Afghanistan’s Hazara minority is often forced to flee to Iran to escape persecution, but instead of welcoming their fellow Shia Muslims, the Islamic Republic is sending them to their death in Syria.

Iran sends Afghan immigrants to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad at a substantially higher rate than its own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and thousands of Hazara fighters have died fighting in Syria for Iran, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Upon joining the Iranian military, Hazara fighters are segregated to the Fatemiyoun division and are often paid a subsistence wage. They have little choice but to fight for Iran, and are often forced into service by the IRGC.

The minority group is despised by both the Taliban and the Islamic State in Afghanistan, as evidenced by the recent ISIS bombing of a Hazara protest. The attack killed more than 80 people, and was the largest terror attack in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion in 2001.

“Iranians see the Hazara as cannon fodder,” a Hazara sheik living in Qom, Iran, told the LA Times. He identified himself only as Hassan out of fear that Iranian security would come after him.

Hassan said the Tehran government uses the Hazaras as proxies for their own soldiers, considering casualty rates among Iranian soldiers would draw the ire of the local population. Hazara deaths are apparently less important, their bodies are even segregated in Iranian cemeteries.

“If the Hazara are the Muslim Shiite brethren of Iranians,” Hassan told the LA Times, “then why are they the least important people in the devastating civil war in Syria?”

While many Hazara fighters go to Syria out of necessity, others are happy to fight to protect Shias from ISIS.

“We don’t care about Bashar al-Assad’s regime,” Mohammad Amiri, a cleric living in Qom, told the LA Times. “We fight for the cause of the Shiites against Daesh (ISIS).”

While some may volunteer to fight, Human Rights Watch has reported that Iran often refuses legal residence to its estimated 3 million Afghan refugees, in an apparent attempt to ensure a flow of proxy forces. Illegal residents caught by Iranian forces are given a choice: either fight in Syria or be deported.

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