Iran Focus
London, 22 May – Twenty-three members of Iran’s forces from the small city of Varamin, south-east of Tehran, have been killed in the Syrian civil war.
Amir Pour-Javadi, head of the Foundation for Martyrs of Varamin City, announced the deaths on the state-run Mehr news agency on Friday, 20 May.
He said “[Varamin city has given] 23 martyrs who defended the sacred shrine”.
Iran has deployed tens of thousands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to fight for the Bashar al-Assad regime, according to the Iranian opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).
Iran claims that the IRGC are protecting shrines but the majority of violence by the Guards is happening in the Aleppo region, over 300km away from the nearest holy Shiite shrines, located in Damascus.
Tehran has repeatedly tried to cover up the amount of Iranian casualties from its involvement in the war.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) report that it could be in the thousands if you take Varamin’s rate of loss as a sample in comparison to Iran’s 75 million population.
Shahin Gobadi of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the NCRI said: “The mullahs’ regime is afraid of announcing its true casualty rate in Syria out of fear of a public backlash resulting in its further isolation at home. But all the news and signs point to the regime’s casualty rate in Syria being far higher than previous estimates. One can confidently say that the mullahs have lost thousands of their forces in Syria”.
Gobadi added: “Syria has transformed into a strategic deadlock and quagmire for Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of the mullahs’ regime. Despite deploying more than 70,000 IRGC forces, foreign militias and more recently its Regular Army and pouring in the Iranian nation’s wealth into supporting Syria’s dictator, the mullahs have failed to score a strategic victory and guarantee the survival of Assad’s regime. Khamenei believes the only solution is to become ever more embroiled in the conflict in Syria but in this crisis they have no way back and no way forward. As the Iranian regime’s officials have repeatedly acknowledged, Assad’s fall from power is a ‘red line’ for the mullahs who see their grip on Syria as a strategic lifeline. The regime’s casualty rate in Syria is however increasing with each passing day”.
