Info:
NAKHSA, the Persian acronym for “Spontaneous Forces of Islamic Lands,” published photographs on social media of its armed members being deployed to crack down on protesters in Tehran and at Amir Kabir University, where students led the protests. The group has announced that it was also deployed to Malard in Tehran province;
NAKHSA itself says that it was established in 2009 with the aim of stopping street protests “for the stability and the strengthening of the regime”. A branch of the organization was set up in Syria by Mostafa Sadrzadeh after the civil war broke out there in 2011. Sadrzadeh was born on September 10, 1986 in the city of Shushtar in Khuzestan province and joined the paramilitary Basij Organization after his religiously devout family moved to Tehran. In 2013, under the pseudonym of Seyyed Ebrahim, he was appointed as the active commander of the Fatemiyoun Brigade in Syria – a unit of Afghan immigrants recruited to defend the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad – in late 2015. A video (in Persian) shows Sadrzadeh declaring he is a member of NAKHSA and had come to Syria to fight. Sadrzadeh was killed in the outskirts of Aleppo in autumn 2015;
It is reported that the Islamic Republic persuades Afghan Shia refugees to join the brigade and fight in Syria by promising them a monthly salary and residency permits for all members of the soldier’s family;
NAKHSA forces have fought shoulder to shoulder with Lebanese Hezbollah forces, Iraq’s Hezbollah Brigades who have sworn an oath of loyalty to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, and the Fatemiyoun Brigade in Syria. In the first year of the Syrian civil war, he says, “we went to Syria on our own. By establishing some connections it was easy to acquire arms and get into the war…In all fronts, boys of NAKHSA fight under the banner of recognized military entities [but] they get there [using] their own money. Of course the people have helped a lot [but] we have tried to preserve our spontaneity.”;
The group’s social media activities began when the Saudi embassy in Tehran was attacked in January 2016. Since then, its accounts have been blocked in Iran six times [Persian link]. According to him, the accounts are managed by the “Union of Haifa Admins,” all of who have “jihadi accounts.”;
The claims by NAKHSA, however, are disputed by some of the same forces that it claims are its brother-in-arms, including the so-called “Defenders of the Shrine” and the Fatemiyoun Brigade fighting in Syria under the command of the Revolutionary Guards’ expeditionary Quds Force. They say that NAKHSA’s list of martyrs killed during the group’s operations is actually a list of soldiers killed while fighting for the Fatemiyoun Brigade. NAKHSA, they say, has never been in the battlefield;
A year ago, NAKHSA posted a video (in Persian) showing its members alongside the police and the paramilitary Basij during violent clashes with Gonabadi dervishes in February 2018;
Also Known As:
Spontaneous Forces of Islamic Lands
Country:
Iran
Address:
Tehran
Reason for the color:
» NAKASHA is Iranian secret violent armed group used to crush the protests;