The Return Of Pro-Iranian Militia Fighters To Afghanistan Fuels Fears In Kabul, Washington

When Syria’s civil war erupted, Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) recruited, trained, and deployed thousands of Shi’ite fighters to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Among them was the Fatemiyoun Brigade, comprised mainly of Afghans from the country's Shi'ite Hazara minority. From 2011, the IRGC recruited thousands of Afghan migrants and refugees within its own borders and covertly drafted hundreds of Shi'a inside Afghanistan.

The majority of Muslims in Afghanistan are Sunni, but around 15 percent of its population -- mainly Hazara -- are Shi’a with religious links to the Shi'ite majority in Iran.

With the Syrian war ebbing, several thousand Fatemiyoun fighters have returned to their homeland, prompting fears that Iran could mobilize the proxy group to target U.S. interests in neighboring Afghanistan, where some 13,000 American troops are stationed.

“We should certainly be concerned about the risk of Iran using this asset in Afghanistan to go after U.S. troops or other American interests in the country,” said Michael Kugelman, South Asia associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

“Let's be clear: At least right now, there are more than 10,000 American soldiers across Iran's eastern border. That's a tempting target, and these [Shi'ite] fighters in Afghanistan give Tehran a potentially useful proxy to go after those troops,” he added.

Rahmatullah Nabil, the two-time head of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security (NDS), the country’s main intelligence agency, estimated that between 2,500 to 3,000 Fatemiyoun fighters have returned to Afghanistan.

“At this stage it seems they are not in a position to pose an immediate threat to Afghanistan’s national security,” said Nabil, who was intelligence chief from 2010-12 and 2013-15. “They are not organized but scattered in different parts of the country.”

“Alefoneh said it was plausible that Iran was deploying Fatemiyoun members to Afghanistan as part of Tehran’s two-prong attempt to prepare for a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“On the one hand, Tehran has normalized relations with the Taliban, which in Tehran’s analysis will seize power in Kabul before long,” he said. “On the other hand, Tehran is preparing for a scenario in which the Taliban once again turns against Iran in the future.””

Marine General Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, said there has been an increase in Iranian activity in Afghanistan that poses a risk to American troops.

McKenzie, who visited Afghanistan last week, said he was seeing a “worrisome trend” of Iranian malign interference.

“Iran has always sort of dabbled a little bit in Afghanistan, but they see perhaps an opportunity to get after us and the coalition here through their proxies,” McKenzie said. “So we are very concerned about that here as we go forward.”

Ismail Qaani, who in January succeeded Soleimani as head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, the overseas operations arm of the IRGC, has a long history with Afghanistan””

“When the Syrian civil war erupted, Qaani is believed to have been personally involved in the organization of the Fatemiyoun Brigade. It included veterans of the Abuzar Brigade, an Afghan militia consisting of Shi’a who had fought on Iran’s side in the war against Iraq.”

Based on this account, I suspect these Hazaras are probably glad to get off the line and return home, with whatever portions of their incomes they have stashed away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liwa_Fatemiyoun
[Liwa Fatemiyoun is led by IRGC commanders and supplied by the Iranian military,[2][30] while its troops are recruited from the approximately 3 million Afghans in Iran,[2][30][3] the 6 million Hazara of Afghanistan,[30] as well as Afghan refugees already residing in Syria.[4] The recruits are typically Hazara, a Persian-speaking Shia ethnic group from central Afghanistan.[4][1][30] The Iranian recruiters for Liwa Fatemiyoun are usually members of the Basij.[33]

The Afghans are promised Iranian citizenship and salaries of $500–$800 per month in return for fighting (usually a 3-month-long deployment to Syria).[2][18][1][24] Many are illegal immigrants/refugees[18] and/or criminals who choose recruitment over imprisonment or deportation,[24][27][25] though the Iranian government generally claims that they are religiously motivated volunteers.[2][33] Iranian media has claimed that the Iranian military provides Liwa Fatemiyoun fighters and their IRGC officers with Hashish to raise their morale.[34]

Though some Afghan sub-commanders of Liwa Fatemiyoun are veterans of several wars, including the Iran–Iraq War and the Afghan Civil War (1996–2001),[2] new recruits of the unit generally lack combat experience.[3] The recruits are given just a few weeks of training, armed, and flown to Syria via the Iraq–Syria–Iran air bridge. These soldiers are used as shock troopers, spearheading numerous important pro-government offensives alongside Iranian, Iraqi, and Hezbollah troops. Most of them operate as light infantry, although some receive more thorough training and can work as tank crews.[35] Parts of Liwa Fatemiyoun have been trained by the Russian Armed Forces.[2] As the unit is often used in those war zones where the most intense fighting takes place[2] despite its sometimes inadequate training,[3] observers believe that Liwa Fatemiyoun fighters often act as “cannon fodder”.[2][3] ]

[Ismail Qaani, who in January succeeded Soleimani as head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, the overseas operations arm of the IRGC, has a long history with Afghanistan””

The thing about mercenaries is that they don’t really feel any particular allegiance to their paymasters. Especially paymasters that persecuted and discriminated against them while they were in Iran. My impression about Hazaras in Afghanistan is that they don’t think of Uncle Sam as their enemy.

[Thanks for that post]

Given the generally Mongoloid cast of the Hazara, it would not surprise me if they faced serious prejudice from Iranians not all that dissimilar to what they faced in Afghanistan from Pashtuns on down. The idea that they would be loyal to Iranians who used them like toilet paper seems contrary to human nature. Whereas Uncle Sam arrived like an avenging angel in 2001 to sweep the Taliban - the blood enemy of the Hazaras - from power. An instructive article about the Hazara situation in Afghanistan during and after the Taliban’s reign:

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/173847
[The Hazaras, a minority that claims descent from Genghis Khan’s world-conquering horsemen who live primarily in the remote fastness of Afghanistan’s central Hindu Kush mountains, played an outsized role in the Afghan National Army and US military operations for good reason. As long-repressed members of the Shiite sect, who have seen their villages torched and people massacred by the Taliban from the dominant Sunni sect, they were fighting an enemy that considered them to be “Godless heretics” worthy only of butchering.

During the course of my extensive fieldwork in the Taliban-infested Pashtun lands, where I came to admire the courage of the Hazara soldiers serving alongside US troops, I became overwhelmed by the mindless and often random horror of the war. After arriving at the scene of particularly gruesome suicide bombing of civilian men, women, and children in the eastern town of Gardez, I got permission to leave the killing behind for a while and decompress in the sheltering peaks of the Hindu Kush. There, in the snowy mountain-ringed Hazara capital of Bamiyan, I found panagah, sanctuary, and a welcoming people governed by Afghanistan’s only female governor. In those terraced, clay-walled mountain villages clinging to the side of steep, misty valleys, I also found widespread gratitude to the Americans for their role in liberating the Hazaras’ lands. Theirs was a relatively peaceful world that was so far removed from the war ravaging the hot Pashtun lowlands to the southeast that I imagined it to be an Afghan Shangri La. While there were signs of the Taliban’s cruel rule over this people that had seen them literally skin Hazaras alive and rape and burn, such as the crumbled ruins of the magnificent 6th century Buddhas of Bamiyan that had been blown up by the Taliban iconoclasts as “heathen idols” in 2000, this mountainous realm was relatively peaceful, welcoming and safe. ]

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