Iran's 'marriage of convenience' with Taliban
Experts say reports of an Iran-backed Taliban buffer zone in Afghanistan against the Islamic State are overstated but that Iran has had links with Taliban commanders for over a decade.
Iranian authorities deny that Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour had just returned from a trip to Iran when he was killed May 21 by a US drone strike not far from the Iran-Pakistan border.
But experts on Afghanistan tell Al-Monitor that Iran has played a complicated game with the Afghan militant group for over a decade and has stepped up contacts in recent years in part to keep an even more dangerous organization — the group that calls itself the Islamic State — from expanding its territory to Iran’s east.
Although IS has only 1,000-3,000 adherents in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon, far fewer than in Iraq or Syria, the Iranian government has a much more alarming assessment.
“My own personal observation from exchanges with Iranians in various settings is that their estimate of the threat of [IS] in Afghanistan is higher than that of the United States,” said Barnett Rubin, a former senior adviser to the Barack Obama administration on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He told Al-Monitor that the Russians also share this view.
