Iran's Afghan Fatemiyoun Militia Pops Up in Restive Southeast, France 24 Finds

France 24 has tracked members of the Fatemiyoun division, Iran's Afghan Shia militia, to Sistan and Baluchistan, the province where Iran meets Pakistan and Afghanistan. The outlet geolocated a September 29, 2026 video published by Haalvsh, a human rights news outlet covering Iranian Baluchistan, to Mount Kala Pade, roughly 80 kilometres west of the provincial capital Zahedan. The footage shows at least 13 armed men, identified by Haalvsh as Fatemiyoun members, patrolling mountainous terrain. An earlier Haalvsh video from September 21 showed armed men in weapons training; France 24 geolocated it to a newly built school in Gosht, near Saravan, but could not independently verify the men's identities.

The deaths came next, and the militia's own channels confirmed them. Fatemiyoun-affiliated sources said Ahmad Yaghoubi was killed by an improvised explosive device in Sistan and Baluchistan on October 2, 2026, and buried in Pakdasht outside Tehran. Mohammadreza Rahimi died in an armed clash in the province on October 13 and was buried in Sarvestan, in Fars province. The People's Fighters Front, a coalition of Islamist and Baluch nationalist armed groups formed in December 2025, claimed both attacks. The group includes Jaish al-Adl, which the US and Iran designate as a terrorist organisation.

Clues first surfaced during the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran in March 2026, when IRGC-affiliated outlets published martyrdom notices for personnel killed in airstrikes on IRGC bases. Most omitted any Afghan connection, but France 24 matched funeral and memorial photographs to the Fatemiyoun. Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with the IRGC, confirmed that Alireza Feizian, a Fatemiyoun member previously wounded in Syria, died in the strikes. Some had climbed into IRGC ranks at officer level, including Lieutenant Colonel Ali Akbar Saket, France 24 reported.

The Fatemiyoun was one of the largest Iran-backed foreign forces in Syria, estimated at 8,000 to 50,000 fighters recruited mainly from Afghan Shia communities, many of them migrants and refugees in Iran. Canada designated it a terrorist entity in 2019, and the US hit it with counterterrorism sanctions the same year for backing the IRGC's Quds Force. After 11 years of fighting, around 2,000 members had been killed — then December 2024 upended everything, as Ahmad al-Sharaa's rebel coalition toppled Bashar al-Assad and the IRGC pulled out of Syria.

Mahdi Nakhl Ahmadi, an Iranian expert on Sistan and Baluchistan based in Italy, told France 24 the shift was no accident. The IRGC could not simply discard fighters it had spent years recruiting, training and blooding in urban warfare — and thousands of trained men, some with senior command experience and access to sensitive IRGC intelligence, could have turned on the Islamic republic if left without jobs or income. Deploying them inside Iran was not the first choice: the IRGC pitched sending them to Afghanistan to fight the Islamic State group, an idea rejected by both the former Afghan government and later the Taliban, and to Pakistan's Balochistan, which Pakistan also refused. The fighters ended up along Iran's borders with both countries, housed in Zabol and other towns in Sistan and Baluchistan.