The world map today only shows three “Islamic Republics” – Iran, Pakistan, and Mauritania – and one Islamic Emirate: Afghanistan.
As the world focuses on the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran, Tehran has begun strengthening its ties to its two eastern neighbors: its fellow Islamic Republic and the Islamic Emirate.
Iran’s relationship with Pakistan has been in the headlines this year, with Islamabad brokering the April ceasefire and hosting the first high-level U.S. and Iranian delegations to meet since 1979. Now its ties with its other eastern neighbor, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, are deepening as well, to the consternation of many Iranians mindful of complicated past relations.
This month, Tehran dispatched its energy minister, members of parliament, and 180 businessmen to Kabul in the space of a single week. Deals announced during the week exceeded $400 million, according to Mahmoud Siadat, head of the Iran-Afghanistan joint chamber of commerce, building on a September visit to Tehran by the Taliban’s head of state enterprises.
The projects under discussion include Iran providing up to 2,000 MW of electricity to Afghanistan, oil and gas contracts, rail links between the two neighbors, and myriad other forms of economic cooperation. For their part, the Taliban offered Tehran opportunities in Afghanistan’s mining, oil, and gas sectors.
Predictably, the two countries are aligned in anti-U.S. rhetoric. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with you,” said Ahmad Jan Bilal, the Taliban head of state enterprises, “and Muslims must stand united against the oppression of the aggressors.” Addressing the Iranian energy minister, he added: “America continues to seek a presence in the region, and you and I will not allow them to interfere.”
These developments were hardly preordained. The Taliban have long persecuted Afghanistan’s Shia minority, most of whom are in the Persian-speaking Hazara ethnic group. During the Taliban’s first time ruling the country from 1996 to 2001, their treatment of the Hazara was particularly brutal. In 1998, when they entered Mazar-e-Sharif, the Taliban hunted down and massacred at least 2,000 civilians, most of them Hazara. There were other Taliban massacres of Hazaras in that period.
Also in 1998, the single most damaging event in Taliban-Tehran relations took place. In August of that year, gunmen stormed Iran’s consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif and killed eight diplomats and journalist Mahmoud Saremi, a journalist with Iran’s official state news agency, IRNA. Tehran has not forgotten. The Iranian foreign ministry decried the even as recently as 2024, and one diplomat left no doubt on who was to blame: the victims, he wrote, had been “martyred by the Taliban.”
In that context, the current courtship has its critics in Tehran. Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban have shut down Shia religious, cultural and media institutions that were close to Iran, arrested Shia figures and confiscated their property. Last month the government dissolved the Shia Supreme Council, an entity the Taliban reportedly had once fostered.
Jomhouri-e Eslami, a conservative Iranian daily with roots in the revolution’s founding generation, has accused the Foreign Ministry of whitewashing the Taliban and of staying silent in the face of what it calls a Taliban “silent war” against Iran.
In a commentary for the paper, Seyed Ahmad Mousavi Mobalegh warned that by crushing the Shia communities that have long looked to Tehran, the Taliban are destroying decades of Iranian influence in Afghanistan. Tehran’s inaction, he wrote, is “a fatal mistake.”
Since the Taliban’s return to power, several thorny bilateral issues have arisen alongside other long-standing and unresolved disputes. Although the Islamic Republic yielded the Afghan Embassy in Tehran to Taliban diplomats in February 2023, it insisted that act did not constitute recognition of the Taliban regime, and Tehran has yet to post an accredited ambassador to Kabul. To date, Russia is the only country formally to recognize the Taliban’s rule.
Iran is home to millions of Afghans who have, variously, fled the brutal Soviet occupation of their country, escaped from the Taliban, or sought a better life next door. They have faced widespread discrimination in Iran and mass forced expulsions by the regime. In October 2024, Iranian border guards reportedly fired on and killed Afghan migrants, by some accounts numbering in the hundreds.
But by far the most contentious issue has been water. The Helmand River, known as Hirmand in Iran, courses for over 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) across much of Afghanistan before ending in wetlands just across the border in Sistan and Baluchistan, Iran’s poorest province. Iran. Under the terms of a treaty signed by the two countries in 1973, when both Iran and Afghanistan were ruled by monarchs, Afghanistan is obligated to deliver about 820 million cubic meters a year to Iran.
Tehran has repeatedly complained that Kabul is not living up to its treaty obligations. “I warn the officials and rulers of Afghanistan to immediately give the rights of the people and the Sistan and Baluchistan region,” Iran’s then-president Ebrahim Raisi said in 2023. In response, the Taliban, which maintains that water levels are too low to flow into Iran, told Tehran to raise its request ‘in appropriate language.’
Another conflict is brewing at the other end of the same province. Chabahar, on the Gulf of Oman, is Iran’s only major ocean port outside the Persian (Arabian) Gulf. It is of interest to many outside players. As I noted in the MBN Iran Briefing last year, Tehran and Russia have been looking to develop Chabahar and connect it by rail and road to the Caspian Sea to the north.
Chabahar is also landlocked Afghanistan’s shortest route to the sea that avoids Pakistan, with whom it has had fraught relations for decades. India has long helped develop the port as a way to reach Afghanistan and Central Asia without passing through Pakistan, though U.S. sanctions have clouded its role.
During the parliamentary delegation’s visit to Kabul this month, Iranian MP Mohsen Zanganeh told Iran’s Dari-language Sahar TV that he had “good news” for Afghans: Iran would allocate about 25 acres (10 hectares) of the waterfront in Chabahar port and more than 250 acres (100 hectares) in Chabahar’s free zone – essentially an area with its own customs and tax rules designed to attract foreign investment – to Afghanistan.
The outcry in Iranian media was immediate, with social media claiming Iran was “handing over 110 hectares of its territory” to the Taliban. Zanganeh hit back, posting on X that “It’s bizarre! They’re begging the Westerners to invest and allocate land in the Chabahar Free Zone! But if Afghanistan, which stood manfully beside Iran during the war and is growing today, wants to invest in Chabahar and transit its cargo through Iran, they scream that we’ve given away the country’s land!!”
As one commentator posted on X in reply to Zanganeh, “Taliban investment in Chabahar? … Granting such a concession to Afghanistan must be transparent, and the public should know what benefit to Iran’s national interests is being exchanged for lifting the Taliban’s landlocked encirclement.”
Zanganeh then backtracked on his earlier promise to the Afghans, claiming that “some hostile media outlets” had “distorted this issue.” The head of the Chabahar Free Zone said Afghanistan had not submitted any request and that the law did not allow land to be transferred.
While Iran benefits from Afghan trade and wants to cement its role as Kabul’s route to the sea, clearly any visible concession to the Taliban sets off a backlash at home.
And Tehran is not Kabul’s only suitor. In September, the Taliban signed a $200 million oil and gas deal with Saudi Arabia’s Delta International Energy that includes plans for a 435-mile pipeline to Spin Boldak on the Pakistani border, a route that would bypass Iran entirely, and this month a Saudi deputy energy minister promised to send a technical team to Kabul.
Tehran appears unsure what it wants from Kabul. The war with the U.S. and Israel has squeezed its Gulf routes and the regime is forced to look east. But the Taliban remain controversial enough that every step toward them raises the question of what Iran gets in return. And the disputes over water, refugees, and Afghanistan’s Shia minority remain unresolved.
For the Gulf states and the West, the stakes are high. If Tehran succeeds in turning east, it will have found a back door around the Gulf and around sanctions. The Taliban, already recognized by Moscow and courted by Riyadh, may find a new path out of isolation via Tehran.
