Foreign Shiite Fighters in the Syrian Civil War: Actors, Recruitment Strategies and Iran’s Regional Role

Abstract

Due to the country’s nuclear program, international efforts regarding it and the impact of the sanctions, the economic and political consequences of the termination of these sanctions, and the “proxy war” it actively carries out in the region, Iran has been one of the key focal points of international relations. Iran's efforts to shape its immediate geography through by “proxies” have undergone significant progress, and the Syrian Civil War has been one of the most influential battlefields where Iran has used this “know-how” it had accumulated over years.
 In this study, how Iran devised a transboundary strategy to ensure the regime’s authority in Syria will be discussed. The study, in order to do so, will provide a general discussion of Iran’s post-revolutionary regional ambitions and key actors within this context. After that, the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War dimensions of this regional strategy will be discussed by profiling some key foreign Shi’a actors with an eye on their recruitment strategies online and offline. By doing so, how Iran has become an influential actor in the Syria Civil War, as the battlefield where Iranian regional strategy in a transnational pattern is played out quite effectively will be made sense of.