“Al-Ahwaz will be next battle after Syria”

Relations between the opposition to Syria’s Assad regime and the Ahwazi Arabs are growing with both forging bonds to fight their common enemy, the Iranian regime. With Iran now in effective control over its Syrian vassal state, the Syrian opposition have pledged to support the Ahwazi struggle in meetings with senior Ahwazi leaders.

A company of the Free Syria Army’s Dere’a Al-Jazeera in Al-Mayadin has named itself the ‘Al-Ahwaz Brigade’ in solidarity with the Ahwazi intifada in Iran. They were instrumental in recently liberating the area from the Iranian-backed Assad regime.

Al-Ahwaz Batallion of the Free Syria Army

Both groups accused Iran of sowing sectarian strife in the Arab world and acting like a colonial power. ASMLA described its formal contacts with the Brotherhood as a “quantum leap in strengthening the relationship between the Ahwazi and Syrian revolutions” that would enable them to “work together to overthrow the existing alliance of the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Iranian regime, which continue to spill the blood of Arabs in Syria and Ahwaz.”

Alliance between Ahwazis and Syrian opposition

Syria had been a safe-haven for Ahwazi Arab refugees until Bashar al-Assad forged closer alliances with Tehran. On Iranian orders, Assad forcibly refouled several UNHCR-mandated Ahwazi refugees living in Damascus, including Faleh Abdullah al-Mansouri, the leader of the Ahwaz Liberation Organisation who now has Dutch citizenship. Assad ignored UNHCR statements that such actions were in contravention of international humanitarian law. Syrian human rights campaigners frequently condemned the deportations, while Persian-led “opposition” groups have failed to voice any protest.