IRGC sends medical units to Syria and Iraq to help “resistance front”

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has dispatched medical practitioners and equipment to Syria and Iraq to treat those injured in combat from its allied forces, a top IRGC general revealed earlier today. “Our medical doctors have been deployed to the regions of the resistance front upon requests by friendly countries such as Iraq and Syria, and they have provided treatment to most of those injured from this front,” General Ahmad Abdollahi, the deputy commander for Health and Medical Education of the IRGC said. He also pointed out that the IRGC has set up temporary and mobile medical units and hospitals in the two Arab countries to provide free services to allied forces.

Abdollahi hailed the IRGC’s achievements in the medical field in the past three decades and claimed that the elite force’s medical teams provide services in marginalized provinces in the eastern and western parts of the country. He also noted that the IRGC has sent medical teams to crisis-hit countries such as Pakistan and Myanmar in the past.

Comment: Over the past six years, Iran has mobilized, funded and deployed tens of thousands of Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi and Lebanese militia forces to Syria to rescue the embattled regime of Bashar al-Assad and gain a military foothold in the Arab country. The IRGC has also deployed hundreds of its own personnel in combat and advisory missions. With most of Syrian hospitals destroyed by the conflict, IRGC mobile medical units have served as primary treatment centers for the IRGC and its militia proxies in Syrian provinces.

The IRGC boasts about providing free medical aid in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere at a time when the Iranian people are increasingly complaining about exorbitant medical expenses and declining purchasing power at home. During anti-regime protests across Iran in December and January, protestors chanted slogans against the IRGC expensive military adventures abroad at the expense of domestic priorities.