Massoud

8am: Following the recent border conflict between the Taliban and Iranian border guards, Ahmad Massoud, the leader of the National Resistance Front (NRF), tweeted a stanza of Rumi’s famous poems, indicating that he had warned Iran not to go to the Taliban as he himself was the true acquaintance of Iran. This tweet provoked a widespread response and elicited various reactions from the people of Afghanistan and Iran. Despite the reactions, the content of Massoud’s tweet for the first time officially revealed that the relationship between Massoud’s Front and the Iranian government was not in a good state, and his attempts to persuade the Iranians to support him financially and morally had failed. Previously, the official stance of the Iranian government towards the events that had occurred in Afghanistan over the past two years had demonstrated that the Iranian government viewed the Taliban as a trusted partner and felt elation over their victory against the “Western-backed regime”. Even once, one of the officials of the Iranian Foreign Ministry had declared the resistance against the Taliban to be an American project. The gist of the story is that Iran believes it has a role in bringing the Taliban to victory, and thus, it considers this group to be indebted to it, believing that this group is able to serve Iran’s interests in Afghanistan in a beneficial way. Iranians are so determined to maintain their relationship with the Taliban that one of them, in his reaction to the border clashes between Iran and the Taliban, which resulted in casualties, deemed these conflicts to be minor and referred to them as “family disputes”. Click here to read more (external link).