The government of Afghanistan is reportedly considering an offer from Iran to send well-trained and battle-hardened Shiite militia fighters to help defeat the Islamic State (ISIS), which has a significant presence in Afghanistan and is violently competing with the Taliban for power.
Voice of America News (VOA) reported Friday that Iran’s offer is “viewed by some Afghan lawmakers and experts as a threat to Afghanistan’s volatile security.”
Among other issues, security analysts worry that injecting a heavily-armed force of Shiites into majority-Sunni Afghanistan might cause a powder keg of sectarian violence to explode. The Shiite militia groups might begin recruiting Afghan youths to increase their numbers, becoming a threat to Afghanistan’s minimal stability that rivals ISIS or the Taliban, and they could give Iran a permanent military footprint in the country.
Iran has been recruiting Shiites from various countries to fight in Syria for the past decade, including thousands of Afghan nationals. Iran supports the government of Syria, whose dictator Bashar Assad and his political elites belong to an offbeat branch of Shia Islam, even though most of the Syrian population is Sunni. Most of the opposing groups in the Syrian civil war were Sunni Muslim, including terrorist gangs linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Iran’s Shiite foreign legion is collectively known as “Liwa Fatemiyoun” or the “Fatemiyoun Brigade.” Organized and trained by both Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Russian military advisers, the Fatemiyoun have been accused of numerous atrocities, including the use of child soldiers. The Fatemiyoun Brigade was designated a foreign terrorist organization and sanctioned by the United States in 2019, as was the IRGC.
“The brutal Iranian regime exploits refugee communities in Iran, deprives them of access to basic services such as education, and uses them as human shields for the Syrian conflict. Treasury’s targeting of Iran-backed militias and other foreign proxies is part of our ongoing pressure campaign to shut down the illicit networks the regime uses to export terrorism and unrest across the globe,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said when announcing sanctions against the Fatemiyoun Brigade in January 2019.
Between ten and twenty thousand Afghans — mostly from the Persian-speaking, primarily Shiite, and persecuted ethnic group called Hazaras — have been recruited for the Fatemiyoun Brigade since 2011 and saw heavy combat in Syria. Foreign observers say the Afghan recruits were often used as “cannon fodder” in the most bloody battles. Ever since Iran declared victory in Syria, its Afghan recruits have been wondering where they might be sent next.
Given this history, it is not surprising that some officials in Kabul would be apprehensive about inviting Iran’s brutal mercenary force of aggrieved and heavily-armed Hazara Afghans to set up shop, even though the Islamic State remains a serious threat in their country, and their only battlefield ally against ISIS is an even bigger threat, the Taliban. Some Afghan officials have long been worried about their country turning into a proxy battlefield between Iran, the Sunni powers of the Middle East, and the United States.
ISIS — more specifically the branch called the “Islamic State Khorasan Province” or ISKP — controls strategic territory in several provinces of Afghanistan and has demonstrated the ability to pull off high-casualty terrorist attacks, even in the capital of Kabul. Although literally surrounded by bloodthirsty Sunni jihadist enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, along with pressure from the Afghan and U.S. military, ISKP has proven remarkably resilient and might even be absorbing smaller militant groups to increase its power.
Iranian Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif recently told Afghan media that Iran’s Fatemiyoun Brigade offered the “best forces” for defeating ISIS and could help “if the government of Afghanistan is willing.”
“Our [Afghan] brothers went to [Syria] voluntarily, just like those who went [to Syria] from Iraq or other places. We supported them in Syria to fight against Daesh, a common enemy for all of us,” Zarif insisted. “Daesh” is another name for ISIS.
“The notion of arming several thousands of Afghan Shiite fighters and having them go after ISIS [in Afghanistan], to me that really suggests that sectarian tension, which has been present in Afghanistan but relatively latent, … could explode,” Michael Kugelman of the Woodrow Wilson Center told VOA in response to Iran’s offer.
“I think it is a significant national security risk for Afghanistan that would require significant care and attention to ensure that it does not actually become a clear and present danger,” Kugelman warned.
Another potential pitfall noted by VOA is that Kabul officially does not allow Afghan nationals to “engage in regional wars and conflicts,” as the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs put it. This position would be challenged, or outright mocked, by Iran marching in thousands of battle-hardened Afghan militia fighters fresh from the battlefields of Syria.
One Afghan official quoted by VOA objected strongly to Iran recruiting impoverished Afghans to serve in the Fatemiyoun Brigade and implied Tehran might harvest reinforcements from among the three million Afghans currently living in Iran as migrants or refugees.
Alex Vatanak of the Middle East Institute in Washington cut to the chase by telling VOA that after Iran successfully used foreign recruits to exert violent control over the politics of Syria, it might be tempted to “repeat the same model elsewhere.” Afghanistan is far from the only Middle Eastern country with a restless and impoverished Shiite minority population.