III. Crossroads in Khuzestan: Afghan Shi’a Mobilization During the Iran-Iraq War

In 1980, a combination of perceived threats and opportunities drove Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. The proximate cause of Baghdad’s conflict with Tehran lay in a long simmering territorial dispute over the oil-rich and predominantly Arab border region of Khuzestan. But, Hussein was also deeply alarmed by Khomeini's open calls for the overthrow of Iraq’s Ba’athist regime.¹ After several assassination attempts against senior Iraqi officials that Hussein suspected were sponsored by Tehran, Hussein subsequently expelled thousands of Iranian backed Dawa Party members from Iraq in the early 1980s.²

At the same time, Iran itself was in turmoil, facing insurgencies in peripheral and predominantly minority regions, like Kurdistan, even as Khomeini’s government moved to consolidate its power by purging the military of royalist and anti-revolutionary elements. In the summer of 1980, as Khomeini’s government struggled to gain its footing amid the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis, Hussein saw the domestic turmoil in Iran as an opportunity to annex disputed territory and push back the Iranian border with Iraq deeper into Khuzestan. After a summer of border skirmishes, Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Iran in September 1980, triggering the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. Initially caught off guard, Khomeini ultimately welcomed the conflict, seeing it as an opportunity to purge Iran’s military and consolidate power at home while exporting the revolution abroad.³

It was during this early phase of the eight year-long Iran-Iraq War that Khomeini’s government began to craft the narrative of martyrdom and sacrifice on the battlefield known as "Sacred Defense."⁴ In the context of the conflict with Baghdad, Saddam Hussein and his Gulf backers as well as the United States were the modern day Yazidi and the fight to secure Khuzestan and Kurdistan was a reenactment of the Battle of Karbala. Khomeini’s government cast the war as an opportunity for the faithful to demonstrate that they were followers of Imam Hussein, willing to fight for God until the end. Martyrdom was also a vehicle through which to save the community from the penury of unjust, un-Islamic rule and cleanse the Shia community of its impiety and impurity.⁵

Iranian forces suffered several battlefield defeats but as the skirmishes with Iraq drifted into a stalemate, Khomeini continued to invest in reinforcing cross-border links with revolutionary Shia cadres in neighboring Afghanistan. There were several channels of interaction between Afghan Shia jihadi factions and the Islamic Republic administration, but the most significant was with Afghan Shia who had earned strong support from Khomeini because of their early loyalty to the Iranian revolutionary cause. Ayatollah Kabuli who had returned from teaching in Najaf to Afghanistan at the outset of the anti-Soviet uprising was among them. It was through the networks of madrassahs and mosques led by Afghan allies like Kabuli and other informal channels that the new revolutionary government in Tehran developed its first iteration of a comprehensive proxy warfare strategy.

More formally, Tehran managed its relations with its Afghan Shia allies through distinct administrative and military channels. Iran’s Office of the Representative of the Supreme Leader for Afghanistan Affairs served as the main outreach office to the Afghan Shia jihadi factions for cultural and religious affairs. This office, through the Iranian Supreme Leader’s special representative for Afghanistan, also mediated between Shia groups at times of conflict and disagreement.⁶

In 1982, after a series of battlefield losses, Khomeini rejected Hussein’s offer of a truce, demanded his removal, and invaded Iraq with the help of Iraqi Shia paramilitaries trained by the IRGC.⁷ Three years later, in 1985, Iran’s military leaders merged those Iraqi militia forces and other units into a single force under the command of Iranian expeditionary force officers in Department 900, a special intelligence unit predecessor to the Quds Force that had been established a year earlier to sustain a northern front against Iraq and was headquartered at what was then called the Ramezan Base.⁸ Officers in Ramezan also briefly oversaw an Afghan unit in the war.

As far as ideological training and material military support, it was Iran’s Liberation Movements Unit, under the control of Sayed Mehdi Hashemi that oversaw IRGC operations abroad including its Shia clients in Afghanistan.⁹ Hashemi’s Liberation Movements Unit, however, soon fell out of favor for its perceived disloyalty to Khomeini and suspicious behavior in the eyes of IRGC’s leadership; the unit dissolved in 1982.¹⁰

From the mid-1980s forward, the Guard Corps sponsored the formation of Afghan groups that later would constitute the leadership cadres of the Fatemiyoun. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Guard Corps dispatched operatives to train Afghan forces initially in Afghanistan, and, following the Iraqi invasion, on bases in Iran under the supervision of Islamic Movements Training Center, which answered to the IRGC Intelligence unit.¹¹ Then-Guard Corps commander Mohammad-Javad Hakim Javadi, who was training Afghans for jihad against the Soviets, proposed to form and deploy an Afghan unit to the front with Iraq in order to better train them before deployment to Afghanistan.¹²

By the late 1980s, the IRGC also dispatched several officers to serve as cultural and military advisers in Afghanistan where they embedded with cells in the anti-Soviet resistance movement.¹³ Thus, the Abouzar Brigade was born, named after one of the companions of Prophet Muhammad whose steadfast support to Ali later led to his exile. The name was especially redolent of the long history of Hazara migration and the community’s outsider status in Afghanistan. Young Hazara men have long viewed cross-border migration to Iran from the Hazarjat region in Afghanistan’s central highlands and from Quetta, Pakistan as almost a rite of passage.¹⁴

Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the same time began making inroads with more moderate anti-Soviet Afghan factions. These subtler Iranian diplomatic efforts with the assistance of the Quds Force and the Office of the Special Representative to the Supreme Leader laid the foundation for the formation of a more broadly based Afghan Shia political movement later coordinated by the Hizb-e Wahdat Islami Afghanistan (Islamic Unity Party of Afghanistan), which was established in 1989 just as the Soviets withdrew.¹⁵

Afghan Islamist political parties provided the bulk of the Abouzar Brigade’s recruits and after they were eventually integrated into the command structures of Ramezan Base, the first Abouzar contingent deployed to the western front of Kurdistan in the winter of 1985-1986.¹⁶ Some fighters worked on a rotation between fronts, deploying back and forth between battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.¹⁷ A year after its formation, however, the Abouzar Brigade disbanded.

Iranian commander Javadi blamed this on Ramezan's failure to support the unit.¹⁸ Official estimates have put the number of Abouzar Brigade fatalities at 2,000-3,000, a remarkably high figure.¹⁹ In a collection of Abouzar Brigade memoirs written many years later and published in 2019, several fighters recounted how Iranians ordered Afghans to storm enemy strongholds and march directly into the line of fire, a phenomenon echoed in the way the Quds Force apparently deployed Afghan Fatemiyoun fighters a generation later.²⁰ This may explain why Abouzar commanders refused to fight any longer. Javadi and a former Abouzar commander lamented that the unit could have been the precursor to "another Hezbollah" in Afghanistan, but the use of Afghans as cannon fodder in Iraq spoiled any chance of standing up a permanent Shia militia element loyal to Tehran in Afghanistan.²¹

A sizable enough remnant remained in the 1990s that Javadi was able to cobble together a new contingent as hardline Sunni Taliban forces began sweeping across Afghanistan. Sepah-e Mohammead was meant to be a sectarian militant organization loyal to Iranian leadership. With support from Quds Force commanders, Sepah-e Mohammad established training bases in Zahidan, capital of Sistan and the Baluchistan province of Iran. The Afghan Shia paramilitary force’s primary objective was to destabilize the Taliban’s hold in western Afghanistan and secure a buffer zone along the Iranian border. It made two failed attempts by fomenting a small rebellion in Herat city and dispatching a small armed unit into the border district of Herat province.²² The former was crushed and the latter ambushed.

The Sepah-e Mohammad contingent dissolved in the mid-1990s. Some members, however, remained on an informal covert reserve status, most probably for what Iran anticipated might be a Taliban-ruled and Saudi-influenced Afghanistan. According to Javadi, Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud once said, "If I want to imagine Islamic mujahid it would be the forces of Mohammad Corps."²³ The U.S. military invasion in late 2001, however, neutralized the potential threat of an Iranian backed Shi’ite paramilitary fifth column, and the unit fully disbanded following the 2001 U.S. incursion into Afghanistan.²⁴

While the Guard Corps did not sponsor a major Pakistani Shiite militia, a Pakistani cleric named Arif al-Husayni established a pro-Khomeini network among Pakistani Shiites. Al-Husayni was one of Khomeini's students prior to the revolution in Najaf. He preached Khomeini's brand of Islamic revolution in the eastern town Parachinar, where Pakistani Shiites predominantly reside, and he is sometimes referred to as the "spiritual father of the Zeynabiyoun," Fatemiyoun’s Pakistani counterpart.²⁵ Although al-Husayni was assassinated in 1988 at the height of Arab infiltration into the jihadi factions of northwest Pakistan, his networks, like others in Afghanistan that Tehran had invested in, endured throughout the Taliban era and into the post-Taliban era albeit at a reduced scale.

After the withdrawal of the Soviet army and the formation of the predominantly Hazara faction of Hezb-e Wahdat, relations between the mainstream Shia groups and Iran were fundamentally transformed. Hezb-e Wahdat leaders’ gradual exercise of political compromise with their one-time Sunni rivals among the mujahedin reshaped its relations with Iran.²⁶ As a result, Iran began to shift its attention beyond its traditional Shia clients in Afghanistan, as the country became more unstable under the Soviet-backed regime of Najibullah.²⁷

When Najibullah’s government collapsed in 1992, fierce internecine battles between warring ethnic factions erupted across Kabul. Iran began to adopt a more pragmatic approach to its foreign policy in Afghanistan by focusing on its interest in maintaining stability in Afghanistan rather than exporting the revolution through its Shia clients.²⁸ The most dramatic evidence of this change is Iran’s decision to cut ties with the leadership of Hizb-e Wahdat in response to its violent opposition to Rabbani’s predominantly Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance interim government. At the same time, Iran also encouraged other small non-Hazara Shia groups within the Wahdat Party to split and join the government.²⁹

For many Hazaras in Kabul, however, anti-government resistance was a do-or-die quest to ensure that the discriminatory regime of the past was not resurrected under Rabbani’s government. Consequently, for many young Hazara leaders in Kabul, Iran’s open support for Rabbani’s regime dramatically reduced the Quds Force’s influence during the early 1990s. But that changed quickly when the Taliban overtook Kabul in 1996 and drove Hezb-e Wahdat and Rabbani’s Jamiat-e Islami party out of the Afghan capital. Alarmed by the rapid pace of Taliban advancement across the country, Iran soon realized the perils of its fickle foreign policy in Afghanistan and joined Russia and India in extending military and financial support to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

Iran’s support to the Northern Alliance increased in 1996 and 1997.³⁰ To that end, Soleimani, who had recently been elevated as Quds Force commander, played an instrumental role in the formation and empowerment of the anti-Taliban resistance front known as “Jabha-e Muttahed” (the United Front) in the north of Afghanistan.³¹ Iran’s reassured support to the Northern Alliance resistance—until the defeat of the Taliban in 2001—through the Quds Force was critical, and Soleimani’s role was pivotal in making that happen.³²

By the mid-1990s, the Quds Force, which was then under the command of Ahmad Vahidi, had already dispatched its own diplomats and military advisers to Afghanistan to support Afghan Shia groups and the Northern Alliance resistance against the Taliban. This group included Soleimani who after serving on the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq War in Kurdistan was appointed as the Quds Force regional commander in the southeastern Iranian province of Kerman and ran counter-narcotics operations along the Afghan-Iranian border.³³ In Afghanistan’s interior, Quds Force general and Soleimani’s eventual successor Esmail Ghani focused on advising Hazara resistance fighters.³⁴

After the Taliban consolidated its power across the country in 1997, and took several Iranian diplomats hostage in 1998,³⁵ the Quds Force attempted to remobilize Sepah-e Mohammad (Mohammad Army) to fight alongside other Northern Alliance contingents against the Taliban. The Quds Force even deployed them to predominantly Sunni districts in Takhar, Farah, and parts of Herat, but they failed to rally local support.³⁶ Soleimani eventually dissolved the contingent, but the IRGC’s assistance to both Shia and Tajik resistance forces in the fight against the Taliban helped Iran mend fences with disaffected Afghan Shia groups, including more mainstream moderate elements within the Hezb-e Wahdat Party.