A senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards swiftly denied Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim earlier on Thursday that Russia had airlifted 4,000 Iranian troops from Syria to Tehran, marking a rare public disagreement between the two partners in arms.
"A large number of Iranians have been living in Syria for a long time, and Russia relocated most of them to Iran," said Mohammad Jafar Asadi, deputy commander of the Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters.
"These were not Iran's advisory forces; we withdrew our advisory forces from Syria ourselves," he added. "We do not allow Russia to relocate our military forces."
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a transnational military organization that lies at the heart of Iran's ruling establishment, has been a key ally of Russia in Syria and Ukraine.
Moscow has launched hundreds of IRGC-provided drones at Kyiv's forces while Iranian and Russian troops together fought the Islamist rebels now running Syria after they seized Damascus from President Bashar al-Assad.
Putin had said Moscow evacuated 4,000 Iranian soldiers from Syria to Tehran by air after Assad's fall.
Putin said in remarks carried by state media that just as Iran had originally requested Russia transport its units to Syria to back Assad, Tehran again sought Moscow's aid to evacuate the soldiers.
"If earlier, for example, our Iranian friends asked us to help them transport their units to Syrian territory, now they asked us to withdraw them from there," Putin said.
"We took 4,000 Iranian fighters to Tehran from the Hmeimim base. Some of the so-called pro-Iranian units left without a fight for Lebanon, some for Iraq."
