Iraq News Now

The ISIS group has lost its caliphate in Syria and Iraq, but

in the forbidding mountains of northeastern Afghanistan the group is expanding

its footprint, recruiting new fighters and plotting attacks on the United

States and other Western countries, according to US and Afghan security

officials.

Nearly two decades after the US-led invasion, the extremist

group is seen as an even greater threat than the Taliban because of its

increasingly sophisticated military capabilities and its strategy of targeting

civilians, both in Afghanistan and abroad. 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 told The

Associated Press that a recent wave of attacks in the capital, Kabul, is

“practice runs” for even bigger attacks in Europe and the United States.

“This group is the most near-term threat to our homelands

from Afghanistan,” the official said on condition of anonymity to preserve his

operational security. “The ISIS core mandate is: You will conduct external

attacks” in the US and Europe. “That is their goal. It’s just a matter of

time,” he said. “It is very scary.”

Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies

at Georgetown University, sees Afghanistan as a possible new base for ISIS 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.

A ‘PROVINCE’ OF THE CALIPHATE

The ISIS affiliate appeared in Afghanistan shortly after the

group’s core fighters swept across Syria and Iraq in the summer of 2014,

carving 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 ISIS affiliate initially numbered just a few dozen

fighters, mainly Pakistani Taliban driven from their bases across the border

and disgruntled Afghan Taliban attracted to ISIS’s more extreme ideology. While

the Taliban have confined their struggle to Afghanistan, the ISIS militants

pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reclusive leader of the group

in the Middle East, and embraced his call for a worldwide jihad against

non-Muslims. Within Afghanistan, ISIS 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 provided 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, eventually all but surrendering the region to the

Taliban.

The area comprising the provinces of Nangarhar, Nuristan,

Kunar and Laghman was so dangerous that 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 ISIS now has a presence in all four provinces.

“Right now in Kunar, the right side of the road is Taliban,

the left side is ISIS and the government is in the middle,” he said, referring

to the group by its Arabic acronym. Speaking inside his heavily fortified home

in the provincial capital, Jalalabad, he said neighboring Kunar would soon

replace the Middle East as the ISIS group’s center of gravity.

“When they began in Afghanistan they were maybe 150 ISIS,

but today there are thousands and thousands,” he said.

“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,” said

the US intelligence official. “I think expansion of territory in eastern

Afghanistan is their number one military objective,” with the goal of

eventually encircling Jalalabad, he said.

TURNING TO THE TALIBAN

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 Sept. 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 ISIS is committed to

overthrowing the Kabul government on its path to establishing a global

caliphate. The Taliban and ISIS 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 ISIS 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 America’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.

“One of the hopes of a negotiated settlement is that it will

bring the Taliban into the government and into the fight against ISIS,” the US

intelligence official said. “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 ISIS. That process is already underway in

parts of northern and eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban have attacked ISIS

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

ISIS for years, and had reached out to the Taliban even before the US talks.

During a visit to Kyrgyzstan last month, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu

described Afghanistan as a “launch pad” for ISIS after the group was pushed out

of Syria and Iraq.

Russia, like the United States, sees a peace agreement

between the Taliban and the Afghan government as the best way of countering the

threat posed by ISIS, 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.

THREATENING THE WEST

Without an aggressive counterterrorism strategy,

Afghanistan’s ISIS 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 ISIS 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 United States linked to the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan.

Martin Azizi-Yarand, the 18-year-old Texan who plotted a

2018 attack on a suburban mall, said he was inspired by ISIS and was preparing

to join the affiliate in Afghanistan. He was sentenced in April to 20 years in

jail.

Rakhmat Akilov, the 39-year-old Uzbek who plowed his truck

into pedestrians in Stockholm in 2017, also had links with the Afghanistan

affiliate, the intelligence official said. “During interrogation he said ‘this

is my commander in Afghanistan and he is telling me what to do,’” he said.

Inside Afghanistan, the group is actively recruiting at

universities, where it is more likely to find tech-savvy Afghans able to travel

abroad, use social media and help plan sophisticated attacks, according to the

intelligence official.

The group’s brutal tactics have been on vivid display inside

Afghanistan for years. Suicide bombings have killed hundreds of Shiite

civilians in Kabul and elsewhere, and residents who have fled areas captured by

the group describe a reign of terror not unlike that seen in Syria and Iraq.

Farmanullah Shirzad fled his village in Nangarhar in late

April as ISIS fighters swept through the area.

“I was terrified to stay,” he said. “When ISIS takes over a

village, they kill the people, they don’t care about the children and they come

into the homes and they take the women.”