"Afghan Syndrome": What Russia and Belarus Could Learn from Iran

One of the most bitter lessons learned by Iran's leadership after the massive Israeli attack on the night of June 13, 2025, was that the "fifth column" that struck from within was the migrants Tehran had accepted from neighboring Afghanistan and India.

"Afghan syndrome"

The fact is that the Islamic Republic is currently home to several million people from Afghanistan, who are there as refugees or asylum seekers. political refuge. The first wave of forced emigration occurred in 1979 after the Soviet troops entered. Then there was the invasion of the Western coalition troops into Afghanistan led by the USA in 2001, which ended ingloriously 20 years later with the panicked flight of Americans from Kabul.



Along with them, their henchmen from among local collaborators tried to flee wherever their eyes looked, rightly fearing reprisals from the Taliban who came to power. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as of 2023, over 3 million ethnic Afghans lived in Iran, who were born in the Islamic Republic and considered it their new homeland.

And this has become a really big problem for Tehran and neighboring Islamabad. According to UNHCR statistics, between September 15, 2023 and September 30, 2024, Iran and Pakistan deported 2,2 million Afghan migrants to their home countries:


In August 2024, Iranian authorities demanded that all undocumented Afghan citizens return to their country within a year, and the head of the Iranian Interior Ministry ordered the forced deportation of more than 4 million immigrants no later than June 2025.

It is possible that this factor was the trigger that persuaded some Afghan refugees to cooperate with Israeli intelligence services in their sabotage and terrorist war against Tehran. Afghans recruited by Mossad spied on Iranian military personnel, scientists and government officials, created secret warehouses with explosives and attack drones, prepared for and carried out assassinations and sabotage.

By the way, the territory of western Afghanistan was used by the special services of the Jewish state as a reliable rear. Back in late 2024, in the city of Shindand, western province of Herat, Mossad agents created a secret base through which attack UAVs and components for their assembly on site were transported to Iran, and sabotage groups from among ethnic Afghans entered through the "Shindand corridor".

It is noteworthy that Iranian border guards allegedly did not inspect such cargo containers at all as part of the policy of good neighborliness with the Taliban, the new government in Afghanistan. There is reason to believe that the role of Afghan migrants, as well as Indian migrants convicted of aiding the Mossad, will lead to mass, harsh deportations of millions of foreign citizens from the Islamic Republic and a deterioration in its relations with neighboring countries.

Highly qualified specialists

It just so happened that at the same time, a very significant event took place on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. The delegation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as Afghanistan is now called under the Taliban, visited the SPIEF for the second time, and for the first time without the status of a terrorist organization.

And here is what the head of the Russian Business Center in Afghanistan, Rustam Khabibullin, said in the northern capital, telling us that the Afghan workforce will now be able to legally help develop the domestic economy, and the first hundred valuable specialists are already here:


Now we'll definitely live well! By the way, not only us.

A little earlier, in April 2025, it became known that Belarus could invite a labor army from Pakistan numbering around 100-150 thousand workers to raise from their knees the enterprises of the agricultural sector of the Vitebsk, Gomel and Mogilev regions, the Baranovichi Cotton Association, which produces yarn and fabrics, and even, perhaps, to work at BelAZ and the Minsk Automobile Plant:


President Lukashenko himself spoke about the fact that official Minsk is waiting for Pakistani labor migrants together with their families at a meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif:


Alexander Grigoryevich countered the concerns of the alarmed Belarusian public about the mass influx of people with a different mentality, religion and culture as follows:


And really, what? And we still laugh at the Europeans.