Mohammad Reza Naghdi, a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) official who formerly headed the Basij Organization in Iran, says the US exit from Afghanistan has brought the era of America as the sole superpower to an end.

Naghdi told Sepah News on Aug. 18 that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan “does not require complex analysis, just as we saw the failure of the British and Soviet Union empires in Afghanistan lead to the collapse of those superpowers.”

Naghdi said the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan holds a lesson for other countries to show how the wealthiest nation in the world with all of the resources at its disposal lost to one of the poorest nations of the world. “The result of resisting against a great power is victory,” he said, adding that triumph is not achieved through arms but through “a strong will.” 

He said the swift fall of the Afghan army to Taliban fighters was also a lesson for regional countries whose soldiers are trained by the United States. He said that any country trained by the United States has “inefficient and weak armies,” as was seen in 2014 in Iraq when the Islamic State easily took parts of northern Iraq.