{"id":5122,"date":"2016-07-29T23:25:25","date_gmt":"2016-07-30T04:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/?p=5122"},"modified":"2016-07-29T23:25:25","modified_gmt":"2016-07-30T04:25:25","slug":"irans-regime-recruit-young-afghans-enticed-by-financial-benefits-to-fight-in-syria-for-bashar-assad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/5122\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran’s regime recruit young Afghans enticed by financial benefits to fight in Syria for Bashar Assad"},"content":{"rendered":"

HERAT, Afghanistan<\/strong>\u00a0– One woman here in the western Afghan city of Herat said she had begged her son not to go fight in the Syrian war, but he charged off anyway, leaving a wife and three children behind. A man overhearing her story came over to say that his son had left two months ago, and since then the family has been desperate for news about him.
\nAnother woman, Khadija, whose son Hassan had joined Afghan brigades fighting alongside the Syrian government, said he had been pulled into the vicious conflict for the same reasons most of the young men in the neighborhood had decided to go: \u201cHe could not find work,\u201d she said.
\nA teenager standing on the edge of the group, listening to the parents, said those were hardly isolated stories among the Afghan Shiites of Herat. The neighborhood, he said, \u201cis full of them.\u201d
\nAfghanistan has been hollowed out as its citizens have fled poverty and war, many seeking work in Pakistan, Iran or Persian Gulf nations, or risking the perilous trail to Europe. But this specific emigration pattern \u2014 of thousands of young men flowing into neighboring Iran and then on to fight alongside the Syrian government and its allies \u2014 has provoked extraordinary anguish for families here and for Afghanistan\u2019s government, particularly over the past year.
\nLeaving a country racked by decades of war, the young Afghans who choose the path to Syria then fall into peril on the bloody front lines of Aleppo, Homs or other battlegrounds. Iranian state news media and some Afghan officials suggest that hundreds have been killed in battles over the past year.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sara, right, said that her son, Ishaq, 40, had ignored her pleas not to join the war in Syria.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thousands of Afghans, almost all of them Shiite Muslims from the Hazara ethnic minority, have fought in Syria in the past few years, serving in brigades supporting the government of Bashar al-Assad, according to their relatives and commanders in Syria. Most of the Afghan men are recruited or drawn from the Afghan diaspora within Iran, a crucial ally of the Assad government.
\nThe promise of urgently needed salaries \u2014 or at least compensation for hardship or death\u2014 has done little to comfort the families left behind, or to ease their regret at the misery that forced their sons to flee in the first place.
\nIn Khadija\u2019s case, her son Hassan\u2019s decision to go to Syria came after her husband, who is disabled, lost his land. But she insisted that she and her husband had urged Hassan not to go.<\/p>\n

Though the Afghan men who leave for Syria soon face the miseries of another incessant war, they have one advantage over some other Afghan migrants: They are less likely to be deported and forced to return to Afghanistan. At the border crossing with Iran, a 90-minute drive from Herat, at least 30 buses arrive several times a week, filled with Afghans deported from Iran. Some carry families who have lived illegally in Iran for years.
\nBut most of the deported Afghans were young men \u2014 some as young as 10, according to aid workers with the International Organization for Migration \u2014 who stole across the border desperate to find work. Many said they would return to Iran as soon as they could.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Afghans who were deported from Iran unloaded their luggage from a bus earlier this month in Herat Province.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Some of the Afghan fighters head to Syria for religious reasons. Others were coerced or duped into fighting, say human rights groups. But most were enticed by financial benefits, including the promise of legal residence for the fighters and their families in Iran, said Abdul Rahim Ghulami. He is a local official in Herat who said his brother-in-law was a commander of an Afghan unit fighting in Aleppo.
\nIran\u2019s government provides a few weeks of training and flies the men to Syria, where they join one of the Afghan brigades. Those units are sometimes viewed with suspicion by their own allies: In interviews in Syria, some of the other fighters from pro-government militias disparaged the Afghans as too young and poorly trained.
\nA shop owner in Damascus named Ahmed giving only his first name because he did not want to be punished who works near the Sayyida Zainab mosque, a revered site for Shiites, said the numbers of Afghan fighters guarding the mosque had increased in the last six months. They were a sorrowful lot who complained about their lives in Iran or Afghanistan when he talked with them, he said, but said they faced little choice if they wanted to support their families..
\nCasualties among the Afghan fighters were high, said Mr. Ghulami, who lived in Iran for 24 years. He said he visited the Iranian town of Mashhad two months ago and saw that its Afghan quarter was blanketed with black banners that signaled a house in mourning.
\nThe size of the outflow from Afghanistan itself has been harder to tally, because the government\u2019s disapproval has led families to stay quiet. Mr. Ghulami, who serves as a local mayor in Jebrail, a Hazara district of Herat with roughly 100,000 residents, estimated that 20 percent of the families there had someone serving in Syria. There was no way to confirm that number: no funerals of Afghan fighters, and no black banners to honor the dead.
\nBut in Jebrail, along with another Hazara neighborhood of Herat, called Khatim al-Anbiya, it is easy to find the relatives or friends the Afghan fighters had left behind.
\nAt the cigarette kiosk where he worked in Jebrail, a boy named Sayed Ali remembered his neighbor and classmate, Habibullah, 20, who ran off to Syria a few years ago, when he was still a teenager. This year, word came back that Habibullah had been killed in the war. Another high school student, named Jawad, disappeared from his home in Khatim al-Anbiya two winters ago, leaving his family to assume he had gone to Iran to find work, according to his uncle, Mohamed Ibrahim.
\nWhen his parents last heard from Jawad, he said he was in Syria, and told his father he was preparing to come home. Then, eight or nine months ago, a man brought the news that Jawad had been shot in the head and killed.
\nMr. Ibrahim said he was not sure what took Jawad to Syria \u2014 \u201cNo one can read anyone\u2019s heart,\u201d he said \u2014 but said he thought the boy was just looking for work. \u201cThey go there because of poverty,\u201d he said.
\nYazdanbeg Yazdani, a 50-year-old resident of Jebrail with family in Iran, said that a year ago, he received a call from Iran telling him his younger brother, named Yunus, had joined the war as an officer and was killed in a suicide bombing attack.
\nMr. Yazdani was unsure why his brother, who was 48, felt compelled to fight \u2014 whether he supported the Syrian government, or had been forced into battle, or simply needed the money. The brothers had been separated decades ago, when Yunus moved to Syria \u2014 their family fractured by migration, like so many in Afghanistan. Mr. Yazdani could not attend his brother\u2019s funeral, which was held in Iran. But his family there sent him pictures of the service.<\/p>\n

Source: New York Times, 28 July 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HERAT, Afghanistan\u00a0– One woman here in the western Afghan city of Herat said she had begged her son not to go fight in the Syrian […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5124,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran-world","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5123,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5122\/revisions\/5123"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}