Washington
Secretary of State John Kerry, who is deeply involved in trying to broker a political solution to end the five-year-old civil war between President Bashar Assad and rebels, told Congress in late February that Iran was recalling its IRGC forces from Syria.
“On Iran, let me just inform everybody here that the IRGC has actually pulled its troops back from Syria,” Kerry told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “pulled a significant number of troops out. Their presence is actually reduced in Syria.”
Other administration officials have backed Kerry’s assertion.
U.S. officials, who were not authorized to publicly discuss Iran’s role in Syria and spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Tehran’s drawdown of IRGC forces will compel Assad to rely more on his own forces, which lack the training and intelligence capabilities of the IRGC.
But experts say that even if the IRGC has trimmed forces, the pro-Iranian Shiite militias Tehran helped create are still fighting. Iran stepped up its fighting in Syria in October 2015, sending mainly IRGC officers to direct Shiite foot soldiers from other nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Iran has done so much to strengthen the Assad regime — stabilize the Assad regime — through the creation of these militia groups,” said Scott Modell, a former CIA officer who has conducted operations throughout the Middle East.
“They don’t want to just build up their militia groups and leave. This is their way of creating a lasting footprint” across the region, he said. “This isn’t Russia where they make sure to shore up Assad and then they downsize.”
A senior congressional staffer said what the U.S. is seeing from the Iranians is not different from what it is seeing from the Russians — a withdrawal of some number of forces and resources that does not significantly change the battlefield. The staffer spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Russia began supporting Assad with airstrikes on Sept. 30, helping his military reverse the tide of war and make some key advances. President Vladimir Putin recently ordered a pullout of some Russian warplanes from Syria, but said that strikes against the Islamic State group and the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front will continue. Those groups have been excluded from a Russian- and U.S.-brokered cease-fire that began on Feb. 27 and has largely held.
Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the IRGC’s aerospace division, told reporters on March 9 that Iran is still deploying troops to Syria. On Monday, Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency quoted Gen. Ali Arasteh, deputy chief liaison of the Iranian Army’s Ground Force, as saying that the army has dispatched a number of commandos to Syria.
Iran was training, advising and assisting Syrian forces through September of last year, but stepped up its activity a month later after Russia began its air campaign. It’s unclear exactly how many Iranians are fighting in Syria, but Iranian deaths rose significantly in mid-October with reports that 1,500 more Iranian troops had been deployed to Syria, according to a new report by the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning policy institute in Washington.