Iran is commanding a “foreign legion” of about 25,000 Shiite militiamen in Syria, the former head of the Shin Bet said on Wednesday.

The Shiite fighters, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, “are fighting in Syria only against the rebels and not against ISIS,” Avi Dichter, now the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said to a visiting delegation of Swiss lawmakers.

Dichter also warned that the terror group Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy, has gained a lot of experience fighting in Syria, which “has made [them] a better fighting force and more adept in conventional military warfare.”

“Everybody should ask themselves why the Iranians are building missiles with a range of 2,000 km, twice the distance [from Iran] to Israel,” he noted. “Egypt is also within their range, as is Saudi Arabia. Two thousand years ago, Iran was an empire and now it wants to recreate that.”

Iran and Hezbollah have played commanding roles on the ground to prop up the Syrian government, which has targeted civilians through the use of barrel bombs, massacres, intentional starvation, and chemical weapon attacks, leading to the death of over 400,000 people and the world’s largest refugee crisis since the Second World War.

Dichter’s remarks are consistent with other recent reports about Iran’s growing military footprint in the Middle East. Iran’s recent formation of a Shiite “Liberation Army” has raised fears among observers that Tehran “is asserting itself as a regional or even an imperialistic power,” noted Tallha Abdulrazaq, a researcher at the University of Exeter. And in 2014, an Iranian official close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei bragged that the Islamic Republic controlled four the capitals of four Arab countries: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon.

[Photo: Stahlgewitter Syrien 2 / YouTube ]