European Eye on Radicalization
The Islamic State’s Khorasan Province (ISKP) attacked the Russian embassy in Afghanistan with a suicide bomber on 5 September, killing six people, including a senior diplomat, identified by the Investigative Committee of Russia as Second Secretary Mikhail Shakh, plus a Russian security guard and four Afghans. This attack has highlighted several important dynamics in jihadist-ruled Afghanistan, with geopolitical implications far outside South Asia.
The Latest Attack
The Islamic State (ISIS) releases a newspaper each week, Al-Naba, and in last week’s edition the main story was the attack on the Russian embassy in Kabul. The attacker who blew himself up was identified by Al-Naba as Waqqas al-Waziristani, who was said to have evaded the Taliban regime’s security measures to carry out this attack in the heart of the capital. About two-dozen people were wounded in the attack, according to Al-Naba.
A significant part of the coverage in Al-Naba was an ideological attack on the Taliban, accusing them of having deviated from jihadist ideology by trying to protect “Crusader” embassies, “in search of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘support’,” and “begging for crumbs” from infidels, while ISIS “deriv[es] its legitimacy from the Qur’an and the Sunna” alone. This is a longstanding messaging campaign from ISIS.
Since the decision of U.S. President Joe Biden to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and allow Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency to reconquer the country through the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in August 2021, overthrowing the elected government, the Taliban has been engaged in a hesitant effort to secure diplomatic recognition, and one way it has tried to do this is by claiming that it is a “counter-terrorism” actor.
Trusting Terrorists To Fight Terrorists?
The problems with believing that the Taliban is helpful to “counter-terrorism,” despite the fact that it is by many definitions a terrorist group itself, is that the Taliban cannot suppress ISKP. The Taliban and its Al-Qaeda accessory have fought fiercely with ISKP for many years, and, when NATO was in the country, NATO provided the Taliban-Al-Qaeda forces with a direct military support—and ISKP still survived.
Indeed, ISKP’s withdrawal from overt territorial control in eastern Afghanistan around 2017 was a tactical decision by the organization itself, which withdrew to rural sanctuaries and seeded its operatives throughout the Afghan prisons, where they proselytized for extremism, while waiting to be broken out during the Taliban conquest. One such ISKP operative was the suicide bomber who attacked the Kabul International Airport during the NATO withdrawal, killing nearly 200 people.
Since the Taliban takeover, ISKP has increased notably in activity, geographic reach, and lethality, as a recent United Nations report documented:
[ISKP] has increased its presence in northern and eastern Afghanistan. It also includes fighters from Central Asia, who have increased activities in the north. In April 2022, [ISKP] claimed it had fired rockets into Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. … [T]he risk of similar attacks [on Afghanistan’s neighbours] remains. The aims were to undermine the credibility of Taliban security forces by demonstrating their inability to control the borders, and to attract new recruits from the region.
It is unclear whether [ISKP] can regain lost territory in eastern Afghanistan. Should they succeed, it may prove difficult for the Taliban to reverse such gains. According to one Member State, [ISKP] would then be positioned to develop a global threat capability from Afghanistan.
Taliban rule in Afghanistan is a boon for jihadist terrorists of all kinds. In the areas that the Taliban controls, Al-Qaeda has safe haven, as was proven when Al-Qaeda’s emir Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in the Taliban capital at the end of July. And in the areas the Taliban does not control, ISKP is thriving and is likely to gain power over time, since the Taliban is incapable of constraining it.
Russia and Jihadism
The other threat to international security is the relationship between the Russian Federation and the Taliban-Al-Qaeda regime. This is not new. There are very murky parts of Al-Qaeda’s history when it comes to interactions with Russia’s intelligence services in the 1990s, and Russia’s involvement with the Taliban dates from around the same time and is very complex and conflicted. Relations have been less complicated since NATO deposed the Taliban in 2001, however: from that point onwards, Russia supported the Taliban, and by extension Al-Qaeda, against NATO—and this has only gotten more blatant since NATO left Afghanistan in 2021.
It is important to note that Russia has used the Taliban’s supposed utility against ISKP as political cover for supporting the group, and this, too, is not new. In April 2017, a “senior U.S. military official” told The Washington Post that “the Russians have increased their supply of equipment and small arms to the Taliban over the past 18 months. The official said the Russians have been sending weapons, including medium and heavy machine guns, to the Taliban under the guise that the materiel would be used to fight the Islamic State in eastern Afghanistan. Instead, the official said, the weapons were showing up in some of Afghanistan’s southern provinces, including Helmand and Kandahar—both areas with little Islamic State presence.”
It was reported in June 2020 that the Russians had, alongside their general supplies of materiel to the Taliban to kill NATO forces and Afghan government officials and security forces, been offering bounties for the assassination of Americans.
Shortly before the Taliban returned to power, they were invited to Moscow—a signal of the Russian government’s support for their then-ongoing drive towards Kabul—and shortly afterwards there was further overt diplomatic contact, which has intensified this year as Moscow has cast about for allies to break out of its isolation after the invasion of Ukraine. (Along with jihadized Afghanistan, Russia’s list of remaining allies includes: Belarus (which Russia has virtually annexed) and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria (a semi-colony of Russia’s), as well as a rogues’ gallery of aggressive dictatorships like China, Iran, Cuba-Venezuela, and North Korea.)
It is crucial that the international community does not turn its attention away from Russia’s activities in Afghanistan, and be allowed to use the jihadist government in that country to recover political and economic ground.
