In a
statement on December 9, the university said it promoted peace, friendship, and brotherhood among nations and slammed the U.S. decision as hegemonic. High-Value Individuals
Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington who has closely monitored IRGC activity in Syria, said that, according to his database from January 2012 to December 2020, 3,059 Iranian and allied foreign fighters were killed in combat in Syria.
Alfoneh says of those, only three were students or graduates of the Al-Mustafa International University known as Jamiat al-Mostafa University in Iran. This indicates that Jamiat al-Mostafa has never served as the primary recruitment ground for the IRGC s war effort in Syria, he says.
This year began and drew to a close with Iran being baited into war
A Shiite Muslim girl holds a poster of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani as she takes part in a anti-US protest against the killing of top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, in Lahore on January 12, 2020 [ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images] December 11, 2020 at 5:49 pm
The single main story of the year has without a doubt been the coronavirus pandemic which has thus far claimed over 1.5 million lives around the world amid encouraging news about vaccine development. However it is now easy to forget that before this story became a near permanent fixture of daily international news, the year kicked off with a major escalation in the decades-long hostilities between the US and Iran with the assassination on 3 January at Baghdad International Airport of Iran s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force head, Major General Qassem Soleimani.