Conference on Iranian regime’s high number of casualties in Syria

Conference on Iranian regime’s high number of casualties in Syria

Syrian and Iranian experts were guests of an online conference on Monday organized by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to discuss the scale of the Iranian regime’s defeats in Syria, particularly its military casualties

Ahmad Ramadan, chairman of the Media and Public Relations Bureau of the opposition Syrian National Council, Saleh Hamid, an Arab political and human rights activist, and Sanabarqh Zahedi, Chairman of the Judicial Committee of the NCRI, participated in this conference.

Dr. Zahedi touched upon the Iranian regime’s active involvement in the massacre of the innocent Syrian people. He referred to two stages of the defeats and high number of casualties of the regime and its Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) in Syria and said:

Last June, the regime’s official news agency IRNA announced that 400 Revolutionary Guards had lost their lives in Syria until that time. One should mention that this number only encompasses the Revolutionary Guards and the Bassij forces dispatched to Syria from Iran and does not include the mercenaries from other countries who lost their lives in Syria. This casualty figure relates to the first half of the last year when Syria’s armed opposition forces had significant advances in the north in Aleppo region, in Jisr al-Shughour and in Sahl al-ghab, as well as in Daraa, capturing strategic areas. The outcome of these advances was the defeat of the Iranian regime and Bashar al-Assad that promised the toppling of the regime in not too distant a future. Secret intelligence from inside the Iranian regime indicate that during that period the various regime forces, including the Revolutionary Guards, the Hezbollah and the Afghan forces, had lost their morale due to the blows they suffered at the hands of the opposition in Syria and were running away from the fight in different fronts. The regime’s assessment at the time was that it could save Assad only if it would inject 30,000 Revolutionary Guards into Syria.

It was after this stage and these defeats that [IRGC Quds Force commander] Qassem Soleimani went to Moscow and asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for help. Subsequently, Putin met with [the Iranian regime’s Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei. According to these discussions, the two parties agreed that Russia would heavily bomb the opposition forces in Syria and in return Khamenei and Soleimani committed to bring in the necessary ground forces to push back the opposition from the areas they had captured. Khamenei told Putin that he would continue the fight in Syria until the last Revolutionary Guard. We are now three months past this stage and we are witnessing consecutive defeats of the regime, including the loss of Hossein Hamedani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards in Syria, the injury to Qasem Soleimani, right hand to Khamenei and Commander of the Quds Force, along with around 20 other IRGC generals and hundreds of regime’s forces.