It is no secret that the Islamic Republic has long sponsored proxy groups abroad, yet far less is known about how these same networks have been used to protect the regime at home. Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Afghan Fatemiyoun Brigade have all played roles in suppressing anti-regime movements inside Iran. Recently, reports of these fighters harassing Iranian female university students have ignited a new wave of public outrage.
Between October 6 and 11, residents of Iran’s western Hamedan Province protested after reports emerged that Iraqi fighters studying at Bu-Ali Sina University had been targeting Iranian female students for so-called “temporary marriages”—a practice permitted under Shiite law and frequently exploited by entities affiliated with Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) to sexually exploit women and children.
In response to the outrage, Iranian Deputy Interior Minister Ali Akbar Pourjamshidian claimed that some 80,000 Iraqi nationals are studying the “culture of the [Islamic] Revolution” in Iranian universities. As part of its doctrine of exporting the 1979 Revolution, the regime recruits many of its foreign proxies for indoctrination and training inside Iran. Guised as “students,” these men are, in reality, loyalists of the Islamic Republic, most of whom have prior military backgrounds.
A greater concern over these foreign fighters stationed inside Iran is their deployment during periods of domestic unrest to suppress dissent—a practice first reported during the 2009 protest wave. Centered largely in Tehran, the 2009 protests, known as the “Green Movement,” marked one of the first major anti-regime uprisings in recent history. Numerous reports at the time described the regime’s foreign proxies participating in the crackdown, with the German Der Spiegel writing that some 5,000 Lebanese Hezbollah fighters were deployed to assist with the crackdowns. The regime later released a state-produced documentary attempting to discredit those accounts. However, its extensive propaganda campaign to refute the story only reinforced suspicions that the reports were accurate.
By 2019, the strategy of employing foreign proxies domestically was no longer covert. When floods devastated parts of Iran that year, the regime’s first response was not humanitarian relief but the deployment of foreign militias to the most affected areas, ostensibly to maintain order but, in practice, to deter dissent. In Khuzestan Province, a longstanding flashpoint on the Iraqi border, members of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and the Afghan Fatemiyoun Brigade, including elements of the US-designated terrorist group Harakat al Nujaba, were sent in. Caravans of armed fighters patrolling flood-stricken cities looked more like occupation forces than disaster aid workers. Locals described the show of force as deliberate intimidation, particularly after security units shot and killed a local dissident amid the chaos.
Mousa Ghazanfarabadi, who was then the head of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, issued an explicit, official threat in 2019 when he said, “If we do not support the [Islamic] Revolution, the Iraqi Hashd al Shaabi, Afghan Fatemiyoun, Pakistani Zeynabiyoun, and Yemeni Houthis will come to support it.”
Foreign fighters were again deployed during Iran’s nationwide 2022 protest wave, known as the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement. That year, The Jerusalem Post reported that members of Hezbollah and Iraq’s Hashd al Shaabi paramilitary forces assisted Iran’s Basij paramilitary militia in cracking down on demonstrators, citing eyewitness accounts of “plainclothes men with Lebanese-accented Arabic” suppressing protests in multiple cities—echoing similar reports from 2009. Likewise, the London-based Iran International claimed that around 150 Iraqi Hashd al Shaabi and Kataib Hezbollah fighters, aged between 25 and 30 and dressed in special uniforms with black bags, had entered Iran to help quell the unrest.
