The funeral proceedings of Iran’s late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that stretched over a week amid a spiralling war and significant internal turmoil at the seat of power for Shiism, saw multiple personalities visit Tehran. Almost unnoticed, however, was the presence of delegations from both the Taliban and the opposition Northern Alliance. The two have been fighting each other, in various iterations, over Afghanistan since the 1990s.

The presence of the Taliban’s Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar along with Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi on the one hand and the Northern Alliance’s Ahmed Massoud, son of the group’s founder Ahmed Shah Massoud on the other, highlighted the delicate game of geopolitics that continues to persist on Tehran’s eastern front. While Iran is the one country which has built the strongest influence with Kabul since the collapse of the government of President Ashraf Ghani (August 2021), it still does not officially recognise the Taliban government. This is hardly surprising, considering that until the 1990s, Iran, along with India, Russia, Tajikistan and other neighbouring and foreign states, supported the Northern Alliance.