Following the departure of President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban's takeover of the Afghan capital Kabul, several Iranian officials have welcomed the collapse of the United States-backed government and have exhibited a positive attitude toward the Taliban.

"The end of any occupation is a humiliating dismissal,” Ali Shamkhani, Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), tweeted Wednesday in English, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew. “The fate that befell the United States in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq is also the inevitable fate of the occupying Zionist regime [in Palestine].” In earlier tweets Monday, Shamkhani referred to “the depth of Washington's infiltration and influence in the country's [outgoing] government."

President Ebrahim Raisi (Raeesi) said Monday that Afghanistan had an opportunity to “revive life, security and lasting peace”, while Iran was “closely monitoring developments.” In remarks reported Tuesday by Sepah News, the official news website of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), Mohammad-Reza Naghdi, the IRGC deputy commander for coordination, referred to “the victory of the Afghan people against America.”

The "disgraceful flight” of US forces, Naghdi said, showed that all countries in the Middle East needed “to separate their path from America” as “all other US bases in the region will soon meet the same fate…” Naghdi argued that, like the Afghan military, US-trained and structured armies in Iraq and Kuwait had collapsed in the face of aggression – a reference to the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the 2014 defeat of the Iraqi army by the Islamic State group (Isis, Daesh).

After setting up camps along the border Sunday, Iran, which already hosts 3 million Afghans, Hossein Ghassemi, an official at the interior ministry, said Wednesday that the situation in Afghanistan was "stabilizing" and that border guards in the three bordering Iranian provinces had been instructed not to allow entry to Afghan refugees. He stated that this was part of the measures against the Covid-19 pandemic – only 0.6 percent of Afghans have been fully vaccinated, according to John Hopkins University.

Associated Press reported Wednesday that the Taliban had blown up a statue of Abdul Ali Mazari, a Shia militia leader killed in 1996, in Bamyan province, and had opened fired to disperse protestors in the eastern city of Jalalabad, with a report one person was killed and six injuted. Bamyan province was the site of two large 1,500-year-old Buddha statues dynamited by the Taliban in 2001.

Officials of the Iranian foreign ministry who will soon be replaced with Raisi's team have so far not made any mention of the "US defeat" in their statements about developments in Afghanistan. Outgoing Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh, said Sunday that Iran welcomed the call from former president Hamed Karzai, who left the post in 2014 after 12 years, for a new coordination council in Afghanistan that could lead to dialogue and a peaceful transition. But this appeared overtaken by the rapid demise of the Afghan government and the scrambled withdrawal of foreign diplomats from Kabul.