Iran has sent thousands of Afghan Shi’a to the battlefields of Syria, catapulting them to the front lines of President Bashar al-Assad and his allies’ brutal six-year war against armed rebels, some of them foreign-backed, and Islamist extremists.
As the first line of attack, the poorly trained proxy force made up of mainly Afghan migrants and refugees known as the Fatemiyoun Division has suffered a high rate of attrition, observers say, with coffins of fallen soldiers paraded and buried in Iranian cities almost every week.
