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2021-08-28 Afghanistan
The view from India: What we know about the Islamic State Khorasan Province
[OneIndia] The focus in Afghanistan has changed from the Taliban
...Arabic for students...
to the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
Khorasan Province (ISKP) following the deadly suicide kabooms at the Kabul Airport on Thursday.

Continued from Page 4



The ISKP has grabbed credit for the attacks in which scores of people were targeted. The ISKP was established in the Nangarhar
The unfortunate Afghan province located adjacent to Mohmand, Kurram, and Khyber Agencies. The capital is Jalalabad. The province was the fief of Younus Khalis after the Soviets departed and one of his sons is the current provincial Taliban commander. Nangarhar is Haqqani country..
province in 2015. It has been at constant battle with the Taliban.

THE FIRST ISKP CHIEF:
The first leader of the ISKP was Hafiz Saeed Khan, a Pakistain national who was part of the Tehrik-e-Taliban. Following his appointment, he brought in several from the TTP into the ISKP.

Abdul Rauf Kadim, a former commander of the Taliban was appointed as the Khan's deputy. Over the next couple of months several more from the TTK and the Lashkar-e-Islam
...a group of Islamic bandidos infesting Khyber Agency. It was headed by a former bus driver and eventually folded into the TTP...
joined the ISKP. It was growing into a potent force in Afghanistan and there were defections into the ISKP from the Haqqani Network, Lashkar-e-Tayiba, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Jamaat-ud-Dawa
...the front organization of Lashkar-e-Taiba...


THE RISE AND FALL:
In 2016, when the ISIS was at its peak in Iraq and Syria, the group had around 4,000 holy warriors in its fold in Afghanistan. However its downfall began in 2018 when there were a series of military strikes on its assets in Jowzjan, a province in northern Afghanistan.

Thanks to the series of these military strikes, the number of holy warriors in the ISKP had come down to just 1,500. Estimates today suggest that the outfit today may comprise hardly around 1,000 terrorists.

A UN report says that the force continues to be prominent only in the Nangarhar and Kunar province
... which is right down the road from Chitral. Kunar is Haqqani country.....
s. While the force is largely decentralised today, it still continues to pose a threat and the Kabul bombings are proof of the same.

WHO LEADS THE ISKP:
The first major blow that the ISKP suffered was when its leader Khan was killed in a US dronezap in 2015. He was replaced Abdul Hasib, but he was taken down by the US and Afghan forces in 2017. Under Hasib, the ISKP undertook a series of attacks including the one at the main military hospital in Kabul.

Following the death of Hasib, Abu Sayeed took over, but he was killed two months later. Since then the outfit is being run by Shahab-al-Mujahir also known as Sanaullah. He was a commander with the Haqqani Network before joining the ISKP.

ATTACKS BY THE ISKP:
In November the group carried out an attack at the Kabul University in which 22 people were killed. In the same month, the ISKP launched a mortar attack in a residential area in Kabul in which 8 people were killed.

In May 2020, the ISKP killed 16 people at a maternity ward in Kabul which was run by the Doctors Without Borders Charity.

Last December, the outfit launched a rocket attack at the airport in Kabul. The outfit also carried out a car kaboom outside a girl's school in Kabul. 165 including 68 students were killed in the attack. The ISKP was also involved in the Kabul Gurudwara attack in which 25 people were killed.

THE ISKP-TALIBAN RELATIONSHIP:
When the ISKP was formed, Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour had written to the ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to stop the recruitment drive. The ISIS had started recruiting disgruntled Taliban fighters. Mansour had said in the letter that any activity by the ISIS in Afghanistan should be carried out under the leadership of the Taliban.

However the letter was not paid heed to and fighting broke out between the two factions within the Taliban in Zabul Province on whether or not to join the ISIS. In April 2017, the ISIS took into captivity several drug pushers who were selling opium to raise funds for the Taliban. This led to more festivities and 20 bad boyz were potted in the fighting.

In July there were more conflicts and the ISIS suffered further setbacks. It was in February 2020 the Donald Trump
...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US...
Administration signed a peace accord with the Taliban in Doha and the outfit pledged that it would keep the ISIS and other Death Eater groups out of Afghanistan.

Currently, according to estimates there are around 2,000 ISIS holy warriors remaining in Afghanistan. It may be recalled that around 23 persons from Kerala too had left for Afghanistan to join the ISIS. Many have died, while some have been captured.
WHO ARE THE ISLAMIC STATE KHORASAN’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 U.S. 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 neighboring country
...Jamaat Ansarullah — as opposed to all the other groups that go by Ansarullah, including the Houthis in Yemen — is the Tajikistani branch of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which fights alongside the Taliban in Jawzjan and Faryab provinces...
; fighters from Iran’s only Sunni Muslim majority province; and members of the Turkistan Islamic Party
...TIP is listed under Tehrik-e-Taliban in the Al Qaeda organization table. Badakhshan has hosted their Afghan base...
comprising Uighurs from China’s northeast.

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 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 Center 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 U.S.-led coalition forces since January 2017. Though the group has yet to conduct attacks against the U.S. homeland, the U.S. government believes it represents a chronic threat to U.S. and allied interests in South and Central Asia.

WHAT IS THEIR ROLE WITH THE TALIBAN?
They are enemies. While intelligence officials believe al-Qaida 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 U.S. and U.S.-backed Afghan government forces to rout the Islamic State from parts of Afghanistan’s northeast.

A U.S. Defense 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.


Posted by trailing wife 2021-08-28 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11 views ]  Top
 File under: Islamic State 

#1 Last para by DoD tool. Complete fabrication or half truth?

Some things the journos didn't mention, probably because they don't know. Ground realities and nitty gritty about IS-K.

The IS-K, maybe due to their brotherhood leanings, does not enjoy Islamabad's blessings or the jamaats' goodwill. For funding they serve as mercenaries and button men for whoever needs extra manpower, needs to false flag an attack on himself, for political assassination, spreading terror, discrediting a regime, whatever. One can also outsource a proxy suicide attack to them. Make the drop, and everything from explosive to an allah-mad sasquatch are ready to deliver your intended level of mayhem. They do not distinguish between clients over religion, country, loyalty, whatever. Sometimes, you can even have them sell out their own loyalists for the right price. Because IS-K need money. There's no ISI funneling them salaries like the Hizb or the Lashkar.

Posted by Dron66046 2021-08-28 02:15||   2021-08-28 02:15|| Front Page Top

#2 According to a Transnational Threats Project report by CSIS on Salafi-jihadist groups, IS-K's fighting force had fallen from 4000 to 800 from 2016 to 2018. When former Taliban commander, Qari Hekmatullah, pledged allegiance to IS-K in 2016 he had brought over several wahhabis to the group. His networks in north Afghanistan facilitated the Islamic State’s expansion in the province from March 2018 until his death by airstrike. They expanded in Pakistan because everyone from local jamaats to the ISI kept contracting them for political work.
Posted by Dron66046 2021-08-28 02:16||   2021-08-28 02:16|| Front Page Top

#3 Later, to escape the FATF blacklist, Pakistan's 'anti-terrorist' [much like ANSDF's great warfighting] ops against them from 2019 onward only obfuscated their real numbers. But it is speculated they have been recruiting steadily from the wahhabis and forming covert cells in Pak, Afghanistan and India. Their grand ambitions, mentioned in their insipid charter read like a comic book villain speech. The rhetoric and random sasquatchery is just them fooling their own recruits and occasional financiers about world domination, but they're basically mercs and covert muscle.

This attack has been engineered by the ISI, I'm sure of it.

This is just one more ice cream cone that has been unwrapped for the US by the Pakistain ISI. I was thinking they'd get the taliban to do it, but those turbans are smartening up for the UNs and World banks. So... IS-K it is.

The perpetrators could be culled effectively only if the US does not pu$$yfoot around Pakistain. For that matter so could have the taliban, long ago before this fiasco ever reached the tables in Qatar.

Suggested reading: This article from a year or two back.
Posted by Dron66046 2021-08-28 02:18||   2021-08-28 02:18|| Front Page Top

#4 With no intelligence assets on the ground, how has anyone determined who is responsible ?

Just curious.
Posted by Besoeker 2021-08-28 02:24||   2021-08-28 02:24|| Front Page Top

#5 If the IS-K have done something, Besoeker, good chances they were pointed in the direction and given a detailed plan.

If you know the animal inside out, you see the signature right away. As for assets, there are always assets on ground, that's all I'll say.

Posted by Dron66046 2021-08-28 03:06||   2021-08-28 03:06|| Front Page Top

#6 an allah-mad sasquatch
Posted by Skidmark 2021-08-28 09:25||   2021-08-28 09:25|| Front Page Top

13:41 Skidmark
13:38 Uleremp and Company7042
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