ISIS is a bigger threat than the Taliban in Afghanistan

ISIS has been using a wave of terror attacks in the Afghan capital of Kabul as ‘practice runs’ for even bigger attacks on Europe and the US, intelligence officials have revealed.

The Islamic extremist group is seen as a greater threat to Afghanistan than the Taliban despite this year losing its caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

The terrorists are expanding the group’s footprint across the northeastern mountains of the country as they recruit new fighters and plot attacks on the US and other Western countries, US and Afghan security officials said.

Two decades after the US-led invasion, the extremist group is seen as an even greater threat than the Taliban due to its increasingly sophisticated military capabilities and its strategy of targeting civilians.

Concerns run so deep that many have come to see the Taliban, which has also clashed with ISIS, as a potential partner in containing it.

A US intelligence official based in Afghanistan said on condition of anonymity: ‘This group is the most near-term threat to our homelands from Afghanistan.

‘The IS core mandate is: You will conduct external attacks’ in the U.S. and Europe. ‘That is their goal. It’s just a matter of time. It is very scary.’

Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC, sees Afghanistan as a possible new base for IS now that it has been driven from Iraq and Syria.

‘ISIS has invested a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in Afghanistan,’ he said, pointing to ‘huge arms stockpiling’ in the east.

The Islamic State affiliate appeared in Afghanistan shortly after the group’s core fighters swept across Syria and Iraq in the summer of 2014.

Its fighters carved out a self-styled caliphate, or Islamic empire, in around a third of both countries.

The Afghanistan affiliate refers to itself as the Khorasan Province – a name applied to parts of Afghanistan, Iran and central Asia in the Middle Ages.

The IS affiliate initially numbered just a few dozen fighters, mainly Pakistani Taliban driven from their bases across the border and disgruntled Afghan Taliban attracted to IS’s more extreme ideology.

While the Taliban have confined their struggle to Afghanistan, the IS militants pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reclusive leader of the group in the Middle East.

They have embraced his call for a worldwide jihad against non-Muslims.

Within Afghanistan, IS launched large-scale attacks on minority Shiites, who it views as apostates deserving of death.

The group suffered some early stumbles as its leaders were picked off by US airstrikes.

But it received a major boost when the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan joined its ranks in 2015.

Today, it counts thousands of fighters, many from central Asia but also from Arab countries, Chechnya, India and Bangladesh, as well as ethnic Uighurs from China.

The group has long been based in the eastern Nangarhar province, a rugged region along the border with Pakistan, but has a strong presence in northern Afghanistan and of late has expanded into neighboring Kunar province, where it could prove even harder to dislodge.

The mountainous province acted as shelter for Osama bin Laden for nearly a year after the Taliban’s ouster, and US forces struggled for years to capture and hold high-altitude outposts there.

The area made up of the provinces of Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar and Laghman was so dangerous the US-led coalition assigned an acronym to it in the years after the invasion, referring to it as N2KL.

Militants launching shoulder-fired rockets from Kunar’s peaks downed a US Chinook helicopter in 2005, killing 16 Navy SEALs and special operations forces in one of the deadliest single attacks of the war.

Ajmal Omar, a member of the Nangarhar provincial council, says IS now has a presence in all four provinces.

He said: ‘Right now in Kunar, the right side of the road is Taliban, the left side is Daesh and the government is in the middle.

Speaking inside his heavily fortified home in the provincial capital, Jalalabad, he said neighboring Kunar would soon replace the Middle East as the IS group’s center of gravity.

He continued: ‘When they began in Afghanistan they were maybe 150 Daesh, but today there are thousands and thousands.’

The US intelligence official added: ‘The bad news is their acquisition of key terrain, height concealment, where they can have easy access to money, weapons, equipment… and from where they can plan, train, stage, facilitate and expedite attacks.

‘I think expansion of territory in eastern Afghanistan is their number one military objective,’ with the goal of eventually encircling Jalalabad, he said.

It’s been nearly 18 years since the US invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, which had harbored al-Qaeda when bin Laden and his lieutenants were planning the September 11 attacks.

Now military and intelligence officials see the Taliban as a potential ally against a similar threat.

In recent months, the Taliban have said they have no ambitions to monopolize power in a post-war Afghanistan, while IS is committed to overthrowing the Kabul government on its path to establishing a global caliphate.

The Taliban and IS are sharply divided over ideology and tactics, with the Taliban largely confining their attacks to government targets and Afghan and international security forces.

The Taliban and IS have fought each other on a number of occasions, and the Taliban are still the larger and more imposing force.

US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has held several rounds of talks with the Taliban in recent months in a bid to end the US’s longest war.

The two sides appear to be closing in on an agreement in which the US would withdraw its forces in return for a pledge from the Taliban to keep the country from being used as a launch pad for global attacks.

The US intelligence official said: ‘One of the hopes of a negotiated settlement is that it will bring the Taliban into the government and into the fight against IS. They know the mountains, they know the terrain. It’s their territory.’

But a negotiated settlement could also prompt an exodus of more radical Taliban fighters to join IS.

That process is already underway in parts of northern and eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban have attacked IS only to lose territory and fighters to the rival extremist group.

Russia, which occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s before being driven out by US-backed Islamic insurgents, has been sounding the alarm about IS for years, and had reached out to the Taliban ahead of the US talks.

During a visit to Kyrgyzstan last month, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu described Afghanistan as a ‘launch pad’ for IS after the group was pushed out of Syria and Iraq.

Russia, like the US, sees a peace agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government as the best way of countering the threat posed by IS, and Moscow has held two rounds of informal talks involving the Taliban, government representatives and other prominent Afghans.

But as peace efforts have stumbled in recent months, Russia has turned to more lethal means of containing the threat.

Shoigu said Russia has sent heavy equipment, including helicopters and armored vehicles, to Kyrgyz forces, and has boosted combat readiness in its bases in the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Without an aggressive counter-terrorism strategy, Afghanistan’s IS affiliate will be able to carry out a large-scale attack in the US or Europe within the next year, the US intelligence official said, adding that IS fighters captured in Afghanistan have been found to be in contact with fellow militants in other countries.

Authorities have also already made at least eight arrests in the US linked to the IS affiliate in Afghanistan.

Source: Daily Mail