The Refugee
He was seventeen when they found him. An Afghan Hazara — Shia, Farsi-speaking, living in the margins of Iranian society where Afghan refugees exist in a permanent state of legal precarity. No work permit. No path to citizenship. No protection from the casual racism that Iranian society directs at Afghans — banned from public swimming pools, excluded from universities, blamed for crime, tolerated only because they fill the construction jobs and agricultural labor that Iranians no longer want.
The recruiter came through the mosque. The pitch was precise: defend the Sayyida Zainab shrine in Damascus from the Sunni extremists who wanted to destroy it. The shrine — built over the grave of the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter — is one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. Its destruction would be a civilizational catastrophe. The pay was modest but real. The promise was citizenship — or at least the possibility of it, whispered but never written down.
He went to Syria. Thousands like him went to Syria. They fought in Aleppo, in Homs, in Deir ez-Zor. Many died — the Fatemiyoun’s casualty rates were among the highest of any force in the Syrian civil war, because they were deployed as expendable infantry in the most dangerous sectors. The citizenship never materialized. The shrine survived. And when the Syrian war wound down and the Assad regime stabilized, the survivors were not sent home. They were warehoused — first in Iranian military camps, then, after Assad fell in December 2024, in Iraqi PMF facilities at camps in Diyala and Anbar provinces. Including, with dark historical irony, Camp Ashraf — the compound originally built to house the MEK dissidents the IRGC had spent decades trying to destroy.
By January 2026, these “defenders of the shrine” had a new assignment: killing Iranian citizens in their own streets.
The Brigade
The Liwa Fatemiyoun — the Fatemiyoun Brigade — is the IRGC Quds Force’s Afghan auxiliary. It was created in 2014, when Iran needed manpower for the Syrian war and the existing pool of IRGC volunteers was insufficient for the grinding urban combat that the defense of Assad required.1 The Quds Force turned to the most vulnerable population within its reach: the Afghan Hazara refugees living in Iran.
The Hazara in Iran
Afghan refugees in Iran: ~3 million (world’s 4th-largest refugee population) | Fatemiyoun peak strength: several thousand | Zainabiyoun strength: 500–1,000 | PMF annual budget (funding the camps): $3.6 billion
The Hazara, as Shia Muslims, face double persecution: in Afghanistan from the Taliban and ISIS-K, and in Iran from a society that treats them as second-class residents. They cannot own property. Their children face barriers to education. They are routinely deported in waves that correspond not to immigration policy but to domestic political pressure.2 Their existence in Iran is conditional, and the condition is obedience.
The recruitment leveraged this vulnerability with precision. Fighters were promised monthly stipends, residency permits for their families, and the implicit possibility of citizenship. Some joined voluntarily, motivated by genuine religious devotion to the Sayyida Zainab shrine. Others were coerced — Afghan men facing deportation were offered a choice between a bus to Kabul and a bus to Damascus. The line between voluntarism and coercion, in a population with no legal rights and no alternative, is theoretical.
The Liwa Zainabiyoun followed the same model with Pakistani Shia, primarily from the Parachinar region and other Shia enclaves. Smaller in number — five hundred to one thousand fighters compared to the Fatemiyoun’s several thousand — the Zainabiyoun served the same function: expendable infantry for the IRGC’s foreign wars, recruited from communities with no political power and no legal recourse.
The War
In Syria, the Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun fought some of the most brutal urban battles of the civil war. They were deployed to sectors that the IRGC and Hezbollah considered expendable — the frontal assaults, the house-to-house clearing operations, the positions that would absorb the heaviest casualties.
The Fatemiyoun’s casualty rates reflected this calculus. Hundreds were killed. The bodies were returned to Iran in batches — celebrated with military funerals in some periods, quietly buried in others, depending on the regime’s political needs. The families received modest compensation. The survivors received combat experience that would later be applied to a different enemy in a different country.
The years in Syria accomplished something beyond military training. They created a force psychologically conditioned for a specific type of violence: urban warfare against populations that the fighters had been taught to view as enemies of the faith. In Aleppo, the enemy was Sunni rebels and civilians caught between them. In Homs, the enemy was anyone in the wrong neighborhood. The distinction between combatant and civilian, always fragile in urban warfare, was eroded by years of combat in which the local population was framed as complicit in the enemy’s cause.
This psychological conditioning — the capacity to view a civilian population through an ideological lens that strips away their humanity — was not a side effect of the Syrian deployment. It was its most valuable product, from the IRGC’s perspective. When the Quds Force needed a force capable of firing into crowds of Iranian civilians without hesitation, the Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun had been pre-conditioned for exactly that mission.
The Displacement
The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 triggered the displacement that made the January 2026 deployment possible.
When opposition forces entered Damascus, the Quds Force command structure collapsed in Syria within days. Officers retreated through Latakia. The Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun, lacking the Iranian passports or military connections to evacuate by air, fled overland into Iraq. Intelligence reports from early 2025 describe thousands of fighters streaming across the border in disarray — effectively stateless mercenaries with combat skills, ideological conditioning, and nowhere to go.3
The Iraqi PMF absorbed them. Camps in Diyala and Anbar provinces — including Camp Ashraf — became warehouses for the IRGC’s displaced foreign legion.4 The fighters were fed, housed, and maintained by the PMF’s $3.6 billion annual budget from the Iraqi state. They trained. They waited. Their presence in Iraq destabilized the fragile sectarian balance, concentrating a “Shia foreign legion” in the heart of a country still recovering from its own civil war.
When the Iranian uprising began in late December 2025, the warehoused fighters were the regime’s strategic reserve — pre-positioned, pre-trained, and pre-conditioned for the violence that domestic forces could not be trusted to deliver.
The Deployment
The Fatemiyoun were deployed primarily to Mashhad and Tehran. In Mashhad — Iran’s second-largest city and home to the Imam Reza shrine, the holiest site in Iranian Shia Islam — the Fatemiyoun had a demographic advantage. Mashhad hosts a large Afghan refugee population. Fatemiyoun fighters could blend into the city’s Afghan community, avoiding the immediate identification that Iraqi Arabic-speakers faced in Tehran and Kurdish cities. They moved through the streets in a city where Afghan faces are common, their military function concealed behind their ethnic presence.
The suppression around the Imam Reza shrine was among the most brutal episodes of January 2026. Mass graves were discovered at Behesht-e Rezvan Cemetery — a systematic effort to dispose of a volume of bodies that overwhelmed the city’s normal burial infrastructure. The Fatemiyoun, deployed as the primary executioners in the Mashhad theater, carried out the killing with the efficiency of men for whom urban combat was not a crisis but a profession.
The Zainabiyoun were deployed to Zahedan and Sistan-Baluchistan province — and this deployment revealed the regime’s most cynical strategic calculation.
The Sectarian Logic
Zahedan is the capital of Sistan-Baluchistan, Iran’s poorest and most marginalized province. The population is predominantly Sunni and ethnically Baluch — distinct from the Shia Persian majority that dominates the rest of the country. The province has been a center of anti-regime sentiment for decades, led by the charismatic Sunni cleric Moulana Abdol Hamid, who has called openly for democratic governance and an end to religious discrimination.
The regime deployed Pakistani Zainabiyoun fighters — Shia, Urdu-speaking — against this indigenous Sunni Baluch population. The sectarian calculation was deliberate and precise.
The Zainabiyoun had spent years in Syria fighting what they were taught were “Takfiris” — a term that designates Sunni Muslims deemed to have left the faith and therefore eligible for killing under certain radical interpretations of Islamic law. The Baluch of Zahedan, in this framework, were not Iranian citizens exercising their right to protest. They were Takfiris — enemies of the Ahl al-Bayt, the Prophet’s family — whose suppression was not just permitted but religiously mandated.
The linguistic separation completed the dehumanization. Urdu-speaking Pakistani fighters had zero connection to Baluch or Persian speakers. They could not understand the protesters’ chants, could not read the signs, could not hear the prayers. The operational effect was identical to the deployment of Iraqi fighters in Tehran: the social ties that might cause a fellow citizen to hesitate before pulling the trigger did not exist. The Zainabiyoun operated in Zahedan with the same psychological distance that characterized their operations in Aleppo — they were fighting in a foreign city, against people they could not speak to, for a cause they had been told was sacred.
Eyewitnesses and human rights monitors described the results as “a policy of extermination.” The tactics bore the hallmarks of the Fatemiyoun’s clearing operations in Aleppo: rooftop snipers, heavy machine gun fire into crowds, and the systematic targeting of anyone who approached the wounded. Ali Moradi, a young Baluch man shot during a protest march, and Mohammad Nouhani, killed by sniper fire near the Grand Mosque, were among the documented dead — their names preserved by HRANA monitors who understood that each verified identity is a brick in a future prosecution.
The Arc
The journey from refugee to executioner spans a decade and four countries.
Imagine being seventeen, undocumented, and told you can earn the right to exist by picking up a rifle. Imagine that the only institution in your life that has ever offered you a salary, a community, and a purpose is the one handing you that rifle. Imagine that a decade later, you are still holding it — but now it is pointed at the citizens of the country that never let you belong.
A Hazara teenager recruited from the margins of Iranian society in 2014. Sent to Syria to “defend a shrine.” Deployed as expendable infantry in Aleppo. Surviving years of urban combat that conditioned him to view civilian populations as enemies. Displaced to Iraq when Assad fell. Warehoused at a PMF camp. Redeployed inside Iran in January 2026 to kill the citizens of the country he was never allowed to belong to.
At every stage, the IRGC exploited the same vulnerability: statelessness. The Fatemiyoun have no country. Afghanistan persecutes them as Shia. Iran exploits them as labor and cannon fodder. Iraq warehouses them as a security problem. Their loyalty to the IRGC is not ideological — it is structural. The Quds Force is the only institution that has ever given them a function, a salary, and a community. The relationship is not one of belief. It is one of dependency.
The Zainabiyoun occupy a similar structural position — Pakistani Shia from marginalized communities, recruited into a transnational military network that offers them a role their own country does not. Pakistan designated the Zainabiyoun as a terrorist group, criminalizing the very men it failed to provide alternatives for.5
The regime’s genius — if that word can be applied to a system this cruel — was to recognize that statelessness could be weaponized. People with no country have no loyalties that compete with the loyalty their employer demands. People with no legal rights have no legal recourse when their employer sends them to kill. The Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun are not soldiers. They are not mercenaries in the traditional sense. They are the products of a system that converts statelessness into violence — a pipeline that begins with a refugee’s desperation and ends with a protester’s death.
The Honest Ledger
The Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun fighters are both perpetrators and victims of the same system. Many were coerced into service through the threat of deportation. Many joined believing they were defending a shrine, not deploying as a domestic Praetorian Guard. The distinction between voluntary and coerced recruitment, in populations with no legal rights and no alternatives, is rarely clean.
The casualty rates they suffered in Syria were genuine — the IRGC deployed them to the most dangerous sectors and accepted their losses as the cost of maintaining its imperial ambitions. The citizenship promises that motivated many recruits were never honored. The men who survived Syria and were redeployed to Iran’s streets in January 2026 had been exploited twice — first as expendable infantry abroad, then as executioners at home.
None of this absolves individual fighters of responsibility for crimes committed against Iranian civilians. The forensic evidence from Mashhad and Zahedan documents systematic atrocities that cannot be explained by coercion alone. But the pipeline that created these fighters — the exploitation of refugee vulnerability, the religious framing of mercenary work, the systematic conditioning through years of sectarian warfare — is as much a crime of the IRGC as the crimes the fighters committed on its behalf.
The regime that promised Afghan refugees a path to belonging used them as instruments of death. The regime that claimed to “defend the Shia world” deployed Shia fighters against Shia citizens. The doctrine of “defending the shrine” — the narrative that justified a decade of foreign wars — ended in the streets of the country where the shrines actually stand.
Footnotes
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Al-Estiklal, “Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun Militias in Iraq: Aftermath of al-Assad’s Fall and Regional Instability,” 2025 ↩
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MERIP, “Courts of Exclusion — Working-Class Masculinity and Anti-Afghan Racism in Iran,” June 2025 ↩
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Washington Institute, “Hundreds of Iran-Backed Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun Terrorists Warehoused at Iraqi Government Bases,” 2025 ↩
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Al-Estiklal, “Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun Militias in Iraq: Aftermath of al-Assad’s Fall and Regional Instability,” 2025; Washington Institute, “Hundreds of Iran-Backed Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun Terrorists Warehoused at Iraqi Government Bases,” 2025 ↩
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Jerusalem Post, “Pakistan Designates Iran-Backed Zainebiyoun Brigade as Terrorist Group,” 2025 ↩