http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323463704578497021387416606.html
MIDDLE EAST NEWS May 23, 2013, 7:06 p.m. ET
Battling Beside Assad Forces, Iraqis and Lebanese Answer Calls to Protect Shrines and Counter Sunnis
By SAM DAGHER
SEYDA ZEINAB, Syria—This town on Damascus's southern fringe, with a shimmering golden-domed shrine at its center and a heavily patrolled perimeter of berms and concrete barriers, has become the first stop for many foreign fighters entering Syria to battle alongside President Bashar al-Assad's forces.
Mourners in Basra, Iraq, on May 17. Relatives say Shiite fighter Mohammed Aboud was killed by a sniper's bullet in the town of Seyda Zeinab, Syria. His coffin reads 'Sigh in grief, Zeinab.'
Shiite fighters, primarily from Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, are now flowing into Syria in greater numbers to bolster government forces, say Syrians familiar with them. They are arriving to defend Mr. Assad's regime, but more fundamentally to protect the Shiite faith from what they see as a regional Sunni onslaught, say people in Seyda Zeinab and the fighters' hometowns.
The influx provides more concrete illustration of how Syria's conflict, long viewed as a civil war fought largely along sectarian lines, is now a full-fledged religious conflagration drawing its oxygen from across the region.
The dynamics have been most visible over the past week in the battle for rebel-held Qusayr, whose capture would bring the regime secure logistical lines in the center of the country, running from Damascus to the pro-Assad Syrian coast and into sympathetic territory inside Lebanon.
In Qusayr, Iran-backed Shiite Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon have battled openly alongside forces loyal to Mr. Assad, whose regime is dominated by the Shiite-linked Alawites. On Thursday, Hezbollah's media arm said regime forces were in control of roughly the southern half of Qusayr and were pressing ahead with an air and ground offensive to take the whole town.
But Shiite militants are increasingly involved in combat elsewhere in the country as well. These include fighters from Hezbollah, from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and from Iraq's Asaib Ahl al-Haq—an Iran-backed group that was responsible for some of the most sophisticated and lethal attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq—according to militia members and Syrians familiar with the fighters.
In a June 2012 photo, Syrian soldiers stand at the site of a car bombing in Seyda Zeinab, a town on Damascus's outskirts that is the site of one of Shiism's holy sites.
Such fighters have been active in campaigns launched this year to wrest control of Damascus suburbs from the rebels, said Maher Ajeeb, the commander of a Syrian pro-regime militia in Seyda Zeinab. Many Shiite warriors have answered calls to protect important shrines like the one here, a mausoleum where Shiites believe Zeinab, a saint-like granddaughter of Prophet Muhammad, is buried.
Mr. Ajeeb said he faced a dilemma when Syrian rebels launched an assault here on New Year's Day this year. His brother was battling on one front, he said. Pressing against rebels on a second front, he said, was a group of fighters he called "the friends"—members of Hezbollah.
Mr. Ajeeb, whose group was mustered the previous month, backed up the Hezbollah fighters. The town's defense proved successful. But his brother Hussein was killed, he said.
"They are my brothers, too," said Mr. Ajeeb of his choice to battle alongside Hezbollah. "And we are all servants of Seyda Zeinab."
The number of Shiite foreign fighters in Syria isn't clear. President Assad told an Argentine newspaper last week that only senior Iranian and Hezbollah military experts with long-standing ties to the Syrian army are in the country. But Syrians and Iraqis fighting alongside the regime say hundreds of foreigners have come this year, compared with dozens late last year.
"I personally get dozens of calls each day from people in the provinces and Baghdad who want to go," said a commander of Asaib, the Iraqi militia. "We send well-trained ideological fighters."
The Shiite shrine in Seyda Zeinab, a heavily guarded pro-government town. Rebels recently fired mortar shells that narrowly missed the shrine, which rebels, in text messages, have also threatened to turn into an ice-skating rink.
These Shiites form a counterpoint to similarly religiously motivated fighters who have entered the country to aid the predominantly Sunni rebels. Many Syrian rebels are increasingly under the sway of al Qaeda fighters, clerics and benefactors from Gulf Arab states who extol the eradication of "heretic" communities of Shiites and Alawites.
Foreign Sunni fighters represent more than two dozen nationalities, from Saudi and Turkish to Chechen, Mr. Assad and other Syrian officials have said. Some 500 to 700 Europeans are among the nearly 6,000 Islamist foreign fighters who have come to Syria to support the rebels since the start of the war, a European diplomat said. In April, the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation placed the number of European rebel fighters at 135 to 590, with the largest numbers from the U.K., France and the Netherlands, basing its count on media reports and martyrdom notices.
The religious fervor extends to fighters' communities as far away as Kuwait, Libya, Iran and Saudi Arabia—on dueling satellite channels, online chat forums and social-media websites. Some Shiite clerics are propagating the idea that the war in Syria is laying a foundation for the imminent return of the Messiah-like Imam Mahdi, who Shiites broadly believe will wage an end-times battle against evil on Syrian soil.
"We must be ready for the reappearance and committed to its aftermath because the process won't be easy," Jalaleddin al-Saghir, an Iraqi Shiite cleric and politician, said in October in one of his many sermons in Baghdad about the topic.
The influx of Shiite fighters to Syria has triggered calls, particularly from Syrian rebel backers and clerics in Gulf Arab Sunni states, for all-out jihad against Iran and its allies in Syria. Faisal bin Jasim al-Thani, a member of Qatar's royal family, warned on his Twitter account Tuesday that Shiites in the region would now face revenge attacks. "Iran and its tails will be crushed in Syria," he wrote.
This regional reach makes a political compromise to end fighting that much more elusive.
"I have every right to ask a Lebanese military expert to help me with my just cause," said Fadi Burhan, a Syrian Shiite cleric in Seyda Zeinab. Mr. Burhan heads public relations at a local office of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader who also conveys religious guidance through offices serving Shiite communities around the world.
Mr. Burhan, a tall and imposing figure in his 30s, lifts his shirt to show scars on his stomach from three bullets that he says were from a failed assassination attempt in Seyda Zeinab in April 2012. His assailants, he said, were two Sunni teenagers—members of the many Sunni families who had sought refuge here because, at the time, it was safer than other areas. The attempt on his life came two weeks after another Syrian Shiite cleric, Naser al-Alawi, was killed here in a similar manner.
By July, most Sunnis had left Seyda Zeinab. At the same time, Shiites and Alawites were brutally chased from a neighboring district, Hajeera, that is now under the control of extremist Sunni rebels and foreign jihadists, according to residents.
Seyda Zeinab is now a virtual fortress accessible only through army checkpoints. The shrine's perimeter is sealed off with concrete walls. Rebels recently fired mortar shells that narrowly missed the shrine. They have also threatened in text messages sent this year to some residents to level the shrine and turn it into an ice-skating rink, said residents.
Hundreds of male residents have joined government-sponsored paramilitary groups tasked with securing the town and participating in operations against rebels around Damascus.
The very name of Mr. Ajeeb's militia, the Abu al-Fadhel al-Abbas Brigade, positions it within the sectarian drama: Al-Abbas was the half-brother of revered Shiite Imam Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad. The brothers were among the Shiites slaughtered more than 1,300 years ago in Karbala, in present-day Iraq, by forces dispatched by the Damascus-based Sunni caliph. The shrine here to the men's sister is one of Shia Islam's holy sites.
The brigade's creation, coupled with the threats against the shrine, have attracted volunteer fighters. especially from Lebanon and Iraq, Mr. Ajeeb said. Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah both issued in April what amounted to religious justification to Shiites fighting in Syria.
"To be martyred in Syria is like being martyred in Karbala" 1,300 years ago, said Mr. Ajeeb, a bearded and stocky 30-year-old in a military uniform, who said that before the conflict he owned a fruit and vegetable stand in town.
In Lebanon and Iraq, funerals for fighters slain in Syria are now an almost daily occurrence.
"At your service, Zeinab!" read one of the banners carried in the southern Iraqi city of Diwaniyah on Saturday at the funeral of Muthana al-Karawi, whom a local news website identified as a fighter killed in Syria a week ago.
—Ali A. Nabhan in Baghdad contributed to this article.
Write to Sam Dagher at sam.dagher@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared May 24, 2013, on page A9 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Fighters, Flowing to Syria, Guard Shiites.
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