Revolutionary Guard member caught smuggling weapons into Afhganistan

plawolf

Lieutenant General
To be honest any weapons finding their way across the border is as likely to be down to Private Enterprise as much as any official policy.

You also have to look at who is receiving the arms as Taliban is as overused as it often inaccurate. There is a Farsi speaking minority in the West of the country and I would guess that arms may well be being sold to them to help support Shia communities in the area.

An excellent point!

A huge proportion, if not the vast majority, of weapons used by Mexican drug gangs originate in the USA. Yet do we see anyone suggesting that the US government is arming drug dealers?

Afghanistan, much like Mexico, is a drugs export world leader. That means they need routes and means to get the drugs out. It's such a simple thing to do to reverse the process and bring in arms the other way using those same smuggling routes.

Does anyone know how gun laws and gun ownership is like in Iran? If its anything like the US, then it would be a minor miracle if no Iranian arms ends up in 'stan.

Iran has little to gain from supplying advanced weapons to the Taliban. They are far better served saving that as a trump card they can threaten to play if the US or Israel attack its nuclear facilities.

Iran has some decent MANPADs as well as all sorts of HMG, shape charges, ATGMs and assorted weapons and equipment they would provide that would make the resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan far far deadlier to NATO and US forces than they are at present.
 

delft

Brigadier
Iran must be maintaining spies in A'stan in order to slow down the flow of heroin over its border. Those spies might well also distribute weapons to win friends.
 
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