March 16, 2018
The regime revealed last week that 2,100 Iranians have been killed fighting in Syria the past few years, more than double the previous death toll announced 16 months ago.
As a proportion of the population, that is a greater loss than the United States has suffered in all its wars in the Middle East since the start of the century.
The numbers came out last week when an announcement said the mothers of Iran’s martyrs had planted 2,100 trees on arbor day to memorialize the Iranians killed in the war.
The last number of war dead to be announced was in November 2016 when Mohammad-Ali Shahidi, the head of the Martyrs Foundation, which provides pensions for the families of the war dead, said more than 1,000 Iranians had been killed in Syria.
Last March, Shahidi said “some 2,100 martyrs” had died under Iranian command. He did not give nationalities, but that number presumably included Afghans, Pakistanis and other nationalities recruited by Iran in addition to Iranians.
Iran has said it does not send combat troops to Syria, only military advisers, most of whom are Pasdar officers. There have, however, been numerous reports of many Iranian zealots volunteering to fight in Syria. Iran has not indicated what its policy is on allowing those individual volunteers to go to the front.
The government has said that the families of anyone killed fighting in Syria under Iranian command—whether an Iranian national or a foreigner—would receive financial aid from the Martyrs’ Foundation.
In August 2016, Shahidi said about 400 families had been referred to him; he said about half the dead were Iranians and half Afghan. In November 2016, he said more than 1,000 Iranians had been killed. Now the number is 2,100. That indicates heavy involvement in combat by Iranian “advisers.”
By comparison, in more than 16 years in Afghanistan, the United States has so far lost 2,356 troops to both combat and non-combat causes. In Iraq, from 2003 to 2011, the United States lost 4,497 to combat and non-combat causes. In the war against the Islamic State, fought in both Iraq and Syria since 2014, the United States has so far lost 14 troops. The Americans in that operation are chiefly advisers.
Given that the United States has four times the population of Iran, the Iranian losses in Syria are proportionately about a quarter greater than the US losses throughout the region this century.
Many Iranians initially opposed the involvement in Syria because there was little sympathy for the Assad dictatorship. But, in the last two years, the war in Syria has been seen more as a fight against the Islamic State and polls show Iranian involvement in the fighting receiving substantial support from the Iranian public, even though the operations Iran is involved in target anti-Assad rebels more than the Islamic State.
Pasdar officers have told the public it is better for Iran to tangle with the Islamic State inside Syria than to wait until they invade Iran and directly threaten the lives of Iranians.
