 Hello and welcome to our panel today. It's great to have you all here at New America for our panel on the launch of our report, Soleimani Shadow. We're gonna be looking today at the Fatemi Yun division in Iranian proxy and it's sort of place in Iran strategy and the way in which Iran looked at using propaganda to cultivate Afghan fighters for its frontline strategy in the region. I'm Candice Rondeau. I am the director of the Future Frontlines program at New America, which is a public intelligence service that looks at how conflict and polarization and information warfare collide in today's 21st century conflicts. And I am also a professor at Arizona State University and a senior fellow at the Center on the Future of War, which is a joint initiative of New America and Arizona State University. Before I introduce our guests today, who are a fabulous panel of some of the world's best experts on all things Afghanistan and Iran. I wanna give you a little bit of background about how this panel came to be and how we kind of pulled this report together and where it all came from. For the last three years, New America has been working with researchers around the world to document the evolution of 21st century proxy warfare, primarily in the Middle East but also looking of course at Eurasia and the war in Ukraine. We have over the last three years published about a dozen reports looking at the way in which the United States, Iran, Russia and others have used proxy forces, foreign forces to fight their wars on their behalf on the cheap. The report that was just launched today, Soleimani Shadow, was authored by myself, Amir Timaj, who's one of our panelists and Arif Amar, who's another one of our panelists. And it really covers a wide range of things. So we have a great program for you today that I think will show I think how today the evolution of proxy warfare involves not just guns and guys but increasingly involves a look at narratives and social media in particular, increasingly plays a role in how these narratives are shaped. So let me first kick off by introducing our panelists. First, let me start with my colleague Amir Timaj. Amir has been working with us at New America on this report for quite some time now. He has a background in looking at Iran and its political and economic factors and how that shapes Iran's strategy and geopolitics. He is the co-founder of the Axis Resistance Monitor and he is one of the top scholars out there on the Fatima Yud. Arif Amar, my longtime comrade in arms from Kabul from our days at International Crisis Group joins us today from Washington. He is an independent researcher who recently worked with the Armed Conflict location event database covering Afghanistan and he continues to cover Afghanistan from here in Washington. And then our two respondents today, the very brave gentleman who took it upon themselves to read our report and spend some time talking with us and who in many ways inspired our work. We have with us today Ali Alfana who in addition to being one of another scholar who's worked very hard on the Fatima Yud is a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute and he's the author of the political succession in the Islamic Republic of Iran. And then also, last but not least, joining us from Kabul is Ahmad Shudra Jamal, another longtime comrade in arms and also a great scholar on all things Fatima Yud. Today, he is joining us from Kabul where he works with the National Security Council of Afghanistan and of course is a key player in the future of Afghanistan today. So let's start maybe if we can our conversation with kind of a 35,000 foot view. We're gonna kind of run through kind of some of the things that we know and don't know about the Fatima Yud and where they fit in Iran in our conversation and then we'll have some time for Q and A toward the end of our discussion today. So just kind of as a scene setter, one thing we know of course right now is that the war in Afghanistan and the US involvement in Afghanistan is beginning to wind down and different players, stakeholders in the region, Iran, Russia, China, are all starting to try and position themselves for what will be a post-NATO Afghanistan. The question we probably have though is how did we arrive at this point where Iran finds itself in a place where it can position itself? And I think I wanna turn to Ali first and see if he can kind of give us a kind of snapshot of A where we are today in terms of Iran's involvement in Afghanistan in the region writ large but also talk a little bit about why Iran has decided on a proxy warfare strategy in the first place. So a very good afternoon to you all and thank you very much for kindly mutation and for providing this opportunity to share my analysis with you. I think the war in Afghanistan shows us that proxy warfare is demonstrably effective in our words. It is a very desirable way of war. 20 years ago, the United States invaded Afghanistan, managed to dismantle the Taliban regime and has been trying to rebuild Afghanistan for the past two decades. And exactly during those two decades, a neighboring country, Pakistan, has waged a proxy warfare against the United States of America and against the NATO alliance and appears to have won that proxy war. It is a war which has crippled the United States military and makes the Afghan government incapable of controlling its territory. Pakistan has done it on the cheap if it had gotten involved in Afghanistan directly by deploying a national army, it would have been directly in war with the United States. It has done so indirectly and it has not paid that much money to the Taliban proxies that very soon unfortunately may even seize control over the capital Kabul. And let's also not forget that Pakistan has more or less never been held responsible for its proxy warfare against the United States. In this light, it's perfectly understandable that any country, not just the Islamic Republic of Iran, but any country is inspired by this method of warfare, which manages to cripple a formidable military organization as that of the United States military and crushes the political will for fighting in Washington. So, I mean, I wanna push back a little bit, but also kind of open the floor to talk to Amir a little bit as well, but you mentioned Ali, just to press the point a little bit that Pakistan hasn't paid very much. In fact, it seems like Pakistan has benefited from the largesse of the United States simultaneously. What do we make of that? Why was it so difficult for the United States to understand and manage the role of Pakistan in the context of the region? The United States largesse towards Pakistan is the reason why other countries, particularly the Islamic Republic of Iran, find it also desirable to have a nuclear weapon capability because the United States knows very well that yes, Pakistan as it is, is a nuisance, but what if this regime collapses? Who will get hold of the nuclear weapons? Therefore, Pakistan and the government of Pakistan, the ISI, they can behave extremely badly and at the same time be rewarded for that bad behavior because collapse of the regime in Pakistan and chaos would be even worse from the point of view of the United States than the destructive and destructive behavior of Pakistan in Afghanistan. In this slide, the conclusion for the Islamic Republic is very clear. Yes, the preferred method of waging wars against a larger and bigger power is proxy warfare. And two, it would be even more better if the Islamic Republic possessed a nuclear weapon capability. That's quite an assessment. Amir, given all the motivations and everything that Ali has just sort of unpacked for us in terms of kind of the regional view and this kind of 30,000 foot view on proxy warfare, just maybe try and set the scene a little bit for folks who don't know much about the Fatima Yun and Iran's relationship with Afghanistan and in particular the Hazara community of Shia Muslims that makes up such a substantial portion of Afghanistan's population. Thank you very much for this opportunity and for this panel. To sort of begin, we'll take back to the 1979 revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion on Afghanistan. After that, the IRGC started to sponsor some Afghan fighters to fight the Soviets but then soon found itself in world in the Iran-Iraq war after Iraq invaded in 1980. And that really diverted significant resources from supporting the war effort in Afghanistan. But as one IRGC commander, he retells it that they still started, they still continue to sponsor Afghan fighters to go fight the Soviets. And one commander had this idea that they could, as the way that he put it, increase training of fighters from the ground up and then to deploy them against the Soviets. And that became the idea of what was called the Abu Zabrigate, which was the unit of Afghan Shia fighters who went to fight for Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. And this is very remarkable given that the Soviet invasion was still growing in their own country. But that experience was short-lived because as we've read in the accounts of the IRGC and the veterans themselves that the IRGC use these Afghan fighters as very disposable. So after a year after they were formed, these Afghan fighters simply refused to fight. Meanwhile, the networks of these Afghan groups, they still remain some returned to Afghanistan following the Iran-Iraq war and the withdrawal of the Soviet Union to fight against the Taliban. And then most of them, all of them returned after the US invasion in 2001. Fast forward to 2011, when the Syrian uprising happened, the Islamic Republic perceived that as an existential threat from the onset because the Assad and the Alawite regime have been steady allies of the Islamic Republic from the onset. And Syrian territory provides access to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is the crown jewel of the Islamic Republic's Arab proxy and a pillar of its power projection abroad. And they figured that if a Sunni uprising succeeded, any Sunni government after that would probably tilt away from Iran. So they view that as unacceptable and made the decision by the top echelon by the IRGC and the Supreme Leader to commit to a strategy to prevent the fall of Assad at any cost. And the plan B at the time was to, should Assad fall, create the condition for an Alawite-laid enclave that would be allied for Iran, that would secure Iran's strategic interest in Syria. That's why we see big part of Iran's war effort in the early phases of conflict were focused on the border with Lebanon. And around 2012, when the Islamic Republic saw the situation in Syria deteriorating rapidly and the Syrian military was hemorrhaging manpower due to defections and due to insurgent gains. And they started to, at the time itself too, they were also embroidered in international sanctions over the nuclear program that was increasingly biting, including with the oil embargo and other secondary sanctions. So they figured to turn to proxy warfare. So as what Ali was saying was to essentially achieve their objectives on the chief while also manage escalation because a full Iranian invasion of the Levant would have been unacceptable to the world powers at the time. So they started to bring in Iraqi paramilitary groups who previously had significant experience fighting US-led coalition forces in Iraq. And then Hezbollah started to trick roll in with this open intervention in 2013. But even in 2012, 2013, they started to see that they needed a lot more manpower. And the answer to them was hiding in plain sight was that they could tap into Afghan shias. There's three million Afghan shias living in Iran right now, not all of them living legally. They face discrimination at both state level and both at the social level. But they figured that they could really tap in as to this resource to fill the manpower shortage that they have. And initially they tapped into the networks who had previously fought for the IRGC in Iran in Iraq for against the Soviets and against the Taliban. And that's what the first wave, the vast majority of them were veterans of this conflict. And they started to deploy initially at auxiliaries through Iraqi paramilitary groups. And towards late 2013, when most fighters started to come, the unit grew and thus was born the Fatimun Brigade. And Fatimun means people of Fatimah. It is named after the daughter of Prophet Mohammed Fatimah and the wife to Imam Ali, who was the cousin and also son-in-law of Mohammed. And one of the earliest converses, I mean, shias believe that the line of succession after the death of the Prophet should have gone to Ali and his descendants from the Prophet. And that's important to know for context because the daughter of Fatimah and Ali, her shrine is in Syria near Damascus. And the call to defend the shrine became a very powerful motivator for shias to wage holy war in Syria. And shias today are about 10 to 15% of the global Muslim community, but in the land stretch from Iran to the Levant, more than 50% at the time. So the IRGC's bet on the Fatimun proved very effective and they were instrumental in the IRGC's war effort in Syria, which successfully prevented the fall of Assad. And it must be noted that the IRGC's war effort will not have succeeded without the backing of Russian air power and Russian special forces were extremely effective and they escalated together in 2050. Right, I mean, so we can drill down a little bit more on the kind of the Russian-Iranian cooperation and collaboration and what that means or what that meant for the sort of the beginning of the Fatimun's kind of revival as it were. But I wanna turn to Arif because you've lived and worked in Afghanistan forever, you're born and raised there. You're part of the community that is affected by all of this. And more importantly, you've been an incredible resource for us on our report. So what was the other side of the equation from your point of view, Arif? I mean, what was the calculus for all the young men who suited up to fight for Iran essentially and join the Fatimun division? And do you remember roughly kind of when you started hearing about that and how you first received news about the Fatimun division? Thank you, Candice. It has been a pleasure working with you and Amir on this report. Let me start with the when did I hear about it or how did we hear in Kabul? Number one, that the news about the division came very late to Afghanistan because the bulk of the recruitment took place in Iran as Amir pointed out. And in Kabul, when we learned about it, so we thought that it has been a very secret operation and a secret type of process to recruit people. So there was little information until between 2015 and 2016 there was not much about in the social media or in the ministry media about the division's role, what they are doing in Syria. When the news about some of the major shocking news like the detention of some prisoners of the Fatimun division came out that Daesh released to the social media. This was a sort of alarm and this was the kind of breaking news for many viewers and audiences in Afghanistan that there are sheer fighters in Syria. And then gradually the social media played a very important role in terms of sharing information about more information about the Fatimun. But again, I should emphasize that the mainstream media in Afghanistan did not cover a lot about it. There was not a lot of substance information about Fatimun division in Afghanistan. And this was very interesting because maybe there are different reasons behind that but the main reason could be that there was not a lot of perception among the community and also within the Afghan society because of the sensitivity of the issue and because of the sectarian part of that, there could be many other reasons behind that. So in terms of the motives and how the young fighters volunteered or they were recruited so there are two different perceptions or there are two different schools of thought about this. The most dominant one is that most of the young Afghans who have lived in Iran for, who have been grown up, I should call them the third generation of these refugees who have lived in Iran, their parents have lived, have migrated to Iran during the 1970s and 80s. So the bulk of the recruitment took place from within these young people, young men who have, most of them have been born in Iran or they have grown up in Iran. So this was the main factor that people didn't know a lot about that in Afghanistan. And the second thing, the second important thing about this aspect is that most of these young men were jobless or they were facing financial constraints in Iran. At the same time, they were facing social pressures and frustrations because of discriminations and problems of residency and things like that. So a large number of these young people were facing a crisis of community identity and they were facing a financial crisis. So they joined the division because they were given promises of good salaries. They were given the promises of issuing for the issuance of permanent residency in Iran. At the same time, so these young people were in the pursuit of acquiring or receiving a sort of social prestige within their families and communities in Iran. So these are some of the factors that they joined and it was appealing for them to join the ranks. But I will also categorize in the second hand, the ideological and religious factor behind this that a number of Fatimid fighters who have joined the ranks, who have joined voluntarily, they are inspired and influenced by the ideological and religious factor and sympathy that is as there is, that has been resulted by the IRGC's very strong strategic communication and propagation to defend the harem of Zainab in Syria and to embrace martyrdom and then come back home or you will be granted with a lot of things, you will earn money, you will earn prestige and you will also earn martyrdom. So it was a win-win situation and game for most of these young fighters who volunteered to go to Syria. So as a whole, it's important to emphasize again that a lot of things happened and developed within Iran and then the news later on came out of Afghanistan into the community between 2015 and 2016. And in 2016, there were a couple of articles which were issued by the New York Times and Wallister Journal and that was also a sort of information sharing more about what is happening within the Fatimid and who are they and why they are fighting in Iran. So in general, the division, I should say that the division has been comprised of both religious and non-religious compensation, but mostly the motive has been non-religious rather than religious. And I can continue on this if there are further questions on that. Thanks, Arif, that's really, I mean, you're kind of touching on a lot of different things that I think are very much central to our report in terms of kind of the backgrounds of a lot of these young men who went to fight, but also kind of some of the grievances and grievance narratives. And Shuja, you spent a lot of time before you joined the government, interviewing current and former members of the Fatimid Union Division, some who had returned back to not just Iran, but to Afghanistan. What's your take? I mean, what did you hear from them about their experience, not just their motivations, but their actual, their experience on the frontline? Well, thank you very much, Candice, for having me and congratulations on this excellent, excellent report. I followed the work of the people on this panel for a number of years and I've tremendous respect for the expertise and the thoroughness and the quality of the work that they produce. And I am privileged very much to be on this panel. As you said, I've actually followed the work of the Fatimid for a few years. My first contribution was some research that I did for Human Rights Watch back in 2014, after which I kept working on this issue as an independent researcher, produced a report for the US Institute of Peace. And now that I'm in the government, I am cracking the issue as well, including with the Iranian government, that we've had some conversations on this issue. But today, in order to be able to speak freely, to be able to speak much more usefully to your audience here, I'm gonna be speaking not as a public official, but as an individual researcher who's worked on this issue for a few years. So to add on top of the excellent comments and contributions made by Aaref and Amir, let me add that there was some voluntary recruitment, but there was also a vast scale of either direct coercion or circumstances that actually amounted to coercion, coercive recruitment. In 2014, 13, when ISIS was on the rise, they were threatening the outskirts of Damascus itself. The US troops were, so four or five things are coinciding together. One of them was that in Afghanistan, the US troops started withdrawing, which means that they stopped their counter-terrorism, sorry, they stopped the counter-insurgency mission. And so at around this time, also the international aid to Afghanistan started dropping precipitously. And so a lot of people started panicking. The wave of refugees that washed up on the shores of Europe also prompted a lot of Afghans to go to regional countries, including Iran. At the same time, the Iranian response was that they escalated significantly the forced deportations of Afghans across the border. And this was not just a forced deportation escalated to unprecedented proportions. This was deportation that the deportees were forced to pay for. And so that was trend number two. Trend number three was the Syria escalated around 2014, 2015. Trend number four, sorry, trend number five was that people leaving Afghanistan in a panic in search of employment opportunities in Iran only to encounter increased threats of deportation that you were forced to pay for were given the choice. You either go and fight in Syria or you go home. If you go and fight in Syria, you become martyred. It's everlasting glory for you. But if you don't and you survive, then here are some of the incentive packages that you and your family could be qualified for. The problem with the incentive package was that it was a game of sort of telephone. I heard that somebody said that this is what the Iranian government is paying you. And so there was a lot of information, but among it there was also a lot of misinformation. So people were misled either by design or by default about the benefits that awaited them at the other end. And so with these sort of complex set of motivations you're putting together a number of divisions to amount into an army at the peak of it, which ideally would not be an excellent fighting force primarily because the motivations are so diverse. And so if you compare the Fadi immune fighters with the people flocking to the ISIS ranks in Syria around the same time, the ISIS fighters were radicalized, radical extremists who flocked into Syria. The Fadi immune were non-radicals who went into Syria and fought and some of them may have returned as radicals after the fighting experience in Syria because in Syria there was indoctrination, they had religious people working at them on Fridays and Thursdays and Ashura's and Muharram's and Ramadhan's. And so what you have is two different sort of directions of causality, radicalism drove ISIS fighters to Syria, a mix of issues drove Fadi immune fighters into Syria and some of them returned radicals. So all of this is to say that a number of international global trends intersected, I think I described four or five that propelled this unprecedented number of Afghans fighting at proxy war abroad. So I mean, that's, you are raising, I mean, all of those trend lines converging as they did, kind of at the outset of the Arab Spring, plus, interestingly regime change in Washington that kind of coincided, right? I mean, Obama is leaving office in 2012 or at least he's changing his administration in 2012. And so we have new players and as usual, as always happens every four years in Washington, there's a sort of reassessment of how to deal with Syria, how to deal with Iran, how to deal with Afghanistan, but they're all perennially chain linked together. And we think about that often in terms of states as if they're sort of monoliths doing stuff, chess pieces on the board, but what you and Ali and Amir and Arif are describing is actually a pretty messy set of circumstances where you have mixed motivations. And I think to Ali's point earlier on, when we talk about proxy forces, particularly in this context in the cauldron that is South Asia and the Middle East, we have to talk about them in a comparative way. I think your observation that ISIS, consistent of fighters who wanted to be there, they sacrificed an enormous amount. They left their families behind. Sometimes they took their families with them and lost them. There was a completely different set of motivations going on there and an extremely effective propaganda campaign on behalf of the ISIS kind of core. And interestingly, what I think at the center of our work in this paper, we wanted to make sure that we weren't replicating stuff that had been done before. I mean, you've talked with all the fighters before, Shooja and Ali, of course, has covered kind of the kind of 35,000 foot view and put all that into context. But for us, I think for Amir and I and Arif, we were really compelled by the fact that the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is, of course, the premier force and strategy, leading Iran's strategy in the region, expended so much energy and money and it's a political capital on building up YouTube channels and Twitter accounts and Facebook posts and Sarush, right? Which is the kind of Iranian version of Twitter, basically, or telegram, kind of closer to telegram. And there were all these other pieces, these other elements that came to play. And I think, Amir, you hit on this in your look at how the pilgrimage, pilgrimages from either Afghanistan or Iran into Iraq, where you have all these sacred, and Syria and all these sacred shrines is a key and pivotal part of the cultivation and kind of the cultural production that the IRGC finds so useful. So talk a little bit about that and kind of this sort of combo pack, if you will, of how Iran leveraged social media in this 21st century environment and then these kind of old school methods of just pamphleting people and recruiting them at the shrines on the pilgrimage trail. Absolutely. Okay. You know what? If you would like to go first and have to differ. Okay, thank you. That is a very good question, and I'll briefly talk about the Islamic Republic's cricketer relationship with social media. Initially after, especially after the 2009 protests in Iran in which protestors mobilized against the Islamic Republic by coordinating through Twitter and Facebook, the state took a very hard approach and we still see remnants of that where Twitter, Facebook, virtually every single social media outlet except Instagram, perhaps, is censored in Iran. But in the 2010s, we start to see a change in this approach that they see advantages and benefits to social media through which to project influence, power, shape their own narrative. And I think the best point case that illustrates that is the rise of Ghassan Soleimani, the former commander of the Quartz Force, of the Quartz Force who was killed in 2020 by a U.S. drone strike. He became famous through selfies on social media. And this was after the rise of ISIS in 2014 where there were questions in Tehran about Soleimani's management of the war, how he could not foresee ISIS's incursion. So then he started to post photos with fighters in the front line and he became an internet sensation. There were memes about him and he became a superstar. And Soleimani transformed to both the medium and the message about the Islamic Republic's power projection in the Middle East. And that really illustrated the point that they could really take advantage of these opportunities on social media. So one, Candice, to your point about pilgrimage sites was how there's a Shia pilgrimage called Advain, which commemorates the 40th day after the death of the third Shia Imam Hussein at Karaballa in the seventh century. And he was killed by the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate and Hussein is the son of Fatima and Ali. And that is a very pivotal moment in Shia's end, the Shia Sunni split. And Advain is tens of millions of people have gone there. It's one of the largest pilgrimages in the world. And there's a tradition where people often go on foot to there, whether it fits from Iran or far to distances or they go to some cities in Iraq, like Ajaf and such and go to the pilgrimage sites. So what the IRGC started doing is they set up eight stations, whether it's at the border crossing between Iran, Iraq, whether it's eight dishes along the way where they would hand out literature, pamphlets, they have eight stations where they put up posters of martyrs. There's even lately where they post documentaries on the Fatima and these others to sort of project the message that what the IRGC is doing is to defend Shia's. And one thing that really helped them was ISIS that was very public about its genocidal attends towards Shia's. And another case and point about how sort of the IRGC took advantage of social media was the biggest hits that they had briefly touched on two points were footages in combat, especially in which fighters who moments before their death, they take a video and they extoll values of martyrdom, self-sacrifice and those become really popular social media. And there's another one about religious singers how they go leave congregation and ritual chest beatings and they sort of copy modern music modern music, implement elements of pop and such to make catchy religious songs. And these have proven extremely effective to motivate fighters. We saw it in the Iran-Iraq war and a lot of these guys went to Syria to rile up fighters before combat and then post the videos online that were passed around. And these are some of the examples that the IRGC used also briefly touched on another one was IRGC linked and state media outlets have set up these professional studios where they were when a fighter was killed. Some fighters, they essentially have the family meet the cascade of the fighter. As you can imagine, this is a very emotional raw event and they capture it all with the family and basically essentially embracing the fighter they show everything about it and then they go post that online on Instagram and reading through the comment sections those were the ones that really riled up a lot of emotion, people who were writing on this road often sectarian messages, often time against Sunnis against Erdogan and everything. So these were some of the examples which the IRGC's propaganda machine including state media outlets in which the Islamic Republic has invested billions of dollars over the years took advantage of new technology and social media to get their messages across and socializing new generation of Iranians. And while there was a smaller generation than the Iran-Iraq war, this was very energetic for the Islamist-based central Rialah fighters. So, I mean, a mix of the old and the new, right? I mean, I think that's one of the things that is so remarkable about Iran's very, I mean, I think a learning journey in a way in terms of drawing on its experience from the 1980s and then pivoting to use social media in ways that perhaps it would not have thought to do some time ago, but then combining that with these kind of old school methods. But the threat, the central threat is the Sunni-Shia schism, the kind of narratives around marginalization and kind of playing on those grievances amongst the population that in Afghanistan and also the bordering regions of Afghanistan with Iran, right? A lot of Hazaras find themselves in these very precarious circumstances, which Shudu was just describing. And one of the things I think, Arif, that you actually explored, I think in great detail, was also kind of the influence of these old line networks from some of the Afghans imams who back in the 1950s, 60s began kind of cultivating ties across the border in, of course, the sacred city of Gom and also in Najaf. Talk a little bit about that and kind of how that played out and how it continues to play out today. In the context of the Shia-wold connection, how the Shia scholars have connected with each other during the course of the modern history. So of course, there have been a few number of Shia scholars from the Afghan Shia community, both Hazara Shia and non-Hazara Shia, as I should say, because Shia is not only the Hazaras in Afghanistan, there are, there's a great other communities that there are also Shias. So back in the 1940s and 50s, this exchange of scholars started and Afghans started moving out of Afghanistan, traveling to Mashhad and then from Mashhad to Qum and then some of them traveled to Iraq and to Syria because in terms of the Shias, Shias are very popular universities, religious universities, there are two of them very popular. One is based in Najaf, which is a religious city and also the shrine of Imam Ali, the Shia's first Imam is based there. So Najaf has always, has been, since long time has been a very important place for the scholars. So many scholars and religious authorities have graduated from Najaf. And then from Najaf, when the Islamic Revolution was successful, so they tried somehow to transfer the authority of the Shia leadership and authorities from Najaf to Qum and the Iranian invested a lot to turn Qum as the main headquarters of the Shia world scholars. So back in the 1950s and 60s, a number of the Afghan Shias traveled like Ismail Balchi and he was the first pioneer of the Afghan Shias who migrated, who traveled actually to Iran and then he started studying in Mashhad and then he traveled down further to Iraq and Syria. So he was a type of Sayyid Jamaluddin, another popular figure in the Islamic world. He wanted to travel around and find out more and to make connections with the rest of Islamic scholars around the world. So he was the first man who pioneered this. And then when he returned back to Afghanistan, so he faced problems within the government and he was, he did not find a kind of easy space within his own community. He was under pressure by the government. So he traveled back to Iran and then he established this contact and he was an inspiration for several other important Shia leaders who traveled between Iran and Afghanistan. And so there has been a connection and this connection was strengthened during the Jihad in the 1980s, the Jihad against the Soviet, the war against Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. And then IRGC, which is very popular in terms of how to manage all these small networks of religious groups and other groups. So they're somehow controlled and they maintain contact and connection with these religious figures because these religious figures were given the funds to establish madrasas and also to disseminate funds to the rest of cultural religious activities both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So the connection has always been there and this connection was kind of a kind of Shia religious type of inspiration for the rest of the community. And the IRGC has utilized these Shia religious figures in a very effective manner from time to time. So as we have observed in this report that some of these religious figures have issued religious decrees and fitwas from Baghdad, from Qum and they have encouraged the young fighters to go to Syria and defend the Haram of Zainab. So the religious aspect of the issue is very much prominent here, of course. However, I should mention that it has been done in a very low profile manner because of the sensitivity of the issue back in the Afghan society because Hazaras have proved to be a responsible community in Afghanistan, especially in the post Taliban era and they have participated very openly and widely in the democratic process in the country. So the religious sect or actual layers of the society have been very cautious and conservative. And we have no evidence in the side of Afghanistan that a religious leader or a Shia religious authority has encouraged or issued something, a statement in favor of Fatim Yun. And that's something very important to notice here. And we also have somehow pointed out that in the report. Yeah, I mean, so I see Shuja nodding and I'm gonna turn to him in a second, the other Kabouli here and I'm the fake Kabouli but I just want to sort of offer, I think an additional- The exception. Thank you for accepting me. One of the things I want to sort of say here, many people have asked me over the years, I've been going in and out of Afghanistan, it's been a long time since I've been there, but I've been working on Afghanistan and trying to understand it for a very long time. And a frequent question I get from a lot of Americans is what's going on there? What's it like? And I think one of the things that for me is really important for, I think not only our American audience and others to understand is, Afghanistan is a majority minority country. And when we talk about its population makeup and we talk about the Taliban and all these different factions, it's really important to remember that it's extremely diverse. And it's not just diverse in terms of ethnicity. I mean, there's a deep diversity of thought and experience. Importantly, I think in the Hazara community, something that I have noted in my years of working alongside a lot of Hazaras, there is, again, a very, very gated idea about the role of religion in life. Some Hazaras are just really straight up secular, just as many Pashtuns are, just as many Tajiks are. So it's important as we're talking here not to sort of paint with a broad brush the entire Hazara community. What we're talking about here is a very narrow slice. And I'm sure you have someone to say on that. Yes, absolutely. And look, in the course of the report that I did for the USIP, I spoke not only with dozens of these current and former fighters, but also dozens of Afghan, Hazara, and Shia political, community, and religious leaders. And what you see in that process is that all of them, almost without reservation, support the fight against ISIS. For reasons that we all understand, ISIS is a tech theory organization, tech theory ideology and all of that. But in fact, almost all of them are actually opposed to the use of Afghan citizens in the fight against ISIS and somebody else's land. In fact, many of them are outright afraid of what that would mean for the community in Afghanistan because ISIS is not just a phenomenon in Syria or parts of Iraq, but it's become unfortunately a bit of a global phenomenon, the presence in Afghanistan as well. And so to the extent that there's a difference in the operating environment in which Afran Shias are picked for fighting abroad by Iran. I remember Amir talked about the Abu Zad group in the during the so-called sacred defense, Iran-Iraq war. There's a tremendous difference. And the difference is that back then and in the during the sacred defense, there wasn't enough awareness, there wasn't enough community mobilization around the issue. But today not only is there significantly greater awareness but there's also significantly greater opposition to Iran's use of Shia fighters in conflicts abroad. And so the Pan Shia ideology in Afghanistan has few if any takers, I'm not saying there are no takers, Pan Shia ideology in Afghanistan has few if any takers, which is important because it has long-term implications not just for Iran, but also for Afghanistan and for the region. So when we talk about the Shias in Afghanistan, I think it's important for us to speak with nuance and finesse, the way we speak about communities elsewhere in other countries. And so this is also significant, especially the implications in Afghanistan because Iran has actually shown to be a very highly rational and motivated by itself interest because it's maintained excellent relationship with al-Qaeda that's been very well documented in the public domain. It's also maintained good relations with Taliban over the years, even though there was that very bitter and acrimonious sort of emotionally scarring experience where the Taliban killed a number of Iranian diplomats in the 1990s in Mazhar Sharif. And so if Iran were to use a proxy unit in Afghanistan, it's a thought experiment. I think the much more, this is by no means to say that this is happening or this is being planned, it's just as a thought experiment. If Iran were to use an organized militia group in Afghanistan, they would have a much better chance of being effective with the minimal investment if they used, say, the Taliban to protect its interests as opposed to the Fatimid, which is a much more scattered, diverse. A lot of them are skeptical, cynical. The returnees doing like the Roman legionnaires, you go fight and you come back to your farm outside of Rome. A lot of these Afghan former fighters in the Fatimid come back and they've settled in these areas, either in cities, but also in some of their older farm communities to return to their fathers and to their families. Like I said, a lot of these people were lured with the promises of a number of things. Some of those promises were genuinely made by the organizers, the IRGC, others were not. And so when you go there and you come back expecting the promises that were made or not made, but you thought that were made, but you were not entitled to anything in reality, then you become cynical and jaded. And so to organize a cynical and jaded group of Afghans in Afghanistan, because remember some of the more motivated Fatimid actually who received Iranian benefits have not really returned in Afghanistan. They're still in Iran. So to organize sort of a disgruntled, jaded group of scattered Afghans in Afghanistan to into a cohesive fighting unit, you have a much more uphold battle as opposed to using say the Taliban outright. So that's just an observation of thought experiment. The point is that it's important to speak about the Shia religious community in Afghanistan with Vanessa and that the pan Shia ideology that a lot of the people ascribed to this community is actually not as strong as many people believe, especially many, many folks who've studied this outside of Afghanistan. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, a great point. This might seem like a bit of a raw comparison, but the black community in the United States, which is of course a minority is by no means monolithic, right? And you have religious African-Americans, you have non-religious ones, you have liberals, you have conservatives, and there's been no successful pan African-American movement except for the role of trying to push for civil rights, right? And I think actually interestingly, there is a parallel in Afghanistan in terms of the Hazara's sort of role in pushing for a more equal and accessible governance structure in Afghanistan. So let me turn to Ali because, you know, he has kind of like this 30,000 foot view. He's our resident theorist. What do you think Ali, I mean, given everything that we've said here are some of the big lessons learned strategically for Iran, not only just on the Fatima Yuen, but maybe talk a little bit about kind of the use of propaganda and kind of narratives to build mobilization. What do you think Iran's takeaways are? Well, then I take the liberty of starting with the strategic lessons that the Islamic Republic has learned. The Islamic Republic in the 1980s had aligned itself with the Sunni, but Persian-speaking Tajik community in the West, mostly known as the Northern Alliance and with such prominent gentlemen on top of the organization, such as Mr. Borhana Dina Rabbani, Mr. Ahmad Shah Massoud and others. And the other Iranian allies at the time in the 1980s were the multiple competing and rivaling Hazara groups who were Shia and loyal to the Islamic Republic, most of them. But towards the end of the 1990s, strategists in Tehran discovered that they had made a terrible mistake only by restricting their friends and allies to the Tajik and Hazara communities. They needed also to have friends among the Taliban who were supported by Pakistan, they were a Pakistani proxy, but the Islamic Republic strategists also sense that this group also has Pashtun ethno-nationalism but also some degree of Afghan nationalism. So it is a group that at least in the future they could deal with. So after the terrible incidents of Mazhar Sharif and the killing of Iranian diplomats and intelligence officers, the Islamic Republic tried to establish some kind of contacts. And over the years, those contacts have matured to the degree that when one of the leaders of Taliban had been staying in Iran for more than three or four months and was returning to Afghanistan, that individual was killed by a U.S. drone, which country gave the information about this individual's movements from Iran to Afghanistan, the government of Pakistan obviously, because Pakistan wants to monopolize ownership over Taliban. So now we have this really interesting game playing out in Afghanistan where an organization which started as a Pakistani proxy, which is now the preferred partner of the government of the United States, a government which sends Ambassador Khalidzal to transfer power to the Taliban from the current democratically elected Afghan government and Iran, which is trying to appeal to the ethno-nationalism of the Pashtun's event. So in this interesting situation, Taliban is desired by all. And I do believe that the Islamic Republic also has learned the lesson that it was largely unsuccessful with the part of the division. I have done statistical studies over those killed in combat in Syria, particularly on the Iranian side. And I see 1,000 Afghans who were members of the Fatima division and who were killed in combat in Syria. And the total number of active Fatima division members who have been around in Syria and also in Iran never exceeded 20,000. Compare this number with the million large Afghan immigrant community in Iran. This community exceeds two million individuals. So in other words, the Islamic Republic discovered that it could not, in a meaningful and effective way, mobilize the Afghans. Those Afghans who were mobilized, they were not good fighters. The entire leadership cadre of the Fatima division was annihilated, killed in the war in Syria. Mr. Tabasim, Mr. Bashkin, number two in command of the division. So it is quite natural and that in this light, the Islamic Republic prefers to have lines of communication with the Taliban so that there is no vacuum of power. After a Taliban seizure of power in Afghanistan, this is their expectations. This is certainly not what I'm personally hoping for. But those relations securing Iran, I would say, an accommodation with the new regime which may come to power in Kabul. So, Shuja, I see you nodding your head. And I wanna remind people that Shuja is here, speaking in his own personal capacity, but I wonder if you could chime in a little bit on some of the lessons learned. I think Ali made a number of important points, including the fact that the Fatimune hasn't really proven to be any kind of, anybody's even remote idea of an elite, religiously, highly motivated fighting unit. I think you're beginning to see in recent years, since at least 2017, that the Iranian government is actually downsizing the Fatimune, primarily because there is insubordination in the ranks. I spoke to a couple of these people who said, our Iranian handlers were telling us to go fight there and we kept telling them it's certain death and he kept saying, but you have to go and he was one and we were many and we beat him up. And so as a result, I was brought back to Iran and it sort of disciplined. So those kinds of things are happening. And when you talk about a scenario like that, you're talking about the role of motivation and radicalism in the battlefield. A lot in the recruitment of the Fatimune, unlike a regular army, there's no physical standards. If you can stand up and walk and hold a gun, you're welcome to be there. There's no screening for drug use. There's no screening for any kind of physical difficulty. There's no screening, even for whether your family knows about you. A lot of people have actually faked paperwork. And so when you're putting the lowest of the low bars and recruiting a group like that, then you get the result that you get with the Fatimune, which is low morale, low motivation, an ineffective group of fighting group and a group that has had a surprisingly large number of its leadership wiped out in the three or four peak active years of its activity in Syria. And so Iran has actually been downsizing. They've been taking away the insubordinates. They're taking away the elderly. They're taking away the people who've had substance abuse issues, which they try to replicate on the battlefield or if they didn't receive the substances that they really needed and dependent on, they were ineffective. And so they're sort of whittling down to a core helping that they whittled down to a core radicalized, highly motivated, battle-hardened militia, which may or may not be useful down the road. I'll stop there. Yeah, well, thank you. Listen, I mean, it's funny because Arif and Amir and I were just talking this morning. Obviously we've been monitoring developments in preparation for the launch of the report. But it's kind of interesting that within the last month or so, you've seen Iran kind of sending kind of messy signals at the same time. Like I think your observations and all these observations that there are some big lessons learned here and that Iran understands the limits of the Fatimiyun and its ability to kind of influence and then mobilize and then in the context of the Afghanistan world that we know today soon to be posted at NATO. But let me quickly turn to Arif and Amir before we then get to questions and answers with the audience. I mean, Arif, tell us a little bit about, first of all, we saw, I think a couple of days ago, there was a visit from Ismail Kani, the Quds Force commander out to Syria. What was that about? There was an unconfirmed news actually, but it was reflected on a number of think tanks based in Syria and a number of Arab world researchers that reported that Mr. Qaani, the current Quds commander has visited recently Fatimiyun headquarters in Syria around July 9 or around July 8. So that's what we know about that that much. And then there was another piece of news which was interesting was that the Fatimiyun division have attacked the US forces in some locations in Syria and they have exchanged fight with each other. So we keep receiving such kind of news in the past couple of weeks from Syria. At the same time, if you have a look at the social media, whenever you search about Fatimiyun, there are a lot of people, anonymous, or some known people who are asking, what is the role of Fatimiyun now in Afghanistan as the Taliban are advancing and they are taking territories of Shia community inside Afghanistan? Is there any role for Fatimiyun inside Afghanistan or not? And this takes us to another question that what is next for Fatimiyun? So still Iran is trying to play the strategy communication of the RGC is active and they maintain a lot of presence in the social media and they try to somehow portray the situation in a manner that Fatimiyun is still there and they are capable of attacking US. And also I can show you another piece of unconfirmed report which is very much interesting is that a number of very highly trained Fatimiyun fighters who are non-Hazarat Shias, they have been deployed and dispatched to the Israeli borders between Syria and Israel. And they are tasked with intelligence activities because the Iranian IRGC believe that Israelis have hired Arab intelligence agents across the border. So the best way to confront those Arab intelligence officers is to utilize Fatimiyun intelligence officers who do not look and feature like the Hazaras, but they are non-Hazarat Shia Fatimiyun. So these are some of the interesting stories that we hear from some of them or some of them are from context that we rely on them. And that's something interesting development happening. Yeah, so it's super interesting in the sense that like here we have a situation where, I mean, I think Ali and Shudja have made a great assessment essentially of kind of the practical and pragmatic lessons learned and how Iran is gonna apply them going forward, but still some signaling going on that it's a little unclear where those signals are coming from. We haven't really talked much about Israel and maybe we'll get into that. Amir, maybe you wanna touch on Israel. And I know that Shudja, I saw kind of a glancing two finger there and I'll give it to you. So Amir, quickly, why don't you tell us a little bit about your impressions? On the Israel point that the IRGC like its other poxies has tried to socialize in its indoctrination of fighters to cultivate this commitment that the Fatimune would fight and annihilate Israel, which is a very far-fetched dream, but that sort of goes to show how much of a emphasis they put in propaganda. And there's a video that made rounds earlier which the Fatimune co-founder, one of them where he was in Syrian Golan Heights was overlooking Israel and say, we'll take it over the summer. He was killed not that long after that. And they will sort of touch on what everybody has been saying, which I agree that in terms of, they want to keep a committed core of fighters to Syria. And then there's also another aspect of it that there's a couple of even potentially up to several hundred reportedly former Fatimune fighters who went to fight in Libya on behalf of Haftar. And then there was even one report from a local news agency that some Fatimune fighters stationed in Syria directly deployed to Libya from there. So essentially in subordination from the IRGC and they probably went for money. It's not hard to imagine with that. And there is a broader sense that the IRGC has reneged on a lot of its promises to Fatimune veterans and many of them were had to go back to Afghanistan to form that Shodja mentioned. And it's sort of becoming, it's not clear exactly how the IRGC is going to navigate. It's ties with the Taliban while also maintaining a core of Fatimune fighters, some of whom have gained significant combat experience. While they're also doing in Iran, I also briefly want to touch on that is that there's a lot of activities that the IRGC has sponsored with the Fatimune sort of cultural event there in association. There was when there was a flood in Iran in 2019 Fatimune Soleimani called on paramilitary groups to go to help people with the flood over there and Fatimune fighters or who were former fighters who were stationed in Iran. They also went, that was very unpopular largely with the Iranian public that created this perception that they were there to crack down on people or that whether these paramilitary groups would be used to crack down on protestors in not too distant future if it comes down to it. So that sort of strikes a really interesting contrast that there's all this emphasis we see scores of documentaries by the Fatimune sponsored by the Fatimune Media Center. They have all this access to these professional shops, IRGC-linked workshops that work with them. There's also one sponsored by the Imam Reza found patients, media organizations who work with the Fatimune and then the reality of it that IRGC has sort of tried to cut into Pakistan's influence among the Taliban. These are some interesting trends to watch in the future as we move forward. Well, I wish them luck with cutting into the Taliban's influence there. Shooja, go ahead. And actually, if you can just also, let's cap this a little bit, give me your two finger and then maybe since you're there in Kabul project forward what's the future look like? Cause that's one of the questions that we have and then we'll turn to the Q and A from the audience. Sure. And thanks for giving me the floor again, Candace. Let's go back to the first principles with respect to the Fatimune. First principles are these are Shia fighters going to Syria to protect Shia shrines, sectarian motivation and these were the principles that in some cases where there was voluntary motivation was the motivation and where there was a complex set of motivations, coercion, circumstances, but also in the event that I were to die, I'd be dying in the defense of an honorable cause with respect to my faith. So when I suppose in November, if I remember correctly, in November, 2017 when the Fatimune's media division issued a statement effectively declaring Daesh defeated in Syria, it used very interesting terminology started using the word and those Zionists. And so what they're trying to do is they're actually trying to redefine potentially sort of exploring the redefinition of the scope of the Fatimune's activities from a fiercely and sort of crochet anti-Daesh to Iran's broader strategic talking points, which is all of these Zionists, but also all of these Americans, the big Satan. And so when we talk about a Shia sectarian fighting group, it's important for us to also recognize that. I mean, we also hear about reports of these people being deployed to Yemen, being deployed in Libya. I think a lot of those are reports at this point, as far as I know, their deployment against Israeli interests, against US interests are still only reports, as far as I know, maybe some of the esteemed panelists here have more information than I do. But I think that would actually then veer into Iran's own strategic objectives as opposed to the strategic objectives of a sectarian-ly motivated Afghan Shia fighting force. And so going back to the first principles, I think this group would probably A, because they don't really blend in in Yemen, they look very different. They don't really blend in anywhere else. They even didn't blend in Syria itself. And B, they're really not trained to fight those Israelis or those Zionists. They're not really trained to fight or motivated to fight those Americans or those Libyans, for that matter. So I think, I don't know how much of that is really Iran trying to whip up an enemy after they ostensibly defeated ISIS to keep the group motivated and the group united and how much it really reflects Iran's long-term interest in deploying these people against these enemies. But in any case, I think at the current moment, the evidence I know of is very limited with respect to the use actual or perceived or planned of the Fatimid against these non-ISIS targets. I mean, such excellent points. As you were talking, I was thinking about the old adage in journalism, which is in war, truth is the first casualty. And it's just one of the things I think that is so important to keep in mind here, which is why we've spent so much time exploring the propaganda machine that Iran has kind of erected in order to support the Fatimid and to keep it alive is because especially from this distance here in Washington perhaps Brussels, because there is this kind of language barrier, cultural barrier between those who are observing from the outside and those who are experiencing from the inside and have kind of a better ground truth. Iran has a distinct advantage in being able to amplify untruths or to color things in ways that make it look more effective in its management of the Fatimid. So let me turn to Q&A here. We've got about 14 minutes left here in our call. And we've got some great questions. So first, of course, we kind of begun to probe this of what is the future of the Fatimid in Afghanistan and Middle East? We can, I think I'd ask each of the panelists to try and weave that in because people are very curious knowing that we are only weeks away from the full complete drawdown of the US forces. That is certainly on people's minds, but I think the question that rises to the top here is what kind of, what do Pakistani actions mean in terms of waging proxy warfare against the United States? Like what can we expect from Pakistan? And Ali, you began to kind of broach that a little bit, but now we've got a situation where the sort of the chief bogeyman, the United States is leaving. It should shift to some degree, Pakistan's position in terms of how it wants to see things fall out in Afghanistan. What can we expect from Pakistan? And I'd like to hear from each one of you, but I'm gonna start with Ali. Well, I do believe that Pakistan has managed to prevail in the war. It is promoting and heightening at the prestige of the Pakistan military. And it also tells the entire world that their strategic thinking is much deeper than any kind of strategic thought at the Washington think tax that I believe is the bitter reality. But of course, Pakistan would also be concerned that the Taliban developed a sense of agency once, and if, and unfortunately this may be the truth, when Taliban seizes Kabul, they will also have responsibility for the Afghan state. They will be on top of a system and they will not only be just a Pakistani proxy, they will also try to pursue their own agenda. And we already see those tendencies within the Taliban where they're trying to play Pakistan, the United States and Iran against each other. That is a very, very clever game that the Taliban is now playing. So I do believe that the chief concern of Islamabad in the coming years would be how to see to it that the Taliban is still more dependent on Pakistan rather than any other state. And Iran's concern and attempt would be to get as close to the Taliban regime as possible because they do know that the Chajik and Hazara communities alone cannot help Iran overthrow the Taliban regime. I mean, super interesting point. Let me turn to Ari for actually for his take because I mean, what you're saying Ali is essentially the Taliban for all intents and purposes maybe will own their own problem. And then they'll be at the top of the pile, potentially alongside portions of the Afghan government today trying to navigate a very unstable state. Ari, what do you think? Let me tell you that actually Iran is now starting another interesting phase of interaction and interference or I should call it intervention in Afghanistan. They're approaching the Taliban and they are hosting the Taliban officials in Tehran. At the same time we hear from our contacts and sources that the Iranian IRGC is pushing Fatimune and pro-Fatimune people within Iran, within the Shia community in Iran to explore venues of cooperation and venues of interaction with the Taliban. So this is adding a new sort of story to the overall scenario. This means that Iranians don't want their the Shia community to confront the Taliban's advancement especially when the Taliban are rushingly advancing their controlling territories. And now we have lost a couple of district centers and central highlands where Shia is populated in Afghanistan. So for Iran, the Taliban's emergence again at the political arena is I think they have made all measure, they have taken some very important measures from several years back and they have been supporting the Taliban cause of insurgency and the waste of the country. And now they are working within the Shia community in Iran to form a kind of Shura in Mashhad or somewhere. And this Shura will be somehow trying to catch base and communicate with the Taliban officials within the western part of the Afghanistan so that to avoid a confrontation of kind of sectarian thing that took place back in the 1990s where some few massacres took place. So I think that the Iranians are trying to mitigate this and they didn't want the Shia community to be attacked or to become victims of violence by the Taliban. But this is not easy as far as I understand Taliban are a different group and all politicians including President Joe Biden says that we can never trust the Taliban. And this is the question raised by the Iranians to their officials that do you trust the Taliban? And do we hear a lot of negative commentaries now within the Iranian audience about the recent behaviors of the Iranian regime with the Taliban. So in general Taliban will serve as a main proxy force in Afghanistan for Pakistan rather than Iran. And I think the honeymoon between Iran and the Taliban will not last long because once they control Kabul there will be a lot of issues on the border. And there will be a lot of issues which might threaten the interest of Iranians including cultural issues and historical issues that Afghanistan and Iranians have. So this is evident that the Taliban might be present for a long time in the borders of Iran particularly in Farah and Nimrods Kandahar and Nileman, something like that. But in general I should say that the Iranians will also try to maintain their connections and relationships with the former Northern Alliance and current Afghan leaders like Ismail Khan, like Jamal Atam-Mohammed Inour, and then like Mr. Khalili and Mouhaqiq who are representing the Shia Hazaras. So they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket. And it's important for Iranians to maintain all these. And I think IRGC has been doing that for the past few decades and they have maintained a sort of private and different types of organized and unorganized connections with all important actors on the ground. So I mean, before I turn to Amir and we do have a couple more questions here. So I wanna make sure with our remaining five minutes we do get to at least one of them. But let me just comment on something you just pointed out. I mean, everybody on this event today, on this panel today, I think understands that you have the states, right? Iran, Pakistan, United States, all operating on their own kind of plane. And then you have the various militias and proxy forces, Taliban, Fatima Yun, and then there are other factions of course who all kind of have a stake in Afghanistan. But we haven't really talked about this. I'm just gonna flag it simply just to say it. There is this other dynamic, in addition to the potential military blowback that Iran may reap from its kind of balancing act between portions of the Afghan population, whether it's with the Taliban or with the Fatima Yun, the region as a whole will experience incredible blowback in terms of the drug trade. And we haven't really talked about that a lot, but the Taliban coming to power will certainly change the calculus for a lot of stakeholders who are not part of the state, who are not part of any militia. They're part of an entirely different informal gray economy that very much shapes some of these interactions that we're talking about. And not just the opium trade, but there's also smuggling routes as well. And I think that's gonna have a huge effect on the future of Afghanistan. So Amir, I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna pose a question as well that's coming to us from the audience that's sort of related. So I'm gonna merge them together. So two questions that are kind of related. One is we haven't really talked about the Zanabi Yun Brigade, which of course is the Pakistani sister to the Fatima Yun. And audience members ask us about that. And then some of these related smaller militias, the Ali Yun, the Haidari Yun, et cetera. And a question that I'll try and answer here from our colleagues over at ASU, and maybe you can chime in as well, what about the interaction between Russian forces and IRGC-backed militias in Syria? So Amir, over to you. In the two minutes you have left. All right, in the two minutes that I have. So short answer is that the IRGC's effort to mobilize Pakistani Shia fighters was significantly more covert than its effort to mobilize Afghan Shia fighters because it was more afraid of ISI in Pakistan than of the other situation that it faced. So they mobilized, there was on a smaller scale, several hundred people, smaller diaspora in Iran. And they operated as very much auxiliaries to the Fatima Yun, but that's an interesting dynamic over there. And then on the second question, would you mind repeating that because there was a couple of things to ask? Yeah, well, there's a lot of things. I mean, it's a complicated spaghetti of a challenge over here. So one of the questions was about the Russians and the interaction between the Russians in Syria with the Fatima Yun and Shia fighters. That one on the base level that they were coordinated through the IRGC because the IRGC was the ground forces of the Russians and the Russians were the air force of the IRGC in terms of like, and we do mention a case where Fatima Yun alongside the Wagner group, they tried to attack American forces and they, it did not go that well for them. So that's something where they're, that's something that, so there's been instances where this was more motivated by money, sort of speak, that there was this opportunity for them to do so. And I guess it sort of lends a little bit of credit to the report that the Fatima Yun, that there was a unit for some people who deployed to Libya from Syria directly. So let me, I know Arif wants to jump in with the last comments and we literally have exactly 30 seconds. So let me just quickly just also speak on the Wagner group piece. For those of you who don't know, the Wagner group is, the so-called Wagner group is a network of Russian private military security contractors that has operated around the world, most notably in the Ukraine, in the Dunbas Eastern area of Ukraine, and then they also traveled to Syria. We've seen them in Libya and elsewhere. And so this rumor about sort of, Fatima Yun fighters traveling to Libya to fight probably stems to some degree from that original relationship that bubbled up around 2013, 14. I mean, the relationship is really one of convenience just as anything else in these contexts. And the Wagner group was very instrumental in supporting the recruitment and mobilization of the fourth and fifth corps militias in Syria. And it is there that there's a sort of intersection between the Shia fighters from Afghanistan. Ari, if you have exactly 30 seconds to make your point and then we're going to close it out. Thank you. I just wanted to mention that the future of Fatima Yun and the Farnstone is quite dismal. As Shijar put it very profoundly and nicely that there is a diverse background of recruitment. So the Fatima Yun are not welcomed at the moment in the society because the foot soldiers have no independent and organized view about the politics in Afghanistan. Most of these recruiters who have been joining from Iran, they are cut off from the Afghan society and from the Shia society within Afghanistan. They are the third generation fighters. So they will not return to Afghanistan actually. And more importantly, the dominant political actors in the Shia society in Afghanistan and the Shia community in Afghanistan have no organized relationship with Fatima Yun division or with Iran. So IRGC is also cut off with them at the moment. And most importantly, I should say that the Afghan Shia religious authorities and scholars who are based in Pum and they are very influential so far they have not issued any sort of statement to support Fatima Yun's further activities across the region or also in Afghanistan. So these are some of the factors that tell us that in the near future, if there is no sectarian violence in Afghanistan, there will be no place for Fatima Yun to return. So the Fatima Yun will be mostly used as critically in those areas where we talked, they will remain, some of them will remain as mercenaries in the borders of Syria and Israel or maybe in Yemen and other places. Excellent points. This panel was fire. I have to say, Shuja, Arif, Amir, Ali, thank you so much for joining us today at New America. For those of you who are online listening in, watching us, please do check out our report, Silamani Shadow. It's out today and we will be tweeting about this and you'll be able to see the full recording of this panel later within the next 24 hours online via newamerica.org. Thanks so much.