Tehran said Tuesday it had brought home 4,000 Iranian citizens from Syria following the ouster of its ally Bashar al-Assad as rebels took over Damascus.
“Over the past three days, 4,000 Iranian citizens were returned to Iran,” Fatemeh Mohajerani, the spokeswoman for Iran’s government, said at a press conference in the capital.
She added that Iran would keep up its efforts “until the departure of the last Iranian” in Syria.
Around 10,000 Iranian citizens had been living in Syria in recent years, according to official figures.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards sent “military advisers” to Syria to help Assad during the civil war that broke out in 2011.
But Ahmad Naderi, a member of the Islamic parliament presidium, said on Tuesday that “there are no Iranian forces in Syria“, citing a briefing by Guards’ chief Hossein Salami.
Iranian citizens have also travelled to Syria for pilgrimages to sites holy to Shiite Muslims, such as Sayeda Zeinab in the southern suburbs of Damascus.
Syria and Iran enjoyed long-standing friendly ties thanks to a rapprochement by Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, in the 1970s, before Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979.
The ouster of Assad by the Islamist-led rebels, however, leaves those ties in question.
On Sunday, as the rebels swept into Damascus, the Iranian embassy in the capital was ransacked by individuals.
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