"Voluntary" fighters of the Basij militia are only admitted to be casualties occasionally and no one can say how many of the Afghan Fatemiyoun Brigade deaths are acknowledged by the regime in Tehran.
According to the Middle East think tank Levantine Group, more than 280 Iranian troops have been killed in Syria since the beginning of Russia’s air campaign in September 2015, 1200 since the Iran started deploying troops to hold Assad in power, according to former IRGC Mazandaran deputy commander Abdullah al Tabrizi.
In one sentence: Iran is in trouble.
After the Khan Tuman "massacre" among its troops by Syrian Islamist rebels, the IRGC recalled the entire 25th Karbala Division, which suffered the most casualties. All these are signs that Iran has to make a strategic choice: All-In at the price of hundreds if not thousands of further casualties among its troops and an increasingly unpopular war in Syria - or All Out, admitting the Mullah regime-promoted policy for the last 5 years led to a deadlock and the demise of the Assad regime is inevitable.
The choice for the Iranian military in Syria resembles to a certain degree the strategic situation of the US army in Vietnam in 1964. The United States advisory mission failed to enable the South Vietnamese Army to turn the tide in the escalating war and America reached a cross road: Give up on the proclaimed goals or proclaim all-out war. America chose to go All-In with the known consequences. The US number of fatalities increased tenfold within one year and again threefold within another.
Iran faces the same crucial choice now and is poised to come to the same bad decision as its archenemy 52 years ago.
However, different from United States, Iran seems not (yet) ready to deploy its regular military. Instead, it escalates the quality and quantity of deployed "fighters" beyond moral limits.
- Simultaneously to the Russian intervention in mid-2015, Iran deployed hundreds of Iraqi militants, most of them of the designated terrorist group Kata’ib Hezbollah. The famous picture of IRGC major general Qasem Soleimani with these - bought - troops covered the fact that many of the Iraqis left Syria after a number of strategic goals were met in February 2016.
- Since then, Hassan Rouhani’s government deployed an unprecedented number of Fatemiyoun Brigade members. What many people don’t know is that these fighters are primarily recruited from Iran’s approximately 3 million refugees from Afghanistan. Many face the choice, whether to return to Afghanistan with their families or to fight for Iran abroad to receive a permanent right of residence in the country.
- Lately, Iran turned to the most vulnerable of its "fighting capacity", its children. Promotion videos by Iran’s Basij militia are actively aiming to recruit child soldiers at the age of 14 15, 16 years; a chilling reminder of Iran’s ruthless policy towards its youngest during the deadly war with Iraq in the 1980s. The draft campaign calls the youngsters to "liberate Iraq and Syria and then reach al-Quds," giving an insight into Iran’a plans for years to come.
From paid mercenaries over IRGC regulars and refugees to children, there seems to be no limits to what Iran is willing to risk to reach its goals.
In the end, the regime in Tehran bears full responsibility for what comes next. Not only for the expected mounting casualty number among Syrian civilians if it further accelerates its commitment, but also for the looming phenomenal death rates among its own troops and even children if it decides to send them abroad to die.
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Julian Röpcke is a newspaper editor and political commentator, based in the German capital, Berlin. With a degree in Political Geography and Sociology, Mr. Röpcke started analyzing geopolitical conflicts after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He covered the “Arab Spring” as well as the evolving conflicts in Syria and Ukraine from their very beginning. Julian Röpcke currently works for BILD, the largest newspaper and leading online news portal in Germany (@JulianRoepcke).
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