Iran's Soleimani sent Afghan kids to fight in Syria

Fariba Sahraei:

I first met Qassem four years ago, at the height of the European refugee crisis. The BBC had sent me to capture the stories of Mideast migrants, thousands of whom would daily wash ashore on the Greek isles. He was around 15, malnourished and clearly traumatized. As we sat together in a cabin at a ­migrant camp on the island of Lesbos, his hunched body rocked backward and forward.

His marginal life amounted to a speck of dust amid the geopolitical earthquakes that were remaking the region at the time. Yet the story he told opened a window onto the activities of the Iranian regime and one military commander whose first name the boy shared — the late Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

I soon realized I was gathering the first evidence that Iran was sending thousands of Afghans, many of them children, to fight in the Syrian Civil War.

Qassem told me that he had been drafted into the notorious Fatemiyoun Brigade, an all-Afghan unit led by Iranian commanders under Soleimani.

Qassem — the boy, not the general — was a survivor. But he was haunted by terrors he’d experienced fighting a war he didn’t understand, for a country, Syria, that wasn’t his.

To their Iranian recruiters, the Afghan fighters in Syria were disposable. “Sometimes, we had no supplies, no water, no bread — hungry and thirsty in the middle of the desert,” Qassem told me. One night, his brigade found itself surrounded in an orchard and taking fire from rocket-propelled grenades. A friend was blown to pieces in front of his eyes.

“For nights afterwards,” he said, “I would picture my buddy in my head and would think, ‘My God, what happened to him?’ I was really scared.”

Until early 2016, Tehran ­insisted it only took an advisory role in this war, that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps wasn’t involved in the activities of the Fatemiyoun Brigade. ­Everyone knew that Iran was supporting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but direct proof was scarce.

But now I had proof.

Over the next few days, I spoke to dozens of Afghan men and boys who had become asylum seekers in Europe. Many had been recruited from impoverished and vulnerable migrant communities in Iran to fight alongside Syrian troops.

One 17-year-old told me he had been stopped by the IRGC and asked for his identity card. This turned out to be a common ploy to press Afghans into service. The IRGC knew that, like most of the 3 million Afghans in Iran, he almost certainly didn’t possess one. So they ­issued an ultimatum: Fight for Assad and get paid $500 a month and receive an ID — or face deportation.

Within hours, he was driven to the airport in a bus with blacked-out windows and, ­despite having no passport, flown directly to Syria.
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Soleimani was a man with few inhibitions when it came to proxy warfare.  He was willing to use anyone of any age to fight Iran's operations in other countries.  This is the guy that Democrats opposed the killing of even though he had the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands.