Iraqi Shi’ite militants fight for Syria’s Assad

Members of the Free Syrian Army take positions as they return fire during clashes with pro-government soldiers in the city of Aleppo, October 15, 2012. REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih

(Reuters) – Scores of Iraqi Shi’ite militants are fighting in Syria, often alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s troops, and pledging loyalty to Iran’s supreme Shi’ite religious leader, according to militia fighters and politicians in Iraq.

Iraqi Shi’ite militia involvement in Syria’s conflict exposes how rapidly the crisis has spiraled into a proxy war between Assad’s main ally Shi’ite Iranand the Sunni Arab Gulf states supporting mostly Sunni rebels fighting the president.

The conflict has already drawn in a stream of Sunni Islamist fighters from across the region attracted to the rebel cause, while on the other side Syrian rebels accuse Lebanon’s Shi’ite Hezbollah of supporting Assad’s troops on the ground.

For Iraqi Shi’ites who follow Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the uprising in Syria threatens Shi’ite influence and Iraqis fighting there say they see a duty to help Assad because of their loyalty to the Islamic Republic’s highest authority.

Among them are defectors and former fighters from anti-U.S. Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army, the Iran-backed Badr group and Asaib al-Haq and Kata’ib Hezbollah, militias who once waged a bloody war on American troops, Shi’ite militants and Iraqi politicians say.

Shi’ite politicians say militants fighting in Syria have no official sanction from their militia leadership or from Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government which is caught in a delicate balancing act between its ally Tehran, and Western and Arab powers calling for Assad to go.

Some of the Iraqi militants are former Mehdi Army fighters who took refuge in Syria after 2007 when their group was crushed by Iraqi forces. Others, loyal to Khamenei as a religious authority, crossed over recently, fighters and Iraqi politicians say.

“We formed the Abu al-Fadhal al-Abbas brigade which includes 500 Iraqi, Syrian and some other nationalities,” an Iraqi defector from the Mehdi Army who goes by the name of Abu Hajar told Reuters by satellite telephone from Syria.

“When the fighting erupted in our areas, we carried out some joint military operations side by side with the Syrian army to clean up areas seized by rebels,” said Abu Hajar, who like others was a refugee in Syria before the conflict.

The brigade is named after Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas, a brother of Imam Hussain Bin Ali, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. Al-Abbas was killed with his brother more than 1,300 years ago, and since then has become a symbol of sacrifice for Shi’ite Islam.

 

Reuters has the full article

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