What is ISIS-K? The terror group believed to be behind Kabul airport explosions

Washington: Explosions outside the Kabul airport that have caused multiple casualties come as Biden administration officials have been alarmed in recent days by threats at Hamid Karzai International Airport by IS-K or ISIS-K, a terrorist group that is a sworn enemy of the Taliban.

US President Joe Biden has pledged that he would retaliate against the terrorists who killed 13 American service members in Thursday’s attack on the evacuation operation at Kabul’s airport.

An ISIS flag.Credit: New York Times

“We will not forgive. We will not forget,” he said from the White House. “We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

The IS-K group claimed responsibility for the attacks on behalf of its loyalists in Afghanistan.

US officials, including President Joe Biden, had been warning of the threat of Islamic State terror attacks at the Kabul airport, which is being guarded by the Taliban as Americans and Afghan allies seek to leave the country.

Douglas London, the CIA’s former top counterterrorism chief for the region, including Afghanistan, said the threat posed by IS-K is now higher because of the vacuum created after the Taliban toppled the Afghan government within a matter of days.

The Defence department’s inspector-general, in a report released last week, noted IS-K had lashed out in the last months of the now-ousted Afghan government, seizing on its weakness.

“[IS-Khorasan] exploited the political instability and rise in violence during the quarter by attacking minority sectarian targets and infrastructure to spread fear and highlight the Afghan government’s inability to provide adequate security,” the report said.

What is IS-K?

IS-K is an offshoot of the Islamic State terrorists who established a sprawling caliphate in Iraq and Syria that was eventually destroyed by a US-led bombing campaign. The K stands for Khorasan, a geographical region which under the Abbasid caliphate from the 8th to the 13th centuries took in parts of what is now Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Central Asia. US officials have grown alarmed in recent years about the group’s growing strength, savagery and intent on attacking Western targets.

IS-K, in adherence to the wider Islamic State group’s ideology, regards modern nation-states as colonial constructs and rejects all dealings with the United States, which it considers the modern enforcer of those constructs against the will of Muslims, who it believes should be ruled by a caliphate. It considers the Taliban, who have negotiated with Washington and forged diplomatic relations with Beijing and Moscow, to be corrupt and views their commitment to an Afghan state as un-Islamic. The two militant groups have engaged in attacks on each other.

Of particular concern for military planners is IS-K’s focus on launching attacks in Kabul. It mounted six major attacks in the Afghan capital in 2016, 18 attacks in 2017 and 24 in 2018, the official said. Its attacks have continued to intensify.

People tend to a wounded person near the site of a deadly explosion outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.Credit: AP

“They’ve been a persistent and vexing problem because, despite all the pressure that we and then the Taliban have placed on them, they’ve managed to maintain operational cells that have been effective as we’ve seen over the past few years in Kabul,” London said. “Most of the attacks that were the most heartless ones, like against hospitals and the maternity ward, were all [IS-K].”

That capability to launch deadly attacks is also the reason IS-K poses such a threat to the Taliban and the affiliated Haqqani Network, London said. “They maintain these capabilities, and those are the reasons they and the Taliban are mortal enemies — because [IS-K] represents a competitor. They represent a competitor for resources, materials and power, even though they’re relatively small.”

Who are the Islamic State-K’s fighters?

The group started as several hundred Pakistani Taliban fighters, who took refuge across the border in Afghanistan after military operations drove them out of their home country. Other, like-minded extremists joined them there, including disgruntled Afghan Taliban fighters unhappy with what they — unlike the West — saw as the Taliban’s overly moderate and peaceful ways.

As the Taliban pursued peace talks with the United States in recent years, discontented Taliban increasingly moved to the more extremist Islamic State, swelling its numbers. Most were frustrated that the Taliban was pursuing negotiations with the US at a time when they thought the movement was on the march to a military win.

The group also has attracted a significant cadre from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, from a neighbouring country; fighters from Iran’s only Sunni Muslim majority province; and members of the Turkestan Islamic Party comprising Uighurs from China’s north-east.

Many were attracted to the Islamic State’s violent and extreme ideology, including promises of a caliphate to unite the Islamic world, a goal never espoused by the Taliban.

What is their relationship with the Taliban?

They are enemies. While intelligence officials believe al-Qaeda fighters are integrated among the Taliban, the Taliban, by contrast, have waged major, coordinated offensives against the Islamic State group in Afghanistan. Taliban insurgents at times joined with both the US and US-backed Afghan government forces to rout the Islamic State from parts of Afghanistan’s north-east.

A US Defence Department official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was working covertly, said previously that the Trump administration had sought its 2020 withdrawal deal with the Taliban partly in hopes of joining forces with them against the Islamic State affiliate. The administration saw that group as the real threat to the American homeland.

What makes them a leading threat?

While the Taliban have confined their struggle to Afghanistan, the Islamic State group in Afghanistan and Pakistan has embraced the Islamic State’s call for a worldwide jihad against non-Muslims.

The Centre for International and Strategic Studies counts dozens of attacks that Islamic State fighters have launched against civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including minority Shiite Muslims, as well as hundreds of clashes with Afghan, Pakistani and US-led coalition forces since January 2017. Though the group has yet to conduct attacks against the US homeland, the US government believes it represents a chronic threat to US and allied interests in South and Central Asia.

London said IS-K developed in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. Its members are a cross-section of tribes including Mehsudis, Waziris and Pashtuns from the cross-border area in the north-east quadrant.

“That’s where the heart of it is been. Those folks, really they don’t really see themselves as Afghans, nor do they really see themselves as Pakistanis,” London said.

A lot of IS-K members came up through the ranks of Pakistani extremist groups like Tehrik-e- Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ), which was involved in the 2002 kidnap and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, according to London. But he said others defected from the Taliban because they favoured its more extreme and militant ideology.

IS-K school attack

On May 8, IS-K attacked a school for girls in Kabul and killed at least 68 people, wounding more than than 165, most of them girls, according to a Defence Intelligence Agency assessment cited by the Defence inspector-general. A suicide bomber drove a car laden with explosives into the school’s gate, and, as the children fled, additional bombs exploded.

The school was for the Hazara, a Shiite Muslim ethnic minority targeted by the Sunni IS-K. In May 2020, IS-K attacked a Hazara maternity clinic, killing 24 mothers, newborns and a health care provider.

Before the withdrawal of US troops, negotiated by former president Donald Trump and accelerated by Biden, US military commanders sought to annihilate IS-K. Army General Joseph Votel, former head of US Central Command, declared that IS-K terrorists were “not reconcilable.”

In 2017, the US Department of Defence unleashed the largest conventional bomb in the US arsenal, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also known as the Mother of All Bombs, on an IS-K stronghold. The explosion killed an estimated 96 fighters.

Evidence of the group’s fanaticism, according to intelligence gathered two years ago, showed that IS-K fighters stranded in mountain passes survived on a small supply of pine nuts, the intelligence official said. They preferred starving to profiting from the lucrative trade in opium, he said.

MCT, AP, with Maher Mughrabi

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