The bodies of two young Afghans, killed while fighting for the Syrian dictator, were buried on Tuesday in Iran.
The state-run news agency IRNA identified the two as Ramazan Mirzaei and Feizallah Khoda-dady, but claimed they were killed while defending sacred places in Syria.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been recruiting thousands of Afghan refugees to fight against the Syrian people.
The Afghan refugees are granted residency in Iran and paid $500 a month to fight for Bashar Assad, according to Afghan and Western officials, reported the Wall Street Journal in May.
A video obtained last month by CNN from Syrian rebels shows a prisoner that doesn’t speak Arabic, but mutters in Dari, the language spoken mainly in Afghanistan.
The prisoner says: “My name is Sayed Ahmad Hussaini. The Iranians pay people like me to come here [Syria] and fight. I am from Afghanistan and I am an immigrant in Iran. The Iranians brought us to Syria to fight.” “I don’t want to fight anymore,” he adds.
He says he wants to go home and that he was paid about $500 a month to fight. There are many Afghan immigrants in Iran trying to find some shelter from the decades of war that have torn apart their land. He says he was trained and then sent to assist the regime in Syria.
CNN sent a photojournalist to eastern Afghanistan to follow up on reports of Iranian regime agents recruiting mercenaries to fight for the regime.
According to the report by CNN, in one village, four men who did not want their identity or location revealed, said they had just returned from training in Iran. There, they were taken to a police station, blindfolded and taken to a training camp where they were shown tactics and light to medium weapons.
The men spoke in great detail about their experiences and were able to show the Iranian bank cards through which they will be paid their $500 to $1,000 a month salaries. Other villagers confirmed their stories.