Brigadier General Mohammad Pakpour, the commander of the ground forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Wikimedia Commons, Hossein Zohrevand, CC BY 4.0)
TEHRAN, Iran — Iran will maintain its support for the Syrian government despite the deaths of hundreds of its advisers and volunteers in the six-year civil war, an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander said in comments published Tuesday.
Shiite Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah are the Syrian regime’s most important military supporters after Russia in its battle against mainly Sunni rebels.
“We will send advisers in all fields and offer all help at our disposal so the resistance front doesn’t break,” the ground forces commander of the IRGC, Brigadier General Mohammad Pakpour, told the Fars news agency.
“They are present there now and we will deploy more as long as there is a need for advisory support.”
Pakpour said that advisers from the IRGC’s ground forces, including the Saberin Special Forces Unit, were working alongside those from the IRGC’s Quds Force foreign operations arm.
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Members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards at an annual military parade in front of the mausoleum of the late Ayatollah Khomeini just outside Tehran, Iran, on September 22, 2014 (AP/Ebrahim Noroozi)
As well as advisers, Iran has sent thousands of “volunteer” fighters recruited among its own nationals as well as the Shiite communities in neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It also has military advisers and trainers deployed in Iraq.
As of early March, at least 2,100 fighters sent from Iran had been killed in Iraq and Syria, according to Iranian officials.
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