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Iran enlists Afghan refugees as fighters to bolster Syrias Assad
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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
