The success of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 marked the first time in modern history that a secular regime in the Middle East was toppled in favor of a theocratic, Islamist order. Over the following decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s primary objective has been to become a regional hegemon. In pursuit of this goal, Iran’s Shi’a clerical leadership has been willing to adopt a remarkably pragmatic approach, allowing it to often diverge from its religious dogma.
Persian to the east and Shi’a to the west
As a feature of its flexible policy, Iran has for many decades taken a Shi’a Islamist line toward countries to its west while following a Persian-centric approach with its eastern neighbors. Facing mainly an Arab world to its west, the Shi’a Islamist approach has allowed Iran to try to breach the Arab versus Persian divide and extend a crescent of Shi’a influence as far as the Mediterranean. At the same time, to its east, Iran has been willing to compromise on its Shi’a Islamist ideals when addressing majority-Sunni societies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Central Asian states. Toward these countries, Iran has employed a strategy that projects strong cultural, political, and, on occasion, military influence.
Iran’s shifting alliances during Afghanistan’s civil war clearly reveals Tehran’s pragmatism. Whereas during the jihad of the 1980s, Iran had reliably aided Afghanistan’s Shi’a Persian-speaking Hazara minority, when the victorious mujahedeen parties fought among themselves over the leadership of the new regime in the 1990s, Tehran threw its support behind the Sunni Persian-dominated, Tajik-led government forces. In brutal, bloody street battles for Kabul between the Shi’a Hazara party led by Abdul Ali Mazari and mujahedeen government fighters, Iran’s notorious Qassem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was embedded with the mujahedeen parties. Just as remarkably, in the fighting, Mazari’s Shi’a Hizb-e-Wahdat party allied with the staunchly Sunni Hizb-e-Islami party favored by Pakistan in the civil war. Later, when the Taliban emerged in a second phase of the civil war, Iran stood with the Persian-dominated but more secular parties of the Northern Alliance against the Islamist Taliban. In the west, a flexible Iran played its Shi’a card when it formed, beginning in 2014, the so-called Fatemiyoun brigade, a Shi’a militia composed entirely of Afghan refugees, to defend the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The Fatemiyoun brigade was also employed by Iran against ISIS in Iraq but was incrementally disbanded beginning in 2018 when many of its recruits returned to Afghanistan.
The rise of a pan-sectarian Iran
In recent years, however, there has been an evolution in Iran’s foreign policy in the region — with the country effectively embracing an Islamist pan-sectarian identity. Namely, Tehran has begun to prioritize an Islamic approach and downplay Iran’s Persian identity among its eastern neighbors; at the same time, it is retaining its ties to Shi’a allies in the Arab world. As Saudi Arabia, the traditional spiritual leader of the Sunni Muslim world for nearly a century, has become more socially liberal and economy-oriented domestically and has broadened its geostrategic perspective on the international stage, Iran has perceived an opportunity to replace the Saudi kingdom as a pan-sectarian leader of the Islamic world. This can be seen most clearly in Afghanistan, where Iran has abandoned its traditional Persian-speaking allies, previously the Northern Alliance but now represented by the anti-Taliban National Resistance Front (NRF), led by Ahmad Massoud, the son of former Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. Iran has instead warmed in its relations with Afghanistan’s non-Persian Sunni Islamist Taliban regime, which the Persian-speaking Tajiks of Afghanistan accuse of oppressing them and their Persian cultural-linguistic identity. This has forced the NRF to seek alternative sponsors, such as Tajikistan, to implicitly support its armed resistance against the Taliban.
Betrayal of the pan-Persian agenda
The most explicit example of Iran’s abandonment of its former Persian-speaking allies in Afghanistan was when the Iranian government took control of the Afghan Embassy in Tehran from the nephew of the legendary Persian-speaking Jamiat-e-Islami commander Ismael Khan and handed it over to the Taliban. Iran’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, who is associated with the IRGC, claimed the Iranian-Afghani relationship was twice as good under the Taliban in comparison to the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which was dominated by the Persian-speaking former allies of Iran. Qomi also declared that Afghanistan was part of the Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” and that the Afghan authorities would send forces to fight Israel if the war in Gaza expands.
In a meeting with the Taliban’s acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, Qomi publicly declared that Iran would not support any armed opposition to the Taliban, which disappointed the leadership of the Persian-speaking NRF, who have historically depended on Iranian support and without which the group stands little chance of launching a successful armed campaign against the new regime. Soon after, Iran arrested three members of the NRF in Karaj, outside Tehran. These three individuals were the relatives of a key NRF commander. Like Qomi, the senior advisor of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Ali Akbar Velayati, also stated publicly that Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is an important part of the “Axis,” with Iran at the center, demonstrating the close relationship between Qom (the de facto power center of Iran’s supreme leader) and Kandahar (the power center of the Taliban’s own Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada).
Development of the Iran-Taliban relationship
Iran’s partnership with the Taliban in the 2010s, while the group carried out an insurgency, was likely the Islamic Republic’s only successful venture inside Afghanistan to date. Taliban fighters, backed by Iran, were ultimately able to evict the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose presence next door in Afghanistan was perceived by Tehran as a major geopolitical threat. On the other hand, Iran’s sectarian and Persian-centric ventures in Afghanistan failed: notably, Jamiat-e-Islami lost the Afghan civil war in the 1990s to the Taliban, despite enjoying Iranian support. The Iran-Taliban relationship solidified under the leadership of the former Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour, who set up a base in Iran’s Zabul District and was assassinated by a US drone while driving from Iran to Pakistan in 2016. Iran's support for the Taliban insurgency encompassed the provision of weapons, training, sanctuaries, and financial and diplomatic assistance. Some of the root causes that later brought the Iranian regime and the Taliban closer were their joint anti-Western agenda, common enmity toward Salafist/Takfiri elements such as the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), the fact that they are the only two Islamic revolutionary movements in the world to have seized control of a state, and their shared experience of having come under intense international sanctions.
The Qom-Kandahar nexus
The key factor behind the current growing ties between Qom and Kandahar is the fact that Taliban Supreme Leader Akhundzada had surrounded himself with the Taliban faction formerly called the “Helmand Shura” (also known as the “Iranian Taliban”) prior to retaking power in the country. The Helmand Shura is composed of key Taliban leaders, such as Sadr Ibrahim, Qayum Zakir, and Daud Muzamil (assassinated by the ISKP). Akhundzada was himself associated with the faction before he became the deputy supreme leader under Mullah Akhtar Mansour. Members of the Helmand Shura were known to use bases in the Iranian districts of Zahedan and Zabul during the 2010s, and some of them kept their families in Iran. Members of this Taliban faction are mostly Panjpai tribal Pashtuns, from which the current Taliban supreme leader’s Noorzai tribe hails.
Akhundzada succeeded Supreme Leader Akhtar Mansour in 2016 as head of the Taliban by default, in a transition designed to avoid a blood feud over the leadership. Having long been a loyal lieutenant of Mansour, Akhundzada shared his former boss’s pro-Iran stance. After he became the supreme leader of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2021, he appointed Helmand Shura member Sadr Ibrahim to serve as the deputy to Minister of Interior Sirajuddin Haqqani as a way to keep a check on the latter man and his Haqqani Network. He also appointed Qayum Zakir as the deputy minister of defense to keep a check on another ambitious rival, Minister of Defense Mullah Yaqoub Mujahid — a son of Mullah Omar, the founder of the Taliban. The importance of this Iran-associated faction of the Taliban to Akhundzada’s grip on power is both a root cause and evidence of Iran’s influence on Kandahar.
Tehran’s visible warming to the Taliban has been accompanied by Taliban leaders in some respect coming to resemble their Iranian counterparts. The Taliban is already headed by a supreme leader who simultaneously acts as Afghanistan’s ultimate decision maker and, as in Iran, has created institutions parallel to the official government structures. Also, as in Iran, where Tehran serves as the administrative capital and Qom as its spiritual center, in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, those same roles are effectively embodied by Kabul and Kandahar, respectively. Furthermore, the Taliban has copied Iran’s model of Sepah (personal guard), with Supreme Leader Akhundzada having built up a force loyal directly to him numbering around 80,000 and composed largely of his fellow Noorzai tribesmen in Kandahar and Helmand. Just like Iran’s bonyads (foundations), through which Supreme Leader Khamenei controls a significant portion of the Iranian economy, the Taliban’s Supreme Leader Akhundzada has recently directed the reorganization and scaling of Afghanistan’s state-owned enterprises under the direct authority of his office. While Tehran and Kabul periodically engage in bilateral disagreements over water rights and border management, the Qom-Kandahar relationship continues to strengthen.
Iran’s support for Sunni Islamists to the west
To Iran’s west, the regime has maintained and expanded relations with a variety of Sunni Islamist groups such as Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This can be understood ideologically since Gaza’s Hamas is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and Iran’s own Shi’a Islamic Revolution in large part takes its inspiration from the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, and especially from the writings of its chief ideologue, Sayyid Qutb.
Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas particularly works to the benefit of Iran’s goal to be seen as the leading Islamist power across the Middle East and beyond. The conflict, which has had an impact on the feelings of millions of Muslims around the world, has allowed Iran to effectively brand itself as the Islamic country most willing to confront Israel over its actions in Gaza. This makes it increasingly difficult for monarchs and other leaders in Arab states to oppose Iran, as they risk running against the grain of elite and public opinion at home. In the months and years ahead, Iran is likely to leverage its newly found opportunities to mobilize support in the Islamic world by promoting the idea, even if unspoken, that its nuclear program serves the interest of all Muslims by providing another Islamic nuclear weapon, a role heretofore held for a quarter-century solely by nuclear-armed Pakistan. However, Islamabad’s reluctance to acknowledge this role, combined with the continuing close relationship between Pakistan’s army and the militaries of the US and other Western countries, has brought into question whether the Pakistani nuclear arsenal can continue to be perceived as an Islamic asset. Iran no doubt expects to capitalize on this uncertainty as it seeks to engender broad regional support for its nuclear program.
Filling the vacuum left by America
Even if developments in the Middle East may have now sidelined the “Pivot to Asia” strategy unveiled by US President Barack Obama in 2014, that earlier attempted policy shift left a deep imprint on the psyche of regimes throughout the region, forcing the Gulf monarchies to question long-term US reliability. As a result, they have seemed increasingly willing to concede greater freedom to Tehran’s geopolitical ambitions and have, one by one, engaged in détentes with Iran. With the receding footprint of the US, Gulf monarchies have also begun to hedge their policies by engaging with other great powers such as China and Russia. The Iranian regime’s increased closeness with both of those countries in recent years further incentivizes Gulf monarchies to find ways to reduce their tensions with the Islamic Republic.
Unless the US is prepared to reassert itself in the Middle East in a major way, the field is left open for Iran to pursue its aim to become the regional hegemon of both the Sunni and Shi’a Muslim communities. If Iran is to be countered, confidence in Washington as a dependable strategic partner in the Middle East as well as in South and Central Asia must be renewed. For this to occur the US will need to advance a comprehensive political, security, cultural, and economic strategy for this complex but critical region.
Ahmad Sayer Daudzai is the Former Acting Ambassador of Afghanistan in the UAE.
Photo by Iranian foreign ministry via Amwaj Media
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