September 20-2013
Video footage has been posted on the Internet by Syrian rebels that appears to show Iranian troops fighting with government forces, something the Islamic Republic has repeatedly denied.
The BBC said the indicators it was able to glean from the footage is evidence that Iranian fighters from the Pasdaran are operating with weapons in Syria and are not just providing advice, as the government in Tehran has contended.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal also reported Monday that Iranian fighters are in Syria engaged in direct combat. It gave no numbers.
The civil war began in March 2011. Until the summer of 2012, there were no Iranian combat troops in Syria, the Journal said, just advisers, repairmen, intelligence specialists and trainers. It said significant numbers of combat troops only began arriving this past spring,
The footage was uploaded on the Internet by a group of Syrian opposition fighters who said they captured the tapes after overrunning a government base.
They said the tapes belonged to an Iranian cameraman who was killed in the fighting.
The tapes show at least five Iranians wearing military fatigues among a larger group of pro-government Syrian fighters.
According to the Farsi conversations recorded among the Iranians, they are somewhere to the south of the city of Aleppo.
The uploaded footage also shows them stationed in a building that the BBC said looks like a school with notices posted on the walls both in Arabic and in Persian—suggesting that the number of Iranians stationed there is greater than the handful seen in the footage.
Part of the video shows a group of Persian speaking officers on what appears to be a combat patrol with Syrian troops. There is also a firefight with rebels.
In Tehran, the Foreign Ministry denied the videotapes showed any Iranian troops in Syria. “We don’t have any military presence in Syria,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzi-yeh Afkham said Tuesday.
In the video, the Iranians appear to be in command of the group of fighters. One Iranian is seen speaking to the camera saying that he has been in Syria for about a year.
The commander says the Syrian fighters are friendly with their Iranian counterparts and at ease fighting alongside them because they were trained in Iran and are familiar with Iranians and their attitudes.
The BBC said the commander on camera is Esmail Haidari, a senior commander of the Pasdaran. According to the Iranian media, he was killed in Syria around the middle of last month.
This officer looks into the camera and says, “Syria is a war between Islam and nonbelievers. Good versus evil. Our front is supported by Iranian fighters, Hezbollah and mujahideen fighters from Iraq and Syria.”
The Syrian opposition has long maintained that Iranian troops are fighting alongside Syrian government forces in Syria. The US government has not taken a position one way or the other.
