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Iran recruits Afghans to fight in Syria- report

World News

16-05-2014 | 05:04

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Iran recruits Afghans to fight in Syria- report

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Wall Street Journal reported late on Thursday that Iran is recruiting Afghan refugees to fight in Syria.

In exchange, Iran is offering them an amount of $500 a month and residency permits, the paper added quoting Afghans and Western officials.

Shiite Muslim Iran is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the three-year-old uprising against mainly Sunnite Muslim rebels seeking to topple him.

Details of the recruitment driven by the Revolutionary Guards were posted this week on a blog catering to Afghan refugees in Iran, the Journal added.

It said this was confirmed by the office of Grand Ayatollah Mohaghegh Kabuli, an Afghan religious leader in the Iranian Shiite holy city of Qom.

The paper quoted a Western official in Iran as saying recruiting Afghans was part of a strategy to send poor soldiers to the battle front.

The aim was to reduce casualties among Iranian Guards personnel and Lebanon's Hezbollah, a close ally of Iran, the official said.

Tehran strongly denies its troops are directly involved in the Syrian conflict but Hezbollah publicly acknowledged in April last year that it has sent fighters to Syria to fight alongside Assad's troops.

Like Hezbollah and most Iranians, the Afghan recruits are Shiites and support Assad, whose Alawite faith is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

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