Iran has long used terrorism as an instrument of statecraft—and has few qualms about aiding the enemies of its enemies, no matter how repulsive.
Ali Rizk’s rebuttal to my recent National Interest piece argues that Iran has no interest in partnering with ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) to destabilize Azerbaijan. It is a thoughtful rejoinder, but it fundamentally seeks to refute an argument I did not make.
Iran Uses Its Enemies for Its Own Purposes
Rizk frames the thesis of my first article as a claim that Tehran had entered into a formal alliance with ISIS-K. That is not what I argued. My point was more narrow: Iranian intelligence is likely exploiting isolated ISIS-K-affiliated cells, recruiting local operatives under the ISIS banner to carry out operations that serve Tehran’s geopolitical objectives in the South Caucasus—without any broader coordination with ISIS-K’s central leadership in Afghanistan.
This is a classic proxy-layering tactic, and it does not require ideological convergence. Iran is no stranger to recruiting ideologically opposed groups for its own ends—even members of ISIS, which despises Iran’s Shia clerical government. In fact, it has done it before. The ringleader of the 2018 Danghara attack in Tajikistan—carried out under the ISIS banner—later testified that he received military and ideological training in Qom.
There have been many other documented cases of Tehran utilizing proxy-layering through outsourcing to criminal and extremist networks to achieve its goals. For example, Tehran attempted to recruit Mexican cartel members to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Last year, it hired members of the Russian mafia to assassinate dissident journalist Masih Alinejad. The Islamic Republic’s willingness to work through cutouts of convenience is not a hypothesis, but a documented pattern.
Rizk’s most salient observation—that ISIS-K killed more than 90 Iranians in Kerman in January 2024—adds to the vast weight of evidence that Iran and ISIS-K are enemies. But it misses the key distinction. The Islamic Republic has never treated Iranian casualties as a constraint on its strategic calculations. In its founding decade, Tehran prolonged the Iran-Iraq War by six years, declining multiple offers for a negotiated peace and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives in an ultimately futile bid to topple Saddam Hussein—a war that ultimately killed somewhere between 500,000 and one million people and remains the deadliest conflict in the modern Middle East. The regime sent waves of its young men into Iraqi minefields and praised them for their “martyrdom.” During last month’s protests, regime security forces killed tens of thousands of its own citizens without visible hesitation. And it has continued working with the Taliban, even though the group killed Iranian border guards as recently as 2023 and massacred Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998. A regime that absorbs those costs without changing strategy or altering its partnerships is not one that recalibrates because of collateral damage.
Tehran views Salafi jihadist groups as a threat when they operate autonomously or strike Iranian soil. However, when small, controllable extremist cells can be redirected toward high-value targets abroad, Iran is more than happy to nurture and assist them, providing the deniability that Shia proxies like Azerbaijan’s Husseiniyyun can no longer offer after years of exposure. We have documented multiple examples of precisely this dynamic. Kataib Hezbollah has recruited Sunni Central Asian fighters and coordinated with both ISIS-affiliated networks and the Taliban. The Iran–Al Qaeda accommodation offers another precedent. Ideological enmity and tactical cooperation are not mutually exclusive in Tehran’s playbook.
Iran’s Two-Faced Diplomacy Dates Back Decades
Rizk also leans heavily on Iran’s deepening security cooperation with Tajikistan and Afghanistan as evidence that Tehran views ISIS-K as an unmanageable threat rather than a usable tool. This argument, while superficially compelling, misrepresents how the Islamic Republic actually operates. The IRGC’s Quds Force and Iran’s Foreign Ministry have historically pursued flatly contradictory policies in parallel—one hand signing counterterrorism agreements while the other runs compartmentalized operations through deniable networks.
The pattern is consistent enough to constitute doctrine. In Afghanistan, the IRGC provided weapons, training, and safe havens to the Taliban for years in order to bleed US forces, even as Tehran maintained nominal diplomatic opposition to the group and cooperated with Kabul on drug trafficking and border security. In Iraq, Iran simultaneously signs counterterrorism pacts with the Baghdad government and arms Kata’ib Hezbollah to attack American troops—two tracks, running in parallel, with neither hand acknowledging the other. Tehran has even hosted Al-Qaeda figures and facilitated their transit since 2001, publicly denouncing Sunni jihadism while allowing and supporting operations that advanced its anti-American objectives.
Iran’s outward cooperation with Tajikistan against ISIS-K at the diplomatic level is therefore entirely consistent with the IRGC running separate, compartmentalized operations that exploit ISIS-affiliated cells for specific objectives in third countries. This is not speculation or innuendo about Iranian duplicity; it is a structural feature of how the Islamic Republic has always managed its foreign policy. The relevant question is not what Iran’s official counterterrorism posture says. It is what the Quds Force is doing in the shadows.
Iran Wields Terrorism as a Foreign Policy Tool
Moreover, Rizk’s assertion that Iran avoids fomenting instability along its borders is flatly contradicted by the historical record. Iran actively supports terrorists, extremists and proxy networks responsible for instability in four out of its seven neighboring states—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Azerbaijan—and also extends its destabilizing reach into Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Bahrain, and the Gulf states. The Taliban killed two Iranian border guards as recently as three years ago over a water dispute. Tehran responded not by withdrawing support, but by deepening engagement.
Proximity has never constrained Iranian adventurism. In the case of Azerbaijan specifically, Ayatollah Khomeini’s framing of “liberating the land of Islam” from “puppet governments” provides the ideological foundation. Iranian state media’s routine description of the Aliyev government as a Zionist-controlled regime and a “puppet government” of Israel supplies the operational motivation.
The pattern in Azerbaijan is telling. For over a decade, the IRGC’s Quds Force and Hezbollah have orchestrated a steady drumbeat of plots against Israeli, Jewish, and American interests in Baku, consistently using local operatives to maintain distance. There is not a single documented case of an attack on Jewish or Israeli targets in Azerbaijan that was not ultimately traced to Tehran—until this latest incident bearing ISIS-K’s fingerprints. Meanwhile, since that attack was foiled, Husseiniyyun activity has gone conspicuously quiet. The last documented Iranian attempt to assassinate a Jewish figure in Baku was coordinated through a Georgian drug trafficker. Tehran has not abandoned its longstanding objectives in Azerbaijan. It is merely updating its methods.
Rizk closes by warning that deeper US-Israel-Azerbaijan security cooperation would jeopardize nuclear negotiations with Tehran. This argument inverts the logic of effective deterrence. The Trump administration’s record demonstrates that Iran responds to pressure, not accommodation. The assassination of Qassem Soleimani produced a reduction in proxy activity across the region. When the United States joined Israel’s Operation Rising Lion in striking Iranian nuclear facilities, Tehran’s retaliatory strike on a Qatari base produced no casualties—a calibrated signal of weakness rather than strength. During the Biden years, by contrast, Iranian proxies struck American military positions more than 170 times, emboldened by the perception that Washington would not respond.
To Stop Iran, America Must Work More Closely with Azerbaijan
Therefore, if the United States is serious about protecting its investments in the South Caucasus—the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, the Middle Corridor, and the broader architecture of trans-Caspian trade—it must act on three fronts. Trilateral security cooperation among the United States, Israel, and Azerbaijan would formalize what is already a deep bilateral defense relationship between Jerusalem and Baku—adding American intelligence capabilities, diplomatic weight, and interoperability to a partnership that is already under pressure from Tehran. Enhanced intelligence sharing among the three parties would be particularly valuable: the Islamic Republic’s shift toward deniable proxy networks makes early detection of operational planning—identifying Iranian handlers, financial flows, and recruiter networks before attacks materialize—the most effective line of defense available.
Lastly, Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act remains a self-inflicted wound, a Cold War relic that restricts direct US assistance to Azerbaijan and has required annual presidential waivers since 2001. With Baku and Yerevan having signed a peace agreement, the statute’s original rationale has evaporated entirely, and its repeal would send an unambiguous signal that America’s commitment to a key strategic partner is durable and unconditional.
The arrests in Baku amounted to a warning. Washington should not wait for the next one.
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