In recent weeks, some Iranian hard-liners — aligned with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President-elect Ebrahim Raisi — have gone on the offensive and publicly painted a rose-tinted picture of a changed Taliban.
On Persian-language social media in Iran and Afghanistan, others condemned Iran’s leaders over perceived efforts to whitewash the Taliban’s bloody history of attacking Hazaras, a Shiite minority, and repressing women and personal freedoms.
Some in Iran celebrated the withdrawal as “a U.S. failure,” said Nasr. But others have argued that the “United States welcomes Afghanistan becoming a quagmire for Iran,” and that withdrawal “is priming Afghanistan for sectarian rule,” he said.
