Toman was captured.
\nAccording to Mehdi, there was a terrible amount of bloodshed in these conflicts. He said in one of these conflicts, 800 Fatemiyoun fighters were sent to the frontline, and only 200 returned alive. \u2018In the mornings, I usually saw 7 or 8 corpses. In the first days, seeing such scenes and hearing the sound of explosions was very frightening for me. Abdullah, one of my co-fighters in these conflicts, still sees nightmares of death and dismembered body parts.\u2019 He said the Fatemiyoun troops were sent in advance. \u2018I saw Afghan troops, just like ants, being crushed under tanks; the bodies were scattered everywhere.\u2019
\nMehdi returned to Afghanistan last year, and his life hasn\u2019t changed a lot. He is still poor and can\u2019t find a job. He bitterly talks of having no option, saying that many of the Fatemiyoun troops have stayed in Syria to find work as construction workers. \u2018I don\u2019t know what will happen in the future. Perhaps I will become a thief or go back to Syria.\u2019
\nThe salary of paramilitary forces who fight under Iran in Syria, however, has been reduced, and many say that Iran doesn\u2019t have the economic capability to equip these forces due to the US sanctions.
\n Source:radiozamaneh<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"