Iran needs cannon fodder for their assault forces in Syria. Afghan recruits are apparently acceptable casualties:
Iran is recruiting Afghan refugees to fight in Syria, offering $500 a month and Iranian residency permits to help fight rebel forces, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Officials told the Journal the effort is part of a strategy to send poor foot soldiers to the front lines and reduce casualties among Hezbollah and Guards members.
Remember, sending in Hezbollah and a Shia foreign legion to be the assault echelon for Assad's counter-offensive in western Syria was necessary because the Syrian army was decimated and shaken by heavy losses in the revolution.
Now the assault forces are starting to recoil from the losses. Hezbollah, as I've already noted, is finding the losses daunting. So the report makes sense.
The part about reducing casualties among the Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) is the puzzling part. I didn't think the Pasdaran was directly involved in fighting. Advising, yes. Training, yes. Technical support, yes. But direct combat? In numbers that could result in significant casualties? I didn't think so.
Since most of the Shia foreign legion has apparently been drawn from Iraq's pro-Iranian Shias, does this mean that Iranian Pasdaran gunmen are going as "Iraqis" to disguise Iran's involvement and dying in Syria in unacceptable numbers?
So now Iran needs cannon fodder to insulate Hezbollah and their own men from losses?
As a bonus, any survivors (and the sons of the dead) will be a cadre of pro-Iranian Afghans whose families rely on Iranian money who could be sent into Afghanistan to pry away western Afghanistan--which was once part of the Persian empire--from Kabul's nominal control.
And there is this gem from an American senior defense official who told Congress:
We assess that there are now significantly more foreign fighters in Syria than there were foreign fighters in Iraq at the height of the Iraq war.
Significantly more now than at the height of the Iraq War? The Dickens, you say! That is so confusing.
Remember how the anti-war side said that our military presence in Iraq defending the new Iraqi government was the cause of foreign jihadis flocking to Iraq to fight?
Remember how they said that if only we'd leave, that "cause" of "why they hated us" would be erased?
Yeah, I remember.
