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