Amid Mounting Losses, Iranian Commander Admits Growing IRGC Presence In Syria

The deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) admitted on state television that Iran has suffered growing losses as it has sent more “military advisers” to Syria, the Associated Press reported today. Agence France-Presse provided more details of the losses suffered by Iranian forces.

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Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, observed in a recent analysis that the growing number of IRGC deaths in Syria reflect a changing role for the force.

Al-Quds Force, the IRGC’s expeditionary arm, which is ac­tive in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere, is relatively small — about 15,000 men. In the wake of mounting al-Quds Force casualties in regional conflicts, the IRGC has had to deploy its regular Ground Forces to Syria to bolster al-Quds Force contingent.

This emerging deployment pat­tern in turn is rapidly changing the characteristics of the IRGC itself as it blurs the differences between the missions of the IRGC’s ground forces, whose primary task is to protect the Iranian homeland against external enemies and the regime against domestic oppo­nents, and that of the Quds Force, which handles operations, invari­ably clandestine in nature, outside Iran.

This means that, in effect, the Syrian war is transforming the entire IRGC into an expedition­ary force. This is likely to increase IRGC military interventions in the Middle East in the future and suggests that more Iranian forces could be deployed in Syria.