Joe Walsh
A deadly attack on Kabul’s airport Thursday amid the U.S. withdrawal from Taliban-run Afghanistan has brought renewed focus to Islamic State-Khorasan, also known as ISIS-K or IS-K, a brutal locally based terrorist group that counts both the United States and the Taliban as its enemies.
The suicide bombers who killed dozens of people — including 13 U.S. military personnel — near Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport were “assessed to have been ISIS fighters,” U.S. Central Command leader Gen. Kenneth McKenzie said Thursday, following days of warnings about IS-K attacks from President Joe Biden.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the bombings, AFP and Reuters reported.
It’s the latest in a string of high-profile attacks in Afghanistan linked to the Islamic State (also known as IS or ISIS), whose local offshoot is called IS-K, its name a reference to the historical Iranian and Central Asian region of Khorasan.
IS-K was formed in early 2015 by disaffected ex-members of the Pakistani Taliban and Afghan Taliban who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, which controlled wide swaths of Iraq and Syria at the time.
The group sporadically held onto some territory in northeastern Afghan provinces like Nangarhar, and it briefly had a presence in southern Afghanistan, but it faced heavy fighting from the Taliban and U.S. military, says Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who tracks territorial control in Afghanistan.
These counter-offensives eliminated most of IS-K’s grip on territory by early 2020, but the group “maintains the ability to conduct mass-casualty attacks,” the U.S.-run Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said last year, and the United Nations said in June the group is trying to recruit new fighters from the Taliban and elsewhere.
IS-K has taken responsibility for targeted assassinations and suicide bombings, and it’s suspected of carrying out attacks on a Kabul hospital in May 2020 and a girls’ school in the Afghan capital in May 2021, both of which killed dozens of people.
KEY BACKGROUND
Suicide bombers attacked a gate to Kabul’s airport and a nearby hotel Thursday, killing American troops who guarded the airfield, and ISIS gunmen shot at military personnel and Afghan civilians shortly afterward, McKenzie said. The attack comes less than two weeks after the Taliban seized control of Kabul and deposed the U.S.-backed Afghan government, prompting the United States to rush to evacuate tens of thousands of American citizens, Afghans who assisted the U.S. military and others who could face retribution from the Taliban. The U.S. military is planning on winding down evacuations and pulling its final troops from Kabul on Tuesday, ending the United States’ 20-year-long war in Afghanistan.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
McKenzie told reporters Thursday he expects more Islamic State threats in the coming days, but the military still plans on evacuating people. U.S. officials are coordinating on security with the Taliban, which is operating checkpoints at the airport’s perimeter, according to McKenzie. “We believe it is their desire to continue those attacks,” he said.
TANGENT
Fighters joined IS-K for large and small reasons, Roggio said. Some may have shared the Islamic State’s wider hardline ideology, including its violent tactics and lofty goal of holding large amounts of territory and forming an international Islamic caliphate. One Islamic State official told PBS’ Frontline last year he’s recruited ex-Taliban fighters who rejected the U.S.-Taliban peace talks. But other Taliban members reportedly splintered off due to frustrations with the Taliban’s organization, higher salaries offered by IS-K and confusion about the status of Taliban founder Mullah Omar, whose 2013 death went unreported for years, Roggio explained.
CONTRA
IS-K is a far smaller group than the Taliban. The group had between 1,500 and 2,200 members in eastern Afghanistan in June, according to a report from a United Nations monitoring team, compared to roughly 75,000 Taliban fighters estimated by Biden last month.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“The Islamic State is a tertiary player,” Roggio told Forbes. “They certainly can conduct terrorist attacks, bombings, assassinations and such, but when it comes down to it, the Taliban [controls] the ground and the Islamic State is underground.”
SURPRISING FACT
The U.S. military has targeted IS-K through airstrikes for years, and the U.S. and Taliban’s shared animosity toward the group led to unofficial and unspoken cooperation between the two sides, Washington Post reporter Wesley Morgan explained last year. During some Taliban battles against IS-K, the United States spied on Taliban communications and conducted anti-IS-K airstrikes in areas useful to the militant group, leading some unnamed U.S. personnel to jokingly refer to their team as the “Taliban Air Force,” the Post reported. McKenzie told Congress in early 2020 the United States had provided “very limited support” to the Taliban’s “very effective” anti-IS-K offensive in eastern Afghanistan.
Forbes
