Demos put spotlight on Iran’s shadowy, vast Syria war

BEIRUT: In demonstrations across Iran, chants are going up against the military’s vast and shadowy war in Syria, one of Tehran’s closest allies and a front-line state in its confrontation with its archenemy, Israel.

Although the protests have focused on economic issues, demonstrators have also voiced opposition to the regime’s policy of sending young Iranians to fight and die in Syria and spending billions of dollars on the military when they say the priority should be working to provide jobs in Iran and control the rising cost of living.

Their slogans include, “Leave Syria, think about us!” and “Death to Hezbollah!” the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group that has been a key instrument of Tehran in Syria’s war.

Syria saw its own anti-government protests in 2011. They were met with a brutal crackdown by President Bashar Assad’s security services, sending the country into civil war.

Iran’s theocratic leadership has cast the effort as a religious war, an epochal struggle to defend the shrine of the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter in Damascus from jihadis, and to deal a crippling blow to what it says is a US-Israeli conspiracy to destroy Syria.

But it is motivated by geopolitical concerns, too. Syria, bordering both Israel and Lebanon, is a key node to Iran’s network of deterrence against Israel.

Tehran needs Damascus as both a conduit to and sponsor of Hezbollah, Iran’s vanguard force in the region.

Today, Iran’s military and an array of regional militias under its command operate with wide latitude in both Syria and Iraq. It is also invested in the Gaza Strip and is accused of supporting Shiite rebels in Yemen.

Iran has not disclosed how many of its soldiers have been lost in Syria. Mohammad Ali Shahidi, the head of the Martyr’s Foundation of the Islamic Revolution, which supports veterans and families of the dead, says more than 2,000 men have been killed, though roughly half are foreigners from Afghanistan and other nations fighting under militias organized by Tehran.

In November, the semi-official Fars news agency reported the death of an Iranian brigadier general in Boukamal, a Syrian town overlooking one of the country’s main crossings into Iraq. Fars said the general was killed by a mortar shell in a battle with Daesh militants.

Iran spends more than $12 billion annually on its military, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It is understood to spend millions more on subsidies and exports to Syria, whose economy has been shattered by the war.

Human Rights Watch says Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has recruited Afghan refugee children as young as 14 to fight in Syria, identifiable by their tombstones in Iran. It says Iranian media memorialized child soldiers and hailed Iranian fighters as young as 13 in the Syria battle.

Iran also leans heavily on the battle-hardened fighters of Iraq’s state-sanctioned Popular Mobilization Units, which havebeen instrumental in opening a corridor of Iranian influence that runs from Tehran to Beirut.