Iran’s invitation of the National Resistance Front to its capital last month suggests an unprecedented willingness to engage with Afghanistan’s opposition movements in public.

The funeral of slain Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, held for six days in mid-July, was intended by Tehran as a display of pageantry to show defiance under pressure from the United States and the resolve to continue fighting. To project an image of strength, Iran invited delegations from nearly 100 countries to attend the ceremonies. From Afghanistan, its eastern neighbor, Iran invited two competing delegations: one from the official Taliban government, and one from the republican opposition movement conducting a guerrilla war against the group.

The presence of the rival delegations created an odd contrast at the procession, in which the Taliban delegation led by Abdul Ghani Baradar and Amir Khan Muttaqi, two high-ranking Taliban functionaries, was followed almost immediately by a second delegation led by Ahmad Massoud, the leader of the National Resistance Front (NRF) opposition group, and Mohammad Mohaqiq, a leader in the historically anti-Taliban Hazara minority. (The Iranian government tactfully chose to keep the two groups well apart from one another during the ceremony.)

Iran Showed Equal Respect for the Taliban and Its Enemies

Perhaps the most important outcome from the ceremony was not merely that Massoud had been invited, but rather how Iran presented him once he arrived. Massoud entered the funeral hall at the head of his delegation, which the announcer welcomed and introduced as “the High Delegation of the Afghanistan Resistance.” The announcer went further, describing the delegation’s presence as a reminder of the historical bonds between the two countries and their shared respect for “struggle, human dignity, and freedom.” One assumes the Taliban representatives were within earshot for the introduction, and not amused.

Back in Afghanistan and across the diaspora, those scenes were the focus of considerable attention, both among Massoud’s supporters and his enemies. Predictably, supporters saw the reception as a vindication of their leader and the wider anti-Taliban resistance. They shared clips of his entrance on social media—editing the footage with patriotic songs and superimposing images of Massoud’s father, legendary guerrilla fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud, who fought the Taliban during the 1990s until his assassination at the hands of al-Qaeda militants in 2001.

Conversely, the elevation of Massoud to official status enraged the Taliban government and its supporters. Abdul Latif Nazari, the Taliban’s Deputy Minister of Economy, accused Iran of playing both sides in the conflict. Kheirullah Shinwari, an official in the Taliban Foreign Ministry, wrote on X accusing Tehran of hosting figures who challenged Afghanistan’s “national sovereignty and independence.” Other Taliban-aligned accounts urged the Taliban to summon Iran’s ambassador—or to respond in kind by inviting exiled Iranian monarch-in-waiting Reza Pahlavi, or even members of the Balochistan-based jihadist movement Jaish al-Adl, to Kabul. The reaction quickly descended into Afghanistan’s familiar ethnic hostility, with Taliban-aligned accounts hurling anti-Tajik and anti-Panjshiri abuse at Massoud and, in some exchanges, anti-Hazara insults at Mohaqiq and his supporters.

Iran’s Afghanistan Policy: Play Every Side Possible

Iran’s antics at the ceremony highlighted a longstanding truism about its relationship with Afghanistan. Given the historical weakness of successive central governments there, Tehran has long found it wise to hedge its bets; it seeks relations with whoever holds power in Kabul, but maintains ties with other players as well.

When Hassan Kazemi Qomi, Iran’s former envoy for Afghanistan, was asked why the Taliban’s opponents had been invited to the ceremony, he explained that Afghanistan’s people have different representatives and that those currently governing the country represent only one part of its population, while other sections of society remained outside the government. Today, some five years after its conquest of Kabul, the Taliban’s leadership and security structure remain overwhelmingly dominated by Pashtun men drawn from the movement’s own religious and military networks. Outsiders such as Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, women, secular professionals, and even reform-minded Pashtuns have no meaningful role in the present political order. Afghanistan is a majority-minority country in which no ethnic group can sustainably govern as though the others are politically disposable. The Taliban may command the institutions of the state at present, but control of ministries and checkpoints is not the same as building an enduring national settlement.

As Qomi put it, Iran’s approach was intended to be directed toward all the people of Afghanistan, rather than whichever political movement happened to be ruling Kabul. Tehran’s message was not that it planned to overthrow the Taliban, or transform the NRF into an armed proxy akin to Hezbollah or the Houthis. Instead, it seemed to be signaling its broader view that the Taliban government was merely the authority of the present moment—and its skepticism that the group would remain dominant over the country indefinitely. Iran will work with the Taliban government today because it controls the country, but will also preserve relations with figures and movements that may matter in the future.

Iran has pursued a similar approach for many years. During the Taliban’s first period of rule from 1996 to 2001, Tehran was one of the main supporters of the anti-Taliban “United Front”—commonly known in the West as the “Northern Alliance”—which governed a sliver of territory in Afghanistan’s north and northeast. It also maintained relations with the Taliban through this period, but increased its support to the United Front as that relationship grew steadily worse—particularly after the Taliban killed 10 Iranian diplomats and a journalist in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif during a massacre of the city’s population in 1998.

After the US intervention in Afghanistan in late 2001, Iran preserved its relationships with Afghanistan’s republic government and its traditional United Front allies within that government. However, it is also known to have kept ties to the Taliban; for instance, former Taliban leader Akhtar Mansour was identified and killed when returning to Pakistan from Iran. Through such engagements, Iran was simultaneously cooperating with, infiltrating, pressuring, and insuring itself against nearly every major actor in Afghanistan.

This hedging paid off when the Taliban returned to power in 2021; despite ongoing border disputes, Iran-Afghanistan relations have been mostly peaceful since then, due in large part to the existing high-level diplomatic relationships between Iranian and Taliban officials. Yet Taliban leaders understand implicitly that just as Iran kept ties with them while they were in the wilderness, it is doing the same for its enemies today. Khamenei’s funeral was notable because it showed a newfound willingness on Tehran’s part to display this strategy in public.

Does the NRF Really Matter? If Iran Thinks So…

Since the outset of the NRF’s struggle in the fall of 2021, its most important objective has been building political legitimacy, both to win support abroad and to use that support to build legitimacy within Afghanistan. The Taliban government has spent years building a narrative that it is the only political reality in the country by dint of its territorial control. For their part, NRF leaders have stressed that there are compelling strategic reasons to avoid giving the Taliban a target at which to shoot. Yet it is indisputable that the NRF has not conquered and held territory as the United Front once did, and this lack of control has cost the group legitimacy.

By giving Massoud the same ceremonial standing as the Taliban, Iran has nevertheless signaled a vote of confidence in the group and its future. That could be a major boon for both the NRF and for Afghanistan’s wider political opposition, as it has lowered the diplomatic cost of engagement for other regional nations. Iran, as a major neighboring state, publicly treats it as a legitimate stakeholder; other regional governments might see this and begin to interact with it in the same way.

In the past, several Western nations, notably Austria and France, have engaged with Massoud and the NRF on cordial terms, and Massoud is widely praised as a hero in anti-Taliban circles in the West. But that support is not all that useful. Western leaders thousands of miles from Afghanistan will periodically fret about the country’s human rights situation, and project their hopes onto a leader who might one day be able to do something about it. Such a meeting can produce publicity for Massoud, but little more. Iran’s engagement is categorically different; it can produce many more vital access points, including material support for the republican insurgency.

The NRF Needs Help—and It’s Tired of Waiting for the West

Another takeaway from the NRF’s improving ties to Iran is that the group, and other resistance movements in the country, seem to have lost hope in salvation from the West. 

For five years, the NRF has searched for meaningful Western political support, mainly from the United States. Massoud has addressed Western and American institutions, met policymakers, spoken at conferences in Washington, and repeatedly warned that America washing its hands of Afghanistan would strengthen the terrorist threat from the country. Massoud has insisted that his movement is not seeking another US invasion, but merely for its political backing for the people of Afghanistan to free themselves.

Yet Massoud’s message has largely fallen on deaf ears. Outside of platitudes about human rights, Western governments have preferred not to think about Afghanistan at all. The one upside to Taliban rule, the thinking goes, has been the country’s post-2021 peace. By arming an opposition movement, Afghanistan could once again plunge into chaos, an outcome that could cause further problems outside of the country. To the extent that the West has interacted with opposition movements, it has demanded those movements remain moderate, inclusive, patient, and aligned with the international order—while offering them no political path through which those commitments could result in meaningful change.

From Massoud’s appearance in Iran, it seems that the resistance is beginning to accept that no movement in Afghanistan can build a serious strategy around Western sympathy alone. Instead, a regional strategy makes far more sense. Massoud seems to have realized that a resistance movement cannot survive indefinitely through conferences in Paris, Washington, Vienna, or London while remaining disconnected from the regional geography from which he must operate. 

The Iran-NRF relationship does not require ideological friendship. Iran and the NRF differ on many fundamental questions. The NRF seeks international legitimacy partly through democratic language, women’s rights, decentralization, and opposition to religious authoritarianism. To put it mildly, Iran has a different perspective on most of these questions. Yet, as the saying goes, war makes strange bedfellows; geopolitics frequently brings together actors who do not share a political vision but do share an interest in preventing one side from acquiring absolute power. For the NRF, engagement with Iran is less about joining Tehran’s camp than escaping strategic isolation. 

On the other hand, this shift carries risks as being too close to Iran could damage the resistance’s reputation among Afghans hostile to the Islamic Republic. It will also complicate relations with Western governments, and will allow Tehran to use the NRF as bargaining leverage rather than support it as an independent movement. But spurned by the West, the NRF is in no position to complain. And the United States in turn may come to realize that by declining to engage with Afghanistan’s opposition, it has pushed it in the direction of more unsavory partners.

About the Author: Natiq Malikzada

Natiq Malikzada is a journalist and human rights advocate. He holds an MA in International Relations and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex, which he attended as a Chevening Scholar. Since 2013, he has focused on countering religious extremism and promoting democracy and pluralism. In 2020, he co-founded Better Afghanistan, an organization dedicated to fighting extremism, supporting education, documenting human rights violations, and empowering civil society. The organization also provides a platform for Afghan women’s rights activists to mobilize, engage in dialogue, and advocate for freedom and justice under increasingly repressive conditions.

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