MN: What was your role as a shrine guardian there and how did the Syrian people receive you?

SHE: Unfortunately, terrorists came and sought shelter inside people’s houses, and cities that had been inhabited by ordinary people emptied. However, a number of people remained in the cities because of their homes and belongings and they were living in fear of the terrorists.

Now Iran has trained its army to be careful when clearing an urban area so that the ordinary people won’t be hurt by terrorists. But unfortunately, people were living with fear among the terrorists and terrorists used them as human shields.

Our training was to surround the terrorists … and complicate the situation so that the terrorists gave up or could be confronted in a different way.

Let me give you one example. On one occasion, terrorists entered a residential building and took the residents as hostage. Maye the first idea that entered the [Syrian] army’s mind was to explode the whole building to eliminate terrorists. But innocent civilians would have been killed by this method.

But our folks told [the Syrian army to say to the terrorists] that if the terrorists put their weapons down and left the area, they would be safe. And they did that and it prevented the spilling of the blood of many civilians. This was an example of Iranian training.

Or for example when terrorists entered a village and the army would go to clear it, the army’s and regime’s viewpoint was that the house which a terrorist has occupied is the terrorist’s house. They didn’t differentiate between the people and the terrorists and would consider the house’s belongings as war trophies and would take everything.

Iranians told the army that this viewpoint should be corrected, and a village or residential area which has been occupied by terrorists should not be subjected to looting. The people are forced to live with the terrorists and it is not right to take their belongings.

Now they saw how our folks treated them and when they encountered us they would greet us with sweets or even their children would come to checkpoints and get humanitarian aid from our Basij folks there.

One of our friends was taking down a story about a woman and eight orphans in a village. The husband of the woman was killed by mistake by the army and our boys would give her a part of their monthly salary so she could afford her living. Now that people see our boys’ kind behavior there and their attention to the orphans and their training of the army, this kind interaction and the army’s corrected methods are becoming a culture there.

It is true that war has a brutal face and many of their economic and social structures have been damaged. But if we look at this from another angle, there is a similarity between Iran’s presence [in Syria] and how Hezbollah [was founded].

Because back when Israel occupied southern Lebanon, Lebanese Shia were not familiar with the principles of the Islamic republic. But people like Dr. Chamran and Haj Ahmad Motavaseliyan and Martyr Ibrahim Hemmat went there and delivered the culture of Islamic Republic and planted the seed of resistance which was able to stand against the world’s fourth army and force it to kneel.

I love Martyr Chamran and I study his books and Hezbollah owes its foundation to this martyr.

A Syrian boy injured in the civil war. Photo via Orient Hospital

Even though the Syrian army didn’t have a positive view toward its own people while confronting the terrorists, our boys treated them as their religious brothers. For example, our boys would give a part of their rations to Syrian children who were suffering from the financial crisis due to the war.

So when Syrian people saw us, they treated us as friends. Because they saw that we didn’t have any expectations and were helping them only to prevent the killing of innocents. This is why the Syrian people stood beside Bashar’s regime and they are seeing that the Islamic Republic is exporting this beautiful culture to them.

Another activity of the Islamic Republic there is forming Basij circles. The Syrian army couldn’t handle this three-year crisis, because any army would be fatigued [after that long]. Iran came and said why don’t you form popular support for yourself and ask your people for help. Trust your people same as we trusted our people in war.

This was how the National Defense Force was formed. The NDF boys would have 45-days assignments to encounter terrorists. Of course, some of them get martyred and some return to their birthplaces. Iran trains the NDF with the same perspective it delivered to the army to differentiate between ordinary people and terrorist, because at the beginning the NDF had the same perspective as the army.

I should mention this that some of Syrian Shia are Alawites. They believe in 12 Imams of Shia, but they don’t get the Shia religious instructions because of the two centuries of the Ottoman Empire. For example, they have been negligent with daily prayers.

But with the presence of our boys, along with them the culture of jihad and martyrdom has been explained to them, and this is why they could stand against terrorists this long.

I dare say the vast majority of places which terrorists have captured have fallen without a fight. It means the terrorists took those areas before the Syrian people and the regime could find themselves and those centers fell without a fight.

Now those important centers and areas are being forced out of terrorists’ hands, but with the intervention of some of foreign governments like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, this crisis has continued to this point. The imported troops constantly make up fake crises, like giving the terrorists chemical weapons and hitting some areas with those weapons and blaming the Syrian regime for that.

Thus with the Islamic Republic’s help, Basij culture is being formed there and people volunteer to protect their homeland from terrorists. The views of some of Alawite neighborhoods toward the Islamic Republic have changed dramatically.

Let me explain an example. When our boys went to one of the biggest Alawite regions, they told the head of one of the major tribes to call upon his youth to take up arms and help the regime, and this is interesting that they [the tribe] said that if the Syrian government had asked them, they wouldn’t have complies. But because we are representatives of the Islamic Republic, they would do this willingly.

So see how their view toward the Islamic Republic has changed, and this formation of volunteer forces to defend against terrorists is a sign of their trust toward the Islamic Republic?