Terror Against the Taliban

Competition for the Taliban

The IS offshoot Province Khorasan emerged in the second half of 2014, after IS had pro­claimed a caliphate in Mosul in northern Iraq in June 2014. Thereafter, subgroups of the organization formed in many parts of the Islamic world, calling themselves “prov­inces” (wilaya in Arabic). While IS Afghani­stan remained overshadowed initially by the stronger IS affiliate in Libya, it gained prominence from 2016 onwards and attracted many foreign fighters.

For IS, the strategic situation in Afghani­stan was particularly difficult for a long time because it had to hold its own against two far superior opponents. From the out­set, IS fought against the Taliban as it believes – just like the parent organization in Iraq and Syria – that there can be only one Islamic state and one legitimate caliph. According to that belief, other Islamist groups and their leaders are to be subordinated to IS and unconditionally adopt the organization’s worldview. But the Taliban have made no attempt to bow to the new rival's claim to power and are seen by IS as highly problematic ideologically because the majority are not Salafists. Moreover, IS criticizes the Taliban for closely cooperating with the Pakistani military and frequently refers to the movement as an instrument of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Paki­stan’s military intelligence agency. More­over, it criticizes the cooperation between the Taliban and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose joint efforts have expanded significantly since 2015 and have been directed, above all, against their com­mon enemy, the United States. All in all, IS regards the Taliban as apostates (murtaddin), who, it argues, should be killed.

Until August 2021, another problem for IS was the presence of the US military in the Hindu Kush, which, together with Afghan government troops, fought against the organization and repeatedly inflicted heavy losses on it. Right from the start, how­ever, the group’s main opponent was the Taliban. While it was able to score major successes in the east of the country, taking over several districts in the southern part of Nangarhar Province, the Taliban launched their first large-scale offensive in autumn 2015 and were able to drive IS out of many localities. From 2016 onwards, the US military stepped up its attacks, too. Especially significant was the death of the first IS in Afghanistan leader, Hafiz Saeed Khan, in a targeted attack. Again and again, the US government and its Afghan allies reported having carried out successful mis­sions that left many IS militants dead. By the end of 2016, the group appeared to have been considerably weakened.

Arguably, the greatest strength of IS Afghanistan is its ability to repeatedly offset heavy losses by enlisting new recruits, as became evident during the course of 2017, when it was once again able to expand its influence. Not even increased US air strikes and joint operations with allied Afghan secu­rity forces were able to prevent that from happening; on the contrary, IS con­tinued its offensive. Among its most remark­able achievements was its expansion from early 2017 onwards into the heavily Uzbek-populated provinces of Jawzjan, Sar-e Pol and Faryab in the northwest of Afghani­stan, where the group established a new base. Also in 2017, it stepped up its attacks in the urban centres of the country, target­ing mainly the Shiite Hazara. A series of attacks in Kabul alone claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians.

It was not until 2018 that IS began to suffer repeated defeats as it came under pressure from its opponents. In Jawzjan, the Taliban launched attacks that ended in July 2018 with the crushing of IS in the northwest of Afghanistan. A large-scale Taliban offensive against the IS strongholds in Nangarhar followed in mid-October 2018, although on this occasion the jihad­ists were able to defend themselves. In 2019, the number of defeats grew as both Taliban and Afghan government troops – the latter bolstered by US support – carried out attacks against IS in Nangarhar, inflict­ing heavy losses. In November 2019, the orga­nization lost the last territories in the province to which it could retreat and the small number of fighters who had been able to escape from the clutches of the enemy fled farther north to Kunar. When, in March 2020, the Taliban announced that the last remaining safe havens in that province had been captured as well, IS Afghanistan appeared to have been defeated. However, repeated attacks in Kabul bore witness to the fact that the organization was still oper­ating underground and thus continued to pose a danger for Afghanistan.

Strong Ability to Regenerate

The persistence of IS Afghanistan stems from its internal structure. Like most IS offshoots, it is an alliance of various groups, some of which come from the homeland and others from elsewhere. In Afghanistan, the organization consists mainly of Paki­stanis, Afghans and Central Asians. It is likely that the large pool of jihadist recruits, at least in Pakistan and Afghanistan, has made it easier to enlist more and more new fighters. Above all, IS Afghanistan has re­cruited those who were unhappy with their previous organizations or the allies of those organizations.

From the very beginning, the IS Afghanistan leadership was dominated by Pakistanis who had earlier belonged to the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan or TTP). The TTP is an independent jihadist group dedicated to fighting the Pakistani state (un­like the Afghan Taliban movement, which is allied with Islamabad). It was formed in 2007 as an alliance of several militant groups from the Pashtun tribal areas near the Afghan border. After its leader Haki­mullah Mehsud had been killed in No­vem­ber 2013, internal conflicts broke out. The high-profile commander Hafiz Saeed Khan was passed over in the search for a succes­sor and promptly joined IS. Above all, it was the Pakistani Pashtuns from the tribal areas in Orakzai, Khyber and Bajaur who professed allegiance to the new organiza­tion. As these three regions border the Afghan provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar directly to the east and southeast, they developed into IS strongholds.

The Afghans who joined IS from 2014 onwards were largely former (Afghan) Taliban who had broken with the organi­zation for ideological or personal reasons. Many were commanders who had remained marginal figures within the group because they were Salafists and criticized the Tali­ban movement for its non-religious tribal traditions, among other things. Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, a high-profile leader and Salafist intellectual who had been im­prisoned at Guantanamo from 2001 to 2005, became particularly prominent. Dost hails from Kunar Province, where there has been a strong Afghan Salafist presence – like in Nangarhar and Nuristan – since the 1980s. In 2014, Dost recruited for IS in this region, paving the way for the surge in activity by the group the following year. At the same time, former Taliban commander Abdul Rauf Khadim was seeking to estab­lish an IS base in the Kajaki district of Hel­mand Province. Khadim had already led major formations in 2001 and had been imprisoned in Guantanamo from 2002 to 2007. Because he was operating in the heartland of the Taliban, the response came almost immediately and his forces were crushed by their Afghan rivals in spring 2015. Khadim himself was killed in a US airstrike in February. Thereafter, IS was unable to establish itself in the Taliban heartland for some time.

The third subgroup of IS Afghanistan is composed of Central Asian jihadists, mainly Uzbeks and Tajiks. Those who joined the organization in the early days were mainly fighters of the Islamic Movement of Uzbeki­stan (IMU) who, in the wake of a Pakistani Army offensive in 2014, had been forced to leave the sites in the Pakistani tribal areas to which they had retreated and flee to Afgha­nistan, where they had set up their headquarters in Zabul Province. Under its emir, Osman Ghazi, the IMU drew closer to IS and swore allegiance to the organization in August 2015, probably not least because the latter is thought to have promised the Central Asians that the struggle would soon begin in their home countries. Like in Hel­mand, the Taliban moved quickly to sup­press the competition, crushing the IMU and killing Ghazi in November 2015.

The Central Asians nonetheless continued to play an important role within IS. From the beginning of 2017, they were in­stru­mental in capturing territory in Jawzjan in the northwest of Afghanistan, near the Uzbek border. Following the defeat of IS in Jawzjan in 2018, hundreds of Central Asians remained with the organization in eastern and northern Afghanistan. Their leader since then appears to have been the Tajik Sayvaly Shafiev (also known as Abu Muawiya), who is suspected of having given the order for a terrorist attack in central Stockholm in April 2017 involving a lorry.

The resilience of this alliance of Paki­stanis, Afghans and Central Asians is also evi­dent from the numbers of fighters. Most estimates for 2015 were as high as 4,000, although the US military tended to put their strength at up to 3,000. By the end of 2016, it was presumed only 1,000–2,000 fighters remained; and in 2017, the US forces sur­mised just 700. Despite defeats in 2018 (Jawzjan), 2019 (Nangarhar) and 2020 (Kunar), however, IS had no problem enlisting new recruits: at the beginning of 2021, the num­bers were back up to 1,000–2,200. Mean­while, it is estimated that some 2,000–3,000 IS inmates escaped in prison break­outs in 2021, which means the number of fighters may have increased significantly. A UN report from early February 2022 sug­gests that the number could be approaching 4,000 once again, a figure last recorded in 2015.

The recruitment of more and more new fighters was possible thanks to solid finances. IS headquarters in Iraq and Syria are reported to have sent large sums of money in the early years. While this was a significant source of funding initially, it lost relevance from 2017 onwards. It is likely that from no later than 2020 onwards, con­tributions from private donors in the Gulf region became increasingly important. But there are also indications that the IS lead­er­ship in Iraq and Syria is ramping up its fi­nan­cial support to its Afghan branch again. So far, it appears that there have been no funding bottlenecks. IS Afghanistan has given its fighters small cash hand­outs and a “wage” of several hundred US dollars as well as family allowances – all in all, an attractive offer by Afghan standards.

Attractive Ideology, Ambitious Strategy

The IS offshoot in Afghanistan is closely aligned ideologically with the parent orga­nization in Iraq and Syria. This is evident from its public relations work, which until 2018 was carried out primarily through IS media outlets in the Middle East. March 2018 saw the release of a video titled “God’s Earth Is Wide” (Ard Allah wasi’a), which con­tained footage mainly from Afghanistan. In the video, the IS leadership recommended that those followers unable to go to the Middle East join the Hindu Kush branch of the organization. According to several reports, IS was even planning to set up a substitute headquarters in the Afghan moun­tains, to which the IS top brass could retreat in the event of a defeat in the Middle East.

Like IS in Iraq and Syria, the Afghan affiliate propounds a particularly uncompromising interpretation of Salafism – one that recognizes only a small number of Sunni Muslims as true believers, sanctifies the fight against non-Sunni Muslims such as the Shiites and prioritizes the rapid estab­lishment of state structures. By calling for an Islamic state based on a Salafist read­ing of Islamic law (Sharia), IS succeeded in mobilizing many young Islamists around the world from 2014 onwards. IS in Af­ghani­stan has been similarly successful, although its recruits have so far been mostly South and Central Asians, not least because travel­ling to Afghanistan from the Middle East or the Western world remains difficult and often dangerous.

From 2014 onwards, the immediate goal of the IS offshoot in the Hindu Kush was to seize a secure area in order to build state-like structures there and to slowly expand the territory under its control. The strategy focused on Nangarhar, Kunar and Nuristan because these provinces are all close to the Pakistani border, through which both for­eign fighters and supplies of weapons, ammu­nition and provisions can enter the country. Moreover, the provinces lent them­selves for the purpose at hand because Salafist ideas are particularly deep- rooted there. Although IS was defeated in the above-mentioned strongholds in 2019–20, it was able to remain underground in the region and carry out numerous attacks from 2021 onwards. Attempts to maintain control in Helmand and Zabul (2015) and Jawzjan (2017–18) all failed. However, the very fact that IS sought to make territorial gains so far into enemy territory was con­sistent with the organization’s approach in the Middle East and demonstrated the un­bridled ambition of the Afghan offshoot.

It is this ambition, coupled with the organi­zation’s ideological radicalism, that makes it virtually impossible for IS to enter into alliances. Herein, perhaps, lies the deci­­sive difference between IS and al‑Qaeda, which has been allied with the Taliban since 1996 and, for this reason, has been able to survive to the present day. For IS Afghanistan, on the other hand, the Taliban are the main enemy and, as such, are to be fought by any means necessary. For a long time, the main goal of IS was to replace the Tali­ban as the dominant force in the insur­gency against the Afghan government and its US allies. Since the withdrawal of inter­national troops and the takeover of power by the Taliban, the IS struggle against the ruling Islamist movement has continued under much improved conditions.

In order to distance itself from the Taliban, IS has focused on anti-Shiite attacks since mid-2016, mostly targeting civil­ians in mosques and educational in­sti­tutions. It is true that the Shiite Hazara – who account for between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of the Afghan population – were subjected to brutal persecution by the Taliban when the latter ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. But since coming to power in 2021, the new masters in Kabul have pledged to protect the Hazara. One possible reason for the moderate stance is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who are Shiites, too, have been covertly sup­port­ing the Taliban since at least 2007 and providing increased and more overt support since 2015. This highlights an important difference between the Taliban and IS: while IS has won over many Shiite enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Arab world, the Taliban find themselves under pressure in the Sunni Islamist camp (where there is almost no sympathy for the Shiites).

Beyond Afghanistan, IS is targeting, above all, Pakistan and Central Asia. In Paki­stan, the organization wants to super­sede the Pakistani Taliban as the most important insurgent group and break down the current borders between the neighbouring country and Afghanistan. The situation is similar in Central Asia, where IS is focus­ed primarily on Uzbekistan and Tajiki­stan. That there has so far been only a small num­ber of attacks in Pakistan and none whatsoever in Central Asia is probably due, above all, to the fact that IS has been fight­ing against far stronger opponents in Af­ghanistan for many years and therefore has had to set priorities.

After the Taliban Victory

The withdrawal of US troops in August 2021 and the takeover of power by the Taliban changed the overall situation in Afghani­stan and, along with it, the position of IS. In fact, things had already started to change by the time of the negotiations be­tween the US administration under Presi­dent Donald Trump and the Taliban, which began in Doha, Qatar, in 2018 and culmi­nated in an agreement in February 2020. The document provided for a gradual reduc­tion in US troops and a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021. For the Taliban, it was a daring step to enter into negotiations with the occupiers over a solution to the conflict. Some commanders and fighters criticized the pragmatism of the Taliban leadership, fuelling hope with­in IS that more ideologically motivated in­di­viduals or even subgroups of the Taliban would join the organization.

So far, however, no significant group appears to have split away from the Tali­ban. Around the same time as the Doha talks, the Taliban stepped up the military pressure on IS, which led to the defeat of the latter in Nangarhar in November 2019 and in Kunar in March 2020. While the Taliban may have been aiming to crush the organization before its willingness to nego­tiate with the US could be used by the enemy to enlist new recruits, IS was able to continue its activities underground, the defeats notwithstanding. In the months that followed, the organization carried out numerous attacks in Kabul and in several provinces (above all, in Nangarhar and the surrounding area). During the course of 2021, it became increasingly clear that IS’s options to act were growing as the pressure from the US troops eased. The number of its attacks grew slowly at first and then rapidly from August onwards. Especially headline-grabbing was the bombing of the airport in Kabul on 26 August 2021: amid all the turm­oil shortly after the Taliban had cap­tured the capital, a suicide bomber killed at least 183 people, including 13 US soldiers.

Since this demonstration of terrorist strength, IS attacks have increased in several parts of the country. The jihadists have repeatedly targeted Shiite mosques. Places of worship have been hit not only in Kabul but also in Kunduz and Kandahar, which suggests the area of operations has expanded. The attack in Kunduz on 8 Oc­to­ber 2021, in which more than 50 people died, shows that IS also has a strong pres­ence in this area close to the Uzbek and Tajik borders. And the attack on a Shiite mosque in the Taliban stronghold of Kan­dahar on 15 October, which left more than 60 people dead, illustrates that the organi­zation is capable of operating in the Tali­ban heartland. In addition, there have been numerous attacks on Taliban “security forces” in Nangarhar Province and Kunar, where IS appears to be gaining strength. Deborah Lyons, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, warned in November 2021 that IS now had a presence in almost every Afghan province and had increased the number of its attacks from around 60 in 2020 to more than 330 in 2021. For its part, IS has said it killed and wounded more than a dozen Taliban in Logar, Nangarhar and Kunar provinces in December 2021 and January 2022 alone.

New Alliances, New Threats

The case of Sirajuddin Haqqani points to an even bigger problem: namely, the Taliban takeover of power could lead to a shakeup of the Islamist scene in the Hindu Kush. After decades of war and a long association with jihadist Arabs, Pakistanis and Central Asians, there is a strong jihadist current running through the Taliban – one that not only has a particularly large number of adherents in the Haqqani organization but is also influential in other Taliban units. After the takeover of power in Kabul, the jihadist goal is to expand the fight beyond Afghanistan to the neighbouring states and the whole world. The number of Afghan, Pakistani and Central Asian fighters who feel committed to jihadism is probably in the low 10,000s.

Thus, the Taliban face a dilemma. If they heed calls from abroad and promote a mod­erate policy at home, jihadist insurgents could turn their back on the movement and endanger the stability of the new regime. If, on the other hand, they pursue a more overtly ideological line, it will probably be impossible to attract aid from abroad, which is urgently needed because of the catastrophic economic and supply situation in Afghanistan. The strong position of the Haqqani organization in the new govern­ment can be seen as an indication that the Taliban want to accommodate jihadist forces. Moreover, there is no evidence that the Taliban are cutting ties with al-Qaeda, as provided for in the February 2020 agree­ment with the United States. Many initial measures suggest that the Taliban leader­ship is following a middle course to gen­erate support from abroad without losing the jihadists within its own ranks to IS.

At the same time, the increasing activity of IS Afghanistan is a clear sign that the jihadists could become a growing threat for the Taliban, the neighbouring states and worldwide. There are reports that since August 2021, large numbers of foreign fighters from the Middle East, Central Asia and Pakistan have gone to Afghanistan. If the country were indeed to become a mag­net for jihadists from other regions, IS would likely be the more important final destination than al-Qaeda: the former’s deeply ideological approach has led to tens of thousands of new recruits joining the orga­nization since 2014, whereas the latter has had problems winning over young Islam­ists. The extent to which IS can benefit from the influx of foreign jihadists depends heavily on just how strong the new Taliban state is and whether it will be in a position to contain IS militarily.

If IS continues to grow stronger, it is likely not only to remain a threat for Af­ghani­stan but also to expand its activities to the immediate neighbouring countries. Paki­stan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are the main candidates, as the overwhelming num­ber of IS fighters in Afghanistan come from the three states and IS maintains bases near the borders of those countries. Iran is another possible target of IS expansion. The country is particularly well suited for this purpose because the Taliban movement has so far maintained good relations with Teh­ran and because IS can distinguish itself from the Taliban by attacking Iranian tar­gets. Moreover, it should be able to expect financial support for such a strategy from anti-Shiite donors in Pakistan and the Arab Gulf states.