The picture of what Iran’s crackdown on protesters looked like is still coming into view. And what I’ve found is that the enforcement, amid a major Internet blackout, was not limited to the Iranian government and military.
First, I’m told that some of the oppressors were proxy groups, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hashd-al-Shaabi, the Shia militias in Iraq. And the State Department’s Persian-language contingent posted that it was alarmed to hear of reports citing such groups. (That is often their convenient way of spreading information without disclosing it.)
But here is something new: I am also told that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps brought in convoys of Taliban special forces to provide additional support in putting down the protests. These were uniformed men, trained and equipped by the IRGC, traveling from southern Afghanistan into Iran.
Two people with deep knowledge of the Taliban believe that these were likely forces that protect the Taliban’s Supreme Leader: Hibatullah Akhundzada’s own private army, which I am told the IRGC helped to create.
This might sound crazy — the IRGC is Shia and the Taliban are Sunni. But a third person explained how the Iran-Afghanistan relationship has taken on an “enemy of my enemy” dynamic.
Lisa Curtis, a former U.S. official who worked on the Doha deal between the Trump administration, Afghan government, and the Taliban, confirmed the ties between Kabul and Tehran. “The IRGC does have links to the Taliban senior leadership. And so it not would be surprising to me to hear that they are doing this.”
Now director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at Center for a New American Security, Lisa said that changes came in the last four or five years of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. “The Iranians cooperated with some of the Taliban elements to target U.S. forces,” she said. She described “some level” of coordinating attacks and relying on networks.
That is a marked shift from the Taliban’s first crack at ruling Afghanistan. “From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban had terrible relations with Iran,” she told me. “There had been a massacre of Shia in the country at the time, and there was a lot of tensions between the Taliban-led government and Iran… There was a chance that they could have gone to war.”
And though U.S. officials waited and watched, that war never came. Meanwhile, the Iranians severely disliked the Americans’ proximity to their territory, Lisa said. “Their common desire to get U.S. forces out of Afghanistan overcame any of the religious differences that were there.”
By the way, three sources tell me that the Russians have also gotten in on this. “Russia opposed the Taliban their first time in power,” Lisa said. “We saw the same kind of thing happen in the last several years of the U.S. mission Afghanistan, where they started cooperating with some of the Taliban elements in an effort to force U.S. forces out of Afghanistan.” Two sources said the Russians have trained some Taliban elements.
When it comes to Habitullah’s special forces, I’m told they came into existence around 2024 and are based out of Kandahar. Recent reporting suggests his army could expand to some 8,000 people.
I do wonder what happens to Iran’s proxies if the regime falls… Certainly, outsourcing some of the brutality on Iranians makes it easier to carry out. (And there have been reports of Iranians defecting.)
For now, the estimates of how many people were killed and arrested keeps rising. The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency currently says nearly 6,000 people were killed and another some 41,000 were detained.
A recent UN fact-finding mission found “gross human rights violations including unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, resulting in arbitrary killings and severe injuries, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, and forced confessions.”
More details in the video.
