International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 111

International Journal on Criminology
the Shiite Hazara population. Officially, Iran does not send Iranian combatants to
Syria, only military advisers. 8 Iran promised to regularize the papers of undocumented
Afghans who had fled persecution and therefore painted this pragmatic
maneuver an ideological religious hue.
Furthermore, as a final example of the survival of the figure of the martyr in
the current Iranian discourse, the state has retained and used martyrdom to honor
national heroes, although it is definitely no longer the popular idealist aspiration
it was during the early years of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Very recently, on August
9, 2017, the case of the combatant and military adviser Mohsen Hojaji, who
was beheaded by ISIS fighters in Syria close to the Iraqi border, was used to revive
the figure of the martyr. General Qassem Soleimani declared “I pray that God will
grant us a destiny as glorious as that of the martyr Mohsen Hojaji,” 9 and on August
21 in Tehran, the supreme leader himself praised the courage of the martyr Hojaji,
in front of a gathering of managers and employees of a cultural institution. The
young Iranian, whose death was filmed and broadcast, was described by the Iranian
press using terms traditionally used to describe the martyr Hussein, the third
Shia Imam: a horrible death suffered with imperturbable calm.
Martyrdom: A Culmination or Failure of Nationalism?
The new form of “sacred cause” takes the nation as its starting point, but it can
very quickly be seen as no longer overlapping with the official international reality:
martyrdom has become a transnational political statement. In the early days
of the Islamic Republic of Iran, during the longest war of the twentieth century,
martyrdom became the weapon of a revolutionary model that would spread
through a Sunni versus Shiite view of the Middle East, particularly in the case of
the Lebanese Hezbollah. Today, Iran is more engaged in realpolitik—a pragmatic
power struggle—rather than an ideological analysis of its foreign relations, but it is
precisely in this pragmatism that the Sunni/Shiite reading may in some cases find
continuity. Iran targets Shiite populations that feel oppressed (not all Shiite populations)
in order to extend its influence. A good example of Iranian pragmatism is
its relations during the 1990s with Christian Orthodox Armenia, which have long
been more cordial than those with Azerbaijan, where approximately 85% of the
population are Shiite. In contrast, Shiite communities in countries such as Iraq,
Lebanon, Syria, and the Gulf States may be receptive to arguments presenting Iran
as the nation that protects oppressed Shiites.
Nationalism is also central in the case of the Palestinian martyr, but unlike
the Iranian martyr, this is in the future tense. In Iran, the martyr is clearly viewed
8 We know however, that the “Iranian Green Berets” were deployed in Syria. Ali Arasteh, deputy
chief of liaison for the ground force troops, told the Iranian Tasnim News Agency on April 4, 2016,
that commandos from the regular army were sent to fight ISIS in Syria.
9 Our translation.
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