Interplay of Language: A CDA of Selected Iranian Media Reports after US Withdrawal of Troops from Afghanistan

Abstract

The withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan was a significant development in the war on terror, which insinuated a wide range of perceptions among politicians, diplomats, and relevant personnel around the world as presented through their media outlets. In this paper, news reports from selected Iranian English newspapers between August 15, 2021, and December 31, 2021, have been taken up for analysis using a discourse historical approach and corpus linguistics to analyse and evaluate how perceptions have been shaped and presented using various discursive strategies. The aim is also to understand how the Iranian media presented this event and shaped the specific narrative through different linguistic tools and strategies. The analysis reveals that, with a recurring emphasis on common themes, keyword co-occurrences, content choices, and specific linguistic strategies such as argumentation and perspectivation, Iranian media have sought to portray the US-led war in Afghanistan as a disaster and failure with far-reaching effects in the region. The Iranian media has also projected its in-group and out-group identities and associated itself with different countries and ideologies. The researcher believes that further studies can be conducted by comparing news reports from different countries within the given time period, or by selecting editorials from different countries for comparative analysis.

Keywords: Withdrawal of Troops, Coalition, Discourse Historical Approach, Corpus Analysis, Discursive strategies.