By Michael Scollon
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
August 13, 2024

The Taliban craves recognition by the international community that it is the only group capable of ruling and establishing security in Afghanistan.

But not only has the militant group failed to achieve that status in its three years in power, rival extremist groups like Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) are mocking it for trying.

IS-K has accused the Taliban of abandoning jihad, or holy war, and bowing to the foreign states it once fought to secure foreign aid and investment.

That is the narrative promoted by the Afghanistan-based branch of the Islamic State (IS) extremist group as it looks to recruit belligerent Taliban fighters into its ranks.

To lure Taliban fighters, IS-K has conducted attacks within and outside Afghanistan that undermine the Taliban’s rule.

IS-K has also employed a sophisticated and multilingual propaganda network to cast itself as the only option for hardened Taliban fighters who want to continue warring against foreigners and sectarian adversaries.

“This is a very powerful and potent strategy, and it is likely already working,” said Lucas Webber, co-founder of Militant Wire and research fellow at the Soufan Center. “There are reports of defections.”

Some Taliban rank-and-file, Webber says, may be fighting the complacency that comes with the day-to-day monotony of running a state.

“A lot of these fighters, they grew up their whole lives fighting the United States and the international coalition, and they come from the global jihadist movement, the historic legacy of fighting the Soviets and fighting the Americans and their Western allies,” Webber said. “Now a lot of them are stuck, bored, doing administrative jobs.”

The Taliban has tightened its grip on power since seizing Kabul in August 2021 and tried to capitalize on its gains to boost its image as a stabilizing force inside Afghanistan and in the region.

“The consolidation of power has improved peace and stability internally and resulted in other positive benefits such as reduced corruption, decreased opium cultivation, and enhanced revenue generation,” the UN monitoring team in Afghanistan reported in early July.

But the hard-line Islamist group’s widespread human rights abuses and failure to establish a government inclusive of women and the country’s various religious and ethnic groups has left its biggest goal — international recognition — out of reach.

It is a situation that, combined with multiple humanitarian, environmental, and economic crises, has hampered international aid and investment and undermined the Taliban’s de facto government.

So, too, have the actions of IS-K, a group founded in 2015 by disgruntled members of the Afghan Taliban and the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan and which subsumed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to Webber.

When IS militants claimed responsibility for the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in two decades in March, suspicion immediately fell directly on IS-K.

The Taliban, which has tried to neutralize IS-K and assuage concerns that Afghanistan is a haven for extremist groups, repeated its denials that the organization was operating on Afghan soil.

But there is a wealth of evidence to show that the Taliban recognizes the threat IS-K poses both militarily and ideologically to its rule.

Just prior to the Moscow bombing in March, Afghan media published an internal document attributed to the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), the Taliban’s notorious intelligence agency, which acknowledged IS recruitment efforts in the central Wardak Province. The document discussed the possibility that Taliban members who left the group during a recent effort to purge the ranks of undesirable fighters might have enlisted to fight for IS.

The UN monitoring team in early July warned that IS-K had grown in numbers and succeeded in infiltrating the Taliban’s GDI as well as its Defense and Interior ministries.

In late July, Afghan media reported the arrest of 20 GDI members accused of working for IS-K in the western Herat Province, leading to the dismissal of the security body’s regional head.

For every step the Taliban takes to burnish its image at home and abroad, IS-K is doing its best to undermine it.

IS-K seeks to establish a caliphate, or Islamic state, in Khorasan, a historical region that includes parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asia.

“The group’s narrative aims to reduce the Taliban’s credibility among the Afghan population and trigger sectarian fault lines, promoting the idea that the Taliban has deviated from Islamic principles, while portraying itself as advancing the ‘wider Khorasan,'” a UN Security Council committee reported in late July.

Externally, that means conducting attacks in Tajikistan, Iran, and Pakistan, as well as in Russia.

In Afghanistan itself, IS-K attacks undercut the Taliban’s argument that it has established the type of security demanded by potential foreign investors from China and other states willing to work with the de facto government.

In March, IS-K killed 21 people, most of them Taliban employees, at a bank in the southern city of Kandahar.

Two months later, IS-K killed six foreign and local tourists in the central city of Bamiyan. The Bamiyan Buddhas were infamously reduced to rubble by the Taliban’s first regime just before it was ousted by U.S.-led forces in 2001. Since retaking power, the Taliban has taken the remains of the Buddhas under its protection as it attempts to lure foreign, particularly Chinese, tourists to visit the UNESCO site.

IS-K has used such attacks to flip some Taliban fighters to its side, boasting in a statement following the killings in Bamiyan that it had targeted foreign tourists and “Shi’a” living in the area. A Sunni extremist group, IS-K considers Shi’ite Muslims apostates.

Riccardo Valle, director of research for The Khorasan Diary, said following the attack IS-K pointed out differences between the first Taliban regime that destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas and the current one.

“They are saying that once the Afghan Taliban were correctly applying religion, so they were destroying these idols,” Valle said. But today IS-K has accused the Taliban of protecting the Bamiyan Buddhas “so that the Chinese can in return grant financial assistance, economic assistance to Afghanistan.”

The violence, Valle says, is part of IS-K’s effort to disrupt the Taliban’s economy and weaken its relations with foreign states.

“They are also speaking directly to Taliban soldiers, trying to show them that the Islamic State is the only actor carrying out jihad,” Valle added. “They know that some Afghan Taliban might be willing to listen.”

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