When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last summer, around 3,000 members of the Afghan security forces, including high-ranking officers and US-trained special forces soldiers, fled into neighboring Iran, a recent US report said.

These individuals could pass on important information to Tehran about US military training and US intelligence, US Congressman Michael McCaul has warned.

McCaul is the highest ranking Republican politician on Congress' Foreign Affairs Committee and his interim report on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was published on August 17.

Security risks

Over 115 pages, the report details how unprepared the US State Department was for the unexpectedly swift collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021. The report also goes into the long-lasting impact of the chaotic evacuation that ensued.

The special forces soldiers who fled Afghanistan into Iran could pass on valuable information about the US military, either voluntarily or if they were forced to, McCaul concluded. He accused his government of not prioritizing the evacuation of Afghan commandos to the US despite such security risks.

During the emergency mass evacuation conducted after the Afghan government fell, the US airlifted almost 130,000 people out of the country. Even so, tens of thousands of Afghans who had supported the US military there for two decades, were left behind.

"Many soldiers who were Afghan elite commandos have deliberately been killed by the Taliban in recent months," Abdul Hadi Khalid, a former lieutenant general in the Afghan army, told DW. The murders are part of an ongoing campaign, evident long before the Taliban took power.

"They were the bravest soldiers the Afghan army had and they fought on the front line for years, preventing many terrorist attacks," Khalid said.

Today, the former senior member of the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs lives in the US, but he still worries about the life of every single special forces soldier in his homeland. He explained that the number of special forces soldiers in Afghanistan totaled around 30,000. It is not known how many of these operatives are still in Afghanistan.

"For years, they fought alongside US soldiers," added Ahmad Saeedi, an Afghan political analyst and former diplomat. "Now they're not just afraid for their own lives, but also for the lives of their families."

Those special forces soldiers who fled into Iran would have had no other choice or hope, Saeedi told DW. "And they don't just have important information. They are battle-tested commandos. Tehran could use them in its proxy wars iin the region — such as Yemen, for example." 

Iran's history of Afghan recruitment

In Yemen, Iran supports the Houthi rebel group. They have been fighting a civil war in that country for over seven years. Their opponents are Yemen's internationally recognized government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia, among others. In the past, Iran is known to have sent Afghan soldiers into Syria.

Iran supports the regime of Syrian dictatorBashar Assad, and established a special Afghan force to fight for the regime on their behalf. Known as the Fatimiyoun Brigade, most of its members are Afghans who fled to Iran sometime over the past 40 years. Afghan soldiers are paid up to $500 a month for fighting.

The Fatimiyoun Brigade is under the command of Iran's Quds force, which oversees Iran's military operations abroad.

This story was originally published in German.