With the Taliban in power Afghanistan, a new enemy is on the rise. The Islamic State group has threatened to start another violent phase. The Taliban, the former insurgents, play the role of state except this time, now that the US military and their ally Afghan government are gone.
The Taliban promised the United States to keep the extremist group under control during successive rounds of peace talks. Under the 2020 US-Taliban agreement, the Taliban guaranteed that Afghanistan would not become a haven for terrorist groups threatening the US or its allies. But it is not clear whether they can keep their pledge with the sudden spurt in IS attacks since the Taliban takeover on August 15.
A deadly bombing on Friday in the northern province of Kunduz killed 46 worshipers at a Shiite-infested mosque. Other deadly IS attacks have taken place in the capital Kabul and the East and North provinces, while smaller-scale attacks target Taliban fighters almost daily.
Historically, most IS attacks have targeted the state… Now that the US and international presence is mostly gone, they need to go behind the state and the state is the Taliban, says research fellow of the Program on Extremism at George Andrew Mines said at the University of Washington.
Both the Taliban and IS advocate rule by their radical interpretations of Islamic law. But there are major ideological differences that fuel their hatred of each other. The Taliban say they are creating an Islamic state in Afghanistan within that country’s borders.
IS says it is Islamic State, a global caliphate that it insists all Muslims should support. It despises the nationalist goals of the Taliban and does not recognize them as a purely Islamic movement. IS has long been a staunch enemy of al-Qaeda for similar reasons. Both the Taliban and IS specifically advocate harsher versions of Islamic Sharia law and use tactics such as suicide bombers. But when it ruled Syria and Iraq, IS was even more brutal and inflicted more severe punishments than the Taliban.
IS emerged in Afghanistan as Islamic State in 2015 in Khorasan province, controlling much of Iraq and Syria at a time when the group was at its peak. This attracted members of the Afghan and Pakistani militants, including a wave of Taliban defectors. The group initially found support among the smaller Salafist movement in Afghanistan in the provinces of East Kunar and Nangarhar.
The Salafists were largely marginalized by the Taliban, and by engaging with the growing IS, the Salafist movement found a means to establish military might. But IS’s brutal methods have since inspired some Salafi clerics to raise their voices. In the years following its emergence, IS was deeply hurt by military setbacks at the hands of the Taliban and US airstrikes, before rising again last year.
The Taliban underestimate the capabilities of IS and dismiss them as a fringe group without mainstream appeal. Influential Taliban figure Sheikh Abdul-Hamid Hamasi told The Associated Press that he has no roots here. END-GAME Nevertheless, the power of the threat of IS is undeniable. There have been two deadly bombings in Kabul, one of which was at the height of the evacuation before the US exit outside the airport, killing 169 Afghans and 13 US service members. Small-scale attacks are also on the rise.
International Crisis Group adviser Ibrahim Bahis said the intensity and breadth of the attacks reflected the potential and level of national reach, which took the Taliban by surprise. IS is not a short-term threat. It may take some time until IS has the ability to retake the area. Its immediate aim is to destabilize the Taliban and break the group’s image as a custodian of security.
For now, its strategy is slow and methodical. It is reaching out to tribes and other groups to recruit from its ranks, stamping out dissent among moderate Salafis and committing jailbreaks, killings and attacks on Taliban personnel.
To package it all together, Mines said, this is a complete form of insurgency that the Taliban is not equipped to deal with. Bill Rogio of the Long War Journal, produced by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies think tank, offered a different view, saying he believes the Taliban can overthrow IS on their own, even Even without the backup of US airstrikes, which nearly eliminated IS.
Rogio said the Taliban had shown themselves to be capable of eliminating some IS cells using their vast local intelligence network. He said that unlike the Taliban, IS did not have access to safe havens in Pakistan and Iran during its insurgency.
The Taliban have refused to cooperate with the US against IS ahead of direct talks between the two sides last weekend. The future trajectory of IS in Afghanistan will depend largely on its ability to recruit more members and win over large sections of the population. Since their inception, they have been hunting Taliban members.
In 2015, a former Taliban commander, Abdul Rauf Khadim, was appointed IS deputy in Afghanistan and reportedly offered financial incentives to other Taliban fighters to join the group. In 2020, when IS re-emerged in Afghanistan, it was under a new leader expelled from the Haqqani network, which is currently a faction of the Taliban.
Hardline members of the Taliban may join IS because the Taliban leadership, now in power, will have to compromise, whether at home or abroad.
The Taliban have promised a more inclusive government, although the provisional administration they have established is made up entirely of Taliban members.
The more the Taliban cooperate with international states, the more they run against the image of a Mujahideen resistance fighter. It is an important identity the Taliban will lose, Mines said.
As the Taliban move from insurgency to regime, a critical test will be whether they act to protect minority groups who were once persecuted by their fighters as the Shia Thousand. Thousands have endured numerous campaigns of persecution and displacement throughout Afghanistan’s history.
When the Taliban first came to power in the 1990s, they carried out genocide against the community, in some cases in retaliation for the genocide of ethnic Pashtuns.
IS has targeted thousands because most are Shia Muslims, killing hundreds in brutal attacks targeting their places of worship, which it called the war on heretics.
Friday’s mosque attack in Kunduz was an opportunity for the Taliban to project a new image as a state power. The Taliban acted swiftly: special forces searched the scene, investigations were launched, the provincial police chief made big promises to protect minority brothers.
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