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Official: More Than 1,000 Iranian Soldiers Killed in Syria

By VOA News November 22, 2016

An Iranian official said Tuesday that more than 1,000 of the country's soldiers have been killed in Syria after Tehran decided to back the government side in the civil war.

Iran has been sending soldiers to fight in Syria since early on in the conflict, which has been ongoing for more than five years. But the number of Iranian soldiers killed has risen sharply in just the past four months, from 400 in July to the 1,000 reported this week, coinciding with the increased Iranian presence on the ground in Syria.

"Now the number of Iran's martyrs as defenders of shrine has exceeded 1,000," Mohammadali Shahidi Mahallati, head of Iran's Foundation of Martyrs, was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency.

Iranian soldiers are referred to as "defenders of the shrines" because they are ostensibly fighting Sunni extremists, like the IS militants, with the goal of defending Shiite shrines in Syria.

While many of the soldiers sent by Iran to fight in Syria are Iranian nationals, Iran also recruits and trains soldiers from Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight along side Assad's army.

The announcement of an increase in Iranian deaths comes on the heels of a week-long bombardment of Aleppo by regime aircraft that has human rights groups fearing things could get worse for the beseiged city.

Syrian troops advance in Aleppo

Monitors say Syrian forces backed by Russian air power pounded targets in the eastern sector of Aleppo on Monday, a day after Syrian and Russian troops and allied Shi'ite Hezbollah militants advanced into a key northeastern Aleppo neighborhood held by rebels for the past four years.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors and reports on the country's nearly six-year civil war, said it had confirmed the deaths of 15 civilians in five eastern neighborhoods and said it expected the death toll to rise.

"If they take control of Masakan Hanano, the (government) regime will have line of fire control over several rebel-held neighborhoods and will be able to cut off the northern parts of rebel-held Aleppo from the rest of the opposition-held districts," Observatory Director Rami Abdel Rahman told the French news agency.

U.N. diplomats critical of Aleppo strategy

At the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said monitors had confirmed the deaths of 289 people in eastern Aleppo in the past seven days, and said one Syrian volunteer had reported 180 airstrikes on Saturday alone.

"The reality is that the regime (of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad) and Russia are continuing their 'starve, get bombed or surrender' strategy in eastern Aleppo," she said.

Power also scoffed at a two-week Russian bombing lull touted by Moscow earlier this month, calling it a "unilateral" exercise in which the Kremlin failed to coordinate with U.N. relief workers or other organizations trying to get emergency aid to Aleppo's war-ravaged civilians.

In a separate critique, U.N. special envoy Stephen O'Brien told the U.N. Security Council that Syrian-Russian airstrikes on civilian infrastructure, "most notably hospitals and schools, have become so commonplace it takes your breath away."

He went on to label the attacks as "violations of humanitarian law," while noting that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly described the bombings as war crimes.

State Department pushes talks

In Washington, the State Department said "multilateral discussions continue in Geneva to try to get at a cessation of hostilities" that can allow humanitarian aid to get in.

While expressing concerns that Russia has "permitted even more violence and even more atrocity" in Aleppo, Washington is engaging diplomatically with Moscow because of "a very keen sense of urgency."

But "there's no naive or innocent belief in the goodness of Russian intentions," said State Department spokesperson John Kirby on Monday.

Divergent views of crisis drive conflict

Moscow and Damascus have routinely described the fight against rebels in eastern Aleppo as a battle against terrorists, despite the sector's vast civilian population trapped in the city and described by witnesses as largely too fearful to flee. Both governments have used that characterization to justify the deadly and apparently indiscriminate bombings in eastern Aleppo.

Western governments and the United Nations have framed the Aleppo onslaught as a vast humanitarian crisis, with diplomats and human rights organizations arguing that both Damascus and Moscow could face future war crimes inquiries for their roles in the destruction of eastern Aleppo.