Ali Reza Tavassoli
Ali Reza Tavassoli was an Afghan militant of the Fatemiyoun Brigade. An ethnic Hazara, he was born in Afghanistan and later moved to Iran, where he studied at Al-Mustafa International University. His first activities as a combatant were during the Iran–Iraq War, when he and many other Afghan Shia Muslims enlisted in a volunteer pro-Iranian militia to fight against Iraq. He had later fought in the Afghan Civil War (1996–2001) and also the 2006 Lebanon War. Following the Arab Spring in 2011, Tavassoli was appointed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to command Afghan Shia militants in the Syrian Civil War. Four years later, while fighting alongside the IRGC, Hezbollah, and the Syrian government in the Southern Syria offensive, he was killed by Jabhat al-Nusra.
Biography
Tavassoli was born in 1962 in Afghanistan. He later moved to Iran, where he lived in Mashhad and studied in Qom, eventually graduating from Al-Mustafa International University.Career
He served as a Shia volunteer fighter on the Iranian side of the Iran–Iraq War.According to the "official" Iranian version, Ali Reza Tavassoli, alias Abu Hamed, and the Iranian cleric Mohammad Baqir Alaoui, initially asked Iran to send their small contingent of 22-25 Afghans stationed in Mashhad to Syria. This first contingent is said to have fought alongside the Shia Iraqi militia Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada , which was created in Syria in the summer of 2013 and then deployed in Iraq alongside Syria, alongside Lebanese Hezbollah. Tavassoli then recruited from the Hazara community who had taken refuge in Iran and then from the small community present in Damascus around the tomb of Sayyida Zaynab. Two other groups of 15 and then 22 volunteers had also arrived in Syria.
Ali Reza Tavassoli, the founder of Liwa Fatemiyoun, is a veteran of the Abouzar Brigade, already composed of Hazaras, which fought in Iranian Kurdistan against Iraqis and Kurdish separatists during the Iran-Iraq War, from its base which was in Ramadan.
Later, he volunteered to fight in the Afghan Civil War (1996–2001) against the Taliban. He had also fought in also the 2006 Lebanon War against Israel.
During the Syrian Civil War, Tavassoli was appointed by Qasem Soleimani, the erstwhile Iranian commander of the Quds Force, as a commander of Shia volunteer fighters from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. In 2014, he organized Afghan Shia volunteers and formed the Fatemiyoun Brigade to protect Shia shrines in Syria, where he was known by the Arabic-language nickname Abu Hamed.