News - Iran News Iran's regime recruit young Afghans enticed by financial benefits to fight in Syria for Bashar Assad

Iran enlists Afghan refugees as fighters to bolster Syrias Assad

HERAT, Afghanistan - 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.
Another 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: “He could not find work,” she said.
A 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, “is full of them.”
Afghanistan 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 — of thousands of young men flowing into neighboring Iran and then on to fight alongside the Syrian government and its allies — has provoked extraordinary anguish for families here and for Afghanistan’s government, particularly over the past year.
Leaving 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.


Sara, right, said that her son, Ishaq, 40, had ignored her pleas not to join the war in Syria.
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.
The promise of urgently needed salaries — or at least compensation for hardship or death— 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.
In Khadija’s case, her son Hassan’s 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.
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.
But most of the deported Afghans were young men — some as young as 10, according to aid workers with the International Organization for Migration — who stole across the border desperate to find work. Many said they would return to Iran as soon as they could.


Afghans who were deported from Iran unloaded their luggage from a bus earlier this month in Herat Province.
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.
Iran’s 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.
A 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..
Casualties 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.
The size of the outflow from Afghanistan itself has been harder to tally, because the government’s 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.
But 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.
At 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.
When 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.
Mr. Ibrahim said he was not sure what took Jawad to Syria — “No one can read anyone’s heart,” he said — but said he thought the boy was just looking for work. “They go there because of poverty,” he said.
Yazdanbeg 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.
Mr. Yazdani was unsure why his brother, who was 48, felt compelled to fight — 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 — their family fractured by migration, like so many in Afghanistan. Mr. Yazdani could not attend his brother’s funeral, which was held in Iran. But his family there sent him pictures of the service.
Source: New York Times, 28 July 2016

Iran's Revolutionary Guard admits Mullah Mansour Met the Iranian Officials

Mansour was in close relations with Iranian authorities

London-A website linked to the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC),  has admitted that Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour had conducted negotiations during the two months of his stay in Iran despite the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s denial of reports that he was in the country before his murder in Pakistan.
On May 23, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hussein Jaber Ansari rejected claims that Mansour had entered Iran.
Two weeks later, Jahan News website revealed that Mansour was in Iran one week before his death and he stayed for two months there to conduct several meetings.
The website described the negotiations between Mullah Mansour and Iranian officials as fruitful. Yet it didn’t reveal details or mention the persons whom he met with.
Jahan News is known for its close relations with Revolutionary Guard Intelligence.
The website also accused Pakistani Intelligence, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of tipping the United States on Mullah Mansour’s location.
The website described Mullah as an independent person, with no relations to Pakistan yet denied any ties between his death and Iran.
The website added that Mullah Mansour had not allowed for negotiations to take place between the Taliban and the U.S. or its NATO allies in Afghanistan.
According to Jahan, the Taliban chief agreed to stop ISIS’s expansion on Afghanistan’s northern border and the frontier with Tajikistan.



The wreckage of a vehicle that Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour was said to be traveling in near the Afghan border in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.Reports said Mansour had entered the Iranian border in late March and returned to Pakistan on May 21 coming from Iran. He was carrying the passport of “Wali Mohammed” who was targeted by a drone.
In his article in Foreign Policy Magazine, Michael Kugelman wondered what Mullah Mansour was doing in Iran. He explained it is clearer now that there are ties between him and Iran.
He reported that drones took off from Afghanistan and followed Mullah Mansour while on his way back from Iran and while crossing the border to Balochistan province in Pakistan.
Kugelman wondered why Mullah Mansour would leave his safe haven in Balochistan and head to Iran.
 According to US media , Pentagon has said its forces killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour because he posed a danger to the United States. 
'They were specific things that we knew he had engaged in or was preparing to engage in, that were directly threatening coalition and US forces,' Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis said.
'This [Mansour] was an individual who was specifically targeting US and coalition personnel and had specifically engaged in operations in the past that had resulted in US and coalition personnel being killed,' he added.
US President Barack Obama approved the strike based on a law authorizing US military force in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said.
The operation against Mansour was strictly in keeping with the rules and in continuance with the US conducting strikes of a defensive nature, according to the Pentagon spokesman.
Source: Asharq Alawsat, Deutsche Welle,  6 June 5016

Why is the migrant crisis erupting now?

Asylum seekers in desperate need of help

After more than 4 years of fighting in Syria and also across the Middle East and North Africa, what has provoked this new influx of asylum seekers into Europe?
They flee a country at war where the West resists any major military or political engagement.
They flee a country where NATO-led forces fought for more than a decade to achieve stability.
The stories of Syria and Afghanistan are two cautionary tales of our time.
Old wars don’t end. New ones get worse.
No matter what the world’s great powers did or did not do, growing numbers of Syrians and Afghans are taking their future into their own hands. They make up the two largest groups in this mass displacement of people across Europe and beyond.
Never has there has been such an ingathering of people sending the most pointed public message to their own leaders and the world at large: 'You failed.'


A Syrian man holds a sign declaring his gratitude to German Chancellor Angela Merkel

It’s the people’s version of the Live Aid concert organised by the world’s musicians 30 years ago to raise money for the Ethiopian famine.
This time, people are no longer waiting for a more peaceful and privileged world beyond to come to them with aid. They’re coming to that better safer place themselves - no matter what it takes.
And as this human stream rushes unabated, it starts to change course and political colour.
Now there are growing numbers of Iraqis, the other major international engagement of the decade past. Eritreans flee well-documented repression, Somalis escape a chronic instability that is now a way of life and even Pakistanis are on the move to get out of harm’s way at home.



'Is there a war in Pakistan?' I ask two men who also spill out of a bus packed with Syrians and Afghans when it pulls up to the last muddy crossing in northern Greece on the Macedonian border.
'Bombs are exploding around Lahore,' one young man insists, bowing his head to show me what he says is a scar on the back of it.

No easy divide
This seemingly unending flow of people making perilous journeys across the Mediterranean and running the gauntlet across northern Europe underlines how difficult distinctions and decisions will have to be made between refugees with a 'well-founded fear of persecution' and those with an understandable desire to seek a better life.
But the neat binary divide between economic migrants and refugees no longer fits a messy world of fragile and failing states and 'post-conflict' conflicts.
Many countries, including the United States, Britain and Canada, have made it clear they are now only opening their door to allow in thousands, possibly tens of thousands, more Syrians.


Sami Khazi Kani is trying for the second time to reach the West

'Its absolutely unfair,' Sami Khazi Kani declares as he waits for his turn to cross the last metal barrier manned by Greek police.
He tried and failed a decade ago to get asylum in Britain. When he was deported to Afghanistan his risks only grew when his English language skills landed him a job as an interpreter for US troops. Now he’s trying to reach the West again.
'The Taliban are killing us, the Taliban are kidnapping us,' he says bitterly. 'But the media only broadcast what is happening in Syria.'
Taliban attacks are on the rise in Afghanistan but Syria is undeniably the war of our time. It’s a country so ravaged that many dare to state the unspeakable: that Syria as we knew it is no more.
This is a place where more than half the population of 22 million people is displaced, dead or a refugee.


Migrant crisis in graphics

’Burden sharing’It’s also described as the largest, most expensive aid operation of modern times.
Even before this current crisis erupted, the world’s major aid agencies had repeatedly warned that the global humanitarian system was at breaking point, cracking under the weight of Syria as well as protracted conflicts in the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Iraq and more.
'Burden sharing' has been the buzzword in aid circles for many months with growing calls for wealthy Gulf states to do more and for countries in all corners of the world to play their part.
Some countries are doing more and giving more but even the most high-profile aid operations like Syria keep running out of cash .
'Don’t say there is no solution to what is a man-made crisis,' Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council told me a year ago. 'There are more than 190 countries in the world.'

There is no humanitarian solution for this tragic humanitarian crisis
Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees

Now there’s a call for quotas among European nations to share responsibility for about 160,000 refugees, mainly from Syria. But it may not work.
So when Western politicians say people must stay where they are, to be helped closer to home, their pleas now ring hollow. Governments in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, hosting the overwhelming majority of Syrian refugees, are under mounting strain.
The head of the UN’s Refugee Agency, Antonio Guterres, has repeatedly invoked one mantra: 'There is no humanitarian solution for this tragic humanitarian crisis.' The only real solution is political.

Maps and groups
And yet, even as this crisis explodes with unprecedented human force, the fate of one man, Bashar al-Assad, seems to matter more, to all sides, than the fate of 22 million people.
Russia and Iran are rushing to bolster the government’s increasingly embattled position. Western powers focus on ramping up air strikes.


 Greek police man the metal barriers
The UN’s new political plan is a long-term process of working groups to study a 'roadmap for peace' to try to encourage warring sides to come to the negotiating table.
But Syrians, worried that aid is running out, fearful of multiplying threats from extremist forces like ISIS, and losing hope that this war will ever end, are deploying their own maps and groups: Google maps from the internet to chart their journey to Europe and Facebook groups to get advice from those who’ve gone before.
And many others from many places are coming with them.
'Are you sure you will be offered asylum?' I ask a young Iraqi man from Baghdad who tells me he’s exhausted after a journey that’s already lasted 10 days just to get him to northern Greece.
'I am sure,' he says confidently on a cold, dark night as the rain pours down on the open field. He covers his head with some plastic sheeting offered by some local volunteers and rushes to catch up with the next group making its way across a short no-man’s land towards the next border.
A slogan once brandished in what was called the Arab Spring seems to have resonance again: 'The power of the people is greater than the people in power.'
But the lesson of that earlier moment was that those in power still have the ability to determine the people’s chances to succeed, or fail.