Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
17-02-2025
DAMASCUS: Mouldy half-finished food on bunk beds, discarded military uniforms and abandoned weapons, these are the remnants of an abrupt retreat from this base that once belonged to Iran and its affiliated groups in Syria.
The scene tells a story of panic. The forces stationed here fled with little warning, leaving behind a decade-long presence that unraveled in mere weeks.
Iran was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most critical ally for more than 10 years. It deployed military advisers, mobilized foreign militias, and invested heavily in Syria’s war.
It’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) built deep networks of underground bases, supplying arms and training to thousands of fighters. For Iran, this was also part of its “security belt” against Israel.
We are near Khan Shaykhun town in Idlib province. Before Assad’s regime fell on 8 December, it was one of the key strategic locations for the IRGC and its allied groups.
From the main road, the entrance is barely visible, hidden behind piles of sand and rocks. A watchtower on a hilltop, still painted in the colors of the Iranian flag, overlooks the base.
A receipt notebook confirms the base’s name: The Position of Martyr Zahedi – named after Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a top IRGC commander who was assassinated in an alleged Israeli airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Syria on 1 April, 2024.
The supplies recently ordered, we found receipts for chocolates, rice and cooking oil suggest daily life continued here until the last moments but now the base has new occupants two armed Uyghur fighters from Hayaat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist militant group whose leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has become the new interim president of Syria.
The Uyghurs arrived suddenly in a military vehicle, asking for our media accreditation.
“Iranians were here. They all fled,” one of them says, speaking in his mother tongue, a dialect of Turkish. “Whatever you see here is from them. Even these onions and the leftover foods.”
Boxes full of fresh onions in the courtyard have now germinated.
The base is a labyrinth of tunnels dug deep into white rocky hills. There are bunk beds in some rooms with no windows. The roof of one of the corridors is draped in fabric in the colors of the Iranian flag and there are a few Persian books on a rocky shelf.
They left behind documents containing sensitive information. All in Persian, they have details of fighters’ personal information, military personnel codes, home addresses, spouses’ names and mobile phone numbers in Iran. From the names, it’s clear that several fighters in this base were from the Afghan brigade that was formed by Iran to fight in Syria.
Sources linked to Iran-backed groups told media that the base houses mainly Afghan forces accompanied by Iranian “military advisers” and their Iranian commanders.
Tehran’s main justification for its military involvement in Syria was “to fight against jihadi groups” and to protect “Shia holy shrines” against radical Sunni militants.
It created paramilitary groups of mainly Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi fighters.
Yet, when the final moment came, Iran was unprepared. Orders for retreat reached some bases at the very last moment. “Developments happened so fast,” a senior member of an Iran-backed Iraqi paramilitary group tells me. “The order was to just take your backpack and leave.” (Int’l News Desk)
