Alex Rowell writes: The first deployment of foreign regular army ground troops to the front lines of the five-year-long battle between supporters and opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad came with rather less fanfare and controversy than might have been expected.

On April 4, less than two months after US Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress Iran was winding down its direct presence in Syria, Iranian Brigadier General Ali Arasteh declared the Islamic Republic was in fact sending its official armed forces, known as the Artesh, onto the Syrian battlefield for the first time, naming the 65th Airborne Special Forces Brigade in particular as one among “other units” joining the fray. The occasion marked the army’s first deployment outside Iranian territory since the 1980-88 war with Iraq.

While there have been Iranian ‘boots on the ground’ in Syria since as early as 2012, these had hitherto all belonged to the irregular Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), the parallel military organization established after the 1979 Revolution in part as an ultra-Islamist counterweight to the Artesh, viewed suspiciously at the time for its roots in the secular ancien régime. A contingent of several hundred IRGC militants fighting in Syria surged to an estimated 3,000 last October, coinciding with the Russian air campaign masterminded in the summer of 2015 by the IRGC’s external operations commander Qassem Soleimani. In strictly literal terms, what Secretary Kerry said in February was true: the IRGC itself had by then withdrawn most if not all of the reinforcements added in October. However, those withdrawals have now been offset by the dispatch of the Artesh. [Continue reading…]