II. The Origins of Iran’s Afghan and Pakistani Shi’a Networks

The Fatemiyoun Division and Zeynabiyoun Brigade origin story is deeply rooted in the Iranian revolution, the U.S.-Soviet proxy war in the 1980s, and Iran’s mobilization of South Asian proxies during the Iran-Iraq War. Historically, Iran has exerted considerable cultural, religious, and political influence over Afghanistan’s Shia minority, and for generations, key religious and cultural sites in the Iranian cities of Mashhad and Qom have been a major draw for Shia among Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazaras.

Long marginalized under laws and customs promulgated by Afghanistan’s dominant Pashtun Sunni elites, ethnic Hazaras are of Turkic, Mongol, and Persian extraction, and their distinctive features have marked them with an outsider status in both Afghanistan and Iran.¹ But, since the start of the anti-monarchist, anti-colonial uprisings in both countries that started with the rise of political Islam across the region in the 1950s, Iran has served as a kind of cultural, political, and economic refuge for Shia Hazaras and a patron to a certain class of Hazara elites.

Although there has been no official census in Afghanistan since 1978,² various estimates suggest Afghan Shia Hazaras constitute anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the country’s 27 million people.³ For generations under the Afghan monarchy, Hazaras’ minority status resulted in their enslavement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Hazaras have traditionally been politically marginalized and discriminated against in the realm of education and labor.⁴ Successive waves of civil unrest and civil war in Afghanistan have also resulted in the forced migration of millions of Hazaras who, over the last century, have settled in large clusters in Mashhad, Qom and the Pakistani city of Quetta.

While Afghanistan outlawed slavery under a constitutional provision passed in 1923, the rise of Pashtun nationalism in the 1930s in the country, the resettlement of Pashtuns in traditionally Hazara areas, and the constant whittling away of land rights in the twentieth century placed Hazaras firmly in the country’s underclass.⁵ Consequently, for generations, most Hazaras lived in poverty and many worked as domestic servants or manual laborers. As Afghan scholar Amin Saikal notes, Afghan ruling elites frequently persecuted and exploited Hazaras.⁶ These factors and Afghanistan’s long history of widespread political violence have contributed to a kind of culture of exile among Afghan Shia and a valorization of resistance and outsider status that permeates the music, literature, media, and art of the community.⁷

For many years, a lack of access to government-subsidized public schools up until the late 1960s and 1970s meant that informal education through religious centers of learning such as mosques and madrassahs remained one of the few consistent sources of education for Afghan Shias.⁸ Consequently, in search of higher and better education, large numbers of Shias traveled to Iran and Iraq’s religious cities.⁹ As a result, a sizable number of educated Afghan Hazara academics, religious scholars, and influential politicians also studied in Iran. Sayed Ismail Balkhi and Ayatollah Mohaqiq Kabuli are among the most prominent in this cadre, and count as the first-nodes in the network of Afghan-Iranian Shia leaders that later played a crucial role in the relations between revolutionary Iran and Afghan Shias.

Born in 1919, Balkhi is often thought of as the ideological progenitor of Afghanistan’s Shia jihadist movements and the link between Afghan Shia, Qom, a key hub of religious power in Iran, and Tehran, the seat of political power in Iran. Kabuli, on the other hand, is often thought of as the more authoritative religious figure within the movement. Born in 1928, Kabuli came of age in the years after the abolishment of slavery in Afghanistan and later spent time in exile in Syria, then Najaf before settling in Qom.¹⁰ The two represent important interrelated strands of the distinctive ethno-political culture at the root of the Fatemiyoun movement.

A pioneer of his generation and later an iconic revolutionary figure among Afghan Hazara Shia, Balkhi was part of a wave of reformist student political movements that emerged during the turbulent reign of Afghanistan’s regent Zahir Shah.¹¹ He was an early adopter of the ideological tenets of political Islam and studied religious theology in the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad. In 1935, during an anti-Reza Shah protest, Balkhi escaped violent state suppression of uprisings in Mashhad and retreated to the western Afghan city of Herat, where he began making public speeches and established pro-republican political cells.¹²

After serving a 15-year prison term for his involvement in a violent anti-government putsch against Zahir Shah in Kabul in 1950, Balkhi continued his political organizing activities in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif and the Afghan capital of Kabul. Balkhi was eventually drawn back to Iran in 1967 when he embarked on a religious pilgrimage to visit Shia sacred sites Mashhad and Qom in Iran, Najaf in Iraq, and Damascus in Syria where he met scores of Shia scholars, revolutionists, and anti-Reza Shah dissidents including Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then living in exile in Najaf.¹³ In their meetings, the two clerics talked of the crucial role of resistance, revolution, and rebellion in harnessing the power of social movements in support of political Islam.¹⁴ Over time, Balkhi’s cross-border consultations and political activism would eventually earn more sustained attention and his teachings gained greater attention in the early 1970s from co-revolutionaries in Iran.

By February 1979, the Iranian revolution had shifted into full gear. The Shah had fled Iran and Khomeini had returned from exile in France. Khomeini and his followers methodically started to eliminate and sideline rivals in the opposition that toppled the Shah in order to establish a government that enforced their rigid interpretations of Islamic law.¹⁵ In the narrative of Khomeini's followers, the cleric's return and the project to Islamize Iran was akin to an explosion of light, and these acts were necessary for the path of correctly implementing God's law. The Pahlavi dynasty's fall and Khomeini’s rise rocked the world, accelerating an Islamist movement that arose in part from the ashes of British and French colonialism in the aftermath of WWII.

It also made manifest the long sought-after dream of Shia revolutionaries building a republic based on the governing religious principle of velayat-e faqih or “guardianship of the jurist,” which vests Islamic clerics with supreme authority in interpreting and administering the law.¹⁶ And, in Afghanistan, where the rebellion against the Soviet incursion was raging, Iran’s revolution in governance found echoes in the formation in 1979 of a loosely knit revolutionary council known as the Shuray-e Ittefaq in the predominantly Shia region known as the Hazarajat, marking the first time in generations that Hazara communities were self-governed in Afghanistan.¹⁷

Soon after taking power, Khomeini dispatched several representatives (wakil) to predominantly Shia areas across the Hazarajat region in northwestern and central Afghanistan. Some 12 clerics served as official envoys of Khomeini’s Office of the Supreme Leader throughout the 1980s.¹⁸ In addition to collecting funds, Khomeini’s representatives preached and advocated taking a more hardline stance against the regime in Kabul.¹⁹ It was in this way that the very personal bond between Khomeini and Balkhi reinforced connections between Iranian elites and Afghan Shia. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and after Khomeini’s Islamic revolutionary movement successfully overthrew the government of Reza Shah in 1979, there were increasing signs that Balkhi and Khomeini’s hardline religious views were becoming more influential among Afghan Shia religious leaders.

In the early stages of the anti-Soviet resistance, Afghan Shia adherents of Khomeini’s revolutionary doctrine of velayat-e fiqh, who were popularly known as the Khat-e Imam²⁰ (Imam’s Line), launched full-scale cultural and religious campaigns aimed at mobilizing support for a sustained resistance movement.²¹ Disorganized at the outset, the Khat-e Imam eventually sought out an ideological organizing principle in the form of fatwas or religious edicts blessing violent political resistance or jihad and formed their own jihadist factions with separate liaison offices in Tehran and Qom. Facilitated by the Islamic Republic, these groups were later reorganized into an umbrella council known as Ettelaf-e Hashtgana (the coalition of eight Shia parties).²²

Yet, while the Iranian revolution and the Afghan anti-Soviet uprising provided the initial spark that would seed the first Afghan Shia jihadi factions that ultimately gave rise to Iran’s modern strategy of proxy warfare and the religious narratives that undergird it, the Iran-Iraq War was played a much more significant role in the formation of the Pakistani and Afghan networks that would pave the way for the Fatemiyoun.