TEHRAN • A group of hardline Iranian students left for Lebanon yesterday pledging to help Hezbollah fight Israeli forces there, witnesses said.
Iranian hardliners have made great public show of recruiting volunteers for "martyrdom-seeking operations" in recent years, but there is no record of any of these Iranian volunteers taking part in attacks in Iraq, or against Israel.
50 volunteers came together at Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, where a large tree-lined area is dedicated to Iran's "martyrs" killed in the 1980-88 war with Iraq.
"A group of 200 volunteer students will be dispatched to Lebanon via Turkey. We are leaving Tehran today by bus," Amir Jalili, a spokesman for the group, said.
"We hope Turkey will let us pass the border and go to Syria. If not we will come back to Tehran."
Iran is a sworn enemy of Israel and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for the Jewish state to be "wiped off the map". But while Israel accuses Iran of arming Hezbollah, Tehran says it only gives the Lebanese group moral support.
The volunteers stressed theirs was a private initiative, not backed by state authorities. The group, calling itself the Justice-Seeking Movement of Students, said they had no military training. Some 50 students boarded buses from Tehran, but more were to join them from other cities at the border, they said.
Iranian officials have repeatedly said such groups have no official sanction and say they can operate only "as long as their ideas are limited to theory."
"We are an independent group. We want to help our Shi'ite brothers," said Hadi, a 23-year-old French literature student, carrying pictures of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who has vowed to take the war deeper into Israel.
"We want to fulfil our religious duty. If officials ban us from going to Lebanon, we will obey," said another spokesman Morteza Assadi before getting on the bus to go to the border.
Members of the hardline Basij militia at the cemetery said they had no intention of taking action against Israel without the green light from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has the last word on all matters in Iran.
"It is our religious duty to help our Muslim brothers. But we need our leader's approval first," said Mohammad, a Basij militiaman witnessing the gathering.
