The Afghan arena and its surrounding area could become an open field of war between the Taliban and ISIS in Khorasan Province, better known as ISIS-K. ISIS’s incorporation of the names of countries and regions, especially those that can be traced back to the Islamic era, into its names has a long history. They adopt names like the Wilaya (province) of Damascus, the Wilaya of Baghdad, the Wilaya of Cyrenaica and others, to play on their supporters’ sentiments. And so, today, we see the group adopting the name Wilaya of Khorasan for its branch in Afghanistan and the surrounding area. It is an attempt to link itself to the area and its history, especially since the Khorasan province historically encompassed the north-west of Afghanistan, the south of Turkmenistan, and the Khorasan provinces in Iran, which means that ISIS is planning on using these countries as launching pads for operations and regional bases. ISIS doesn’t adopt names because they like the sound of them.
ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the Kabul Airport bombings, after having risen to the fore in eastern Afghanistan in 2014 and fought the “former government of Afghanistan” and even the Taliban, whom the organization has called “heretics” whom it sees have deviated from the path of the “Khilafa.”
ISIS-K is actually more belligerent than the others. It has, for example, slaughtered newborn babies in a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders.
Although the Americans used the “mother of all bombs”, the most powerful conventional non-nuclear bomb in the world, on ISIS-K’s caves, the organization remerged and attacked the US army fortified Kabul Airport. A suicide bomber merged into the crowd of people at Kabul Airport and detonated the bomb once he was about five meters away from American soldiers in order to cause casualties among their ranks in addition to the Afghan victim. The suicide attack was the most devastating bombing attack ISIS has ever launched on a “supposedly” militarily fortified site, it killed 72 people, including 13 American soldiers, leaving US President Biden embarrassed and facing sharp criticism at home. Critics decried the rushed withdrawal that had not been properly planned, leaving even some US nationals stranded. Biden was quick to repudiate claims that the Taliban had colluded with ISIS on the attack.
As soon as the bomb went off, the Amaq News Agency, ISIS’s official new site, rushed to announce the “Logary” bomber’s name, affirmed that its “fighter managed to overcome all the security fortifications, coming no further than 5 meters from the US forces.”
The return of ISIS-K, which counts among its ranks the Afghans who had been part of the Taliban before and defected, pledging their allegiance to Baghdadi before he was killed, and others from Uzbek tribes, are considered extremely dangerous. This is especially true because the new Taliban has not been able to fill the security and military gap left by the US forces’ sudden withdrawal.
It seems that the Americans’ sudden withdrawal has enabled ISIS-K to gain a foothold in Afghanistan, which could become a launching pad for major extremist terrorist attacks in the future, within and outside Afghanistan, especially since the group knows no borders and benefits from wars and civil strife.
The war on Afghanistan was one of the US’s failed wars in the region, preceding those of Iraq and Libya. All of these countries have become failed states after interventions that it was claimed would spread democracy. In reality, these countries have become more chaotic and troubled than they had been, which emphasizes the erroneousness of intervening without a plan and then withdrawing without a plan, which is what happened in all three cases.
The emergence of this wicked organization, ISIS-K, and what it did in Kabul Airport is an omen that evil is coming from the Afghan arena.
