Alwaght | News & Analysis Website

Editor's Choice

News

Most Viewed

Day Week Month

In Focus

Ansarullah

Ansarullah

A Zaidi Shiite movement operating in Yemen. It seeks to establish a democratic government in Yemen.
Shiite

Shiite

represents the second largest denomination of Islam. Shiites believe Ali (peace be upon him) to be prophet"s successor in the Caliphate.
Resistance

Resistance

Axis of Resistances refers to countries and movements with common political goal, i.e., resisting against Zionist regime, America and other western powers. Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine are considered as the Axis of Resistance.
Persian Gulf Cooperation Council

Persian Gulf Cooperation Council

A regional political u n i o n consisting of Arab states of the Persian Gulf, except for Iraq.
Taliban

Taliban

Taliban is a Sunni fundamentalist movement in Afghanistan. It was founded by Mohammed Omar in 1994.
  Wahhabism & Extremism

Wahhabism & Extremism

Wahhabism is an extremist pseudo-Sunni movement, which labels non-Wahhabi Muslims as apostates thus paving the way for their bloodshed.
Kurds

Kurds

Kurds are an ethnic group in the Middle East, mostly inhabiting a region, which spans adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. They are an Iranian people and speak the Kurdish languages, which form a subgroup of the Northwestern Iranian branch of Iranian languages.
NATO

NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949.
Islamic Awakening

Islamic Awakening

Refers to a revival of the Islam throughout the world, that began in 1979 by Iranian Revolution that established an Islamic republic.
Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

A militant Sunni organization founded by Osama bin Laden at some point between 1988 and 1989
New node

New node

Map of  Latest Battlefield Developments in Syria and Iraq on
alwaght.net
News

US-Trained Afghan Soldiers, Spies Joining ISIS to ‘Resist’ Taliban: Paper

Monday 1 November 2021
US-Trained Afghan Soldiers, Spies Joining ISIS to ‘Resist’ Taliban: Paper

Alwaght- A growing number of US-trained Afghan soldiers and intelligence officials are joining the ISIS terrorist group’s ranks to fight the Taliban, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The US spent a staggering $88 billion arming and training Afghanistan’s military, only for Afghan forces to crumble before the Taliban’s lightning fast reconquest of the country in August. Though the Taliban have promised amnesty to these personnel, stories of violent reprisals have circulated, and according to the American daily, a “relatively small, but growing” number of former Afghan soldiers and spies are flocking to the only outfit currently resisting Taliban rule – ISIS terrorist group.

ISIS Afghan offshoot, ISIS-K, is eagerly absorbing these US-trained recruits. According to the former security officials and Taliban members the Wall Street Journal spoke to, some former government troops have joined for a paycheck, and others for lack of a better alternative to Taliban rule.

"If there were a resistance, they would have joined the resistance,” former spy chief Rahmatullah Nabil told the paper, adding that “For the time being, ISIS is the only other armed group".

Though ISIS-K and the Taliban are both Islamic fundamentalist groups, their ideologies differ. The Taliban are a predominantly Punjabi nationalist organization with no stated goals beyond Afghanistan’s borders, and a tolerance for the country’s other Muslim sects. ISIS-K, by contrast, view Shiites and other Muslim sects as apostates and aim to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate, as ISIS attempted to do several years ago in Iraq and Syria.

Initially suppressed by the Taliban, ISIS-K mounted a resurgence amid the chaos of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, carrying out a suicide bombing outside Kabul Airport in August that killed around 200 Afghans and 13 US troops. For the US military, it was the deadliest day in Afghanistan since 2011.

It is unclear what “critical expertise in intelligence-gathering and warfare techniques” these new recruits will bring to ISIS-K, given that the supposedly 300,000-strong Afghan military they came from folded before the Taliban in a matter of weeks, with its members often fleeing or surrendering without firing a shot.

However, the fact that these US-funded fighters are signing up to a hardline terror group within months of the US leaving Afghanistan illustrates a problem that decision-makers in Washington evidently haven’t learned from in four decades of experience.

Just as the US-funded Afghan Mujahideen would eventually morph into the Taliban in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the Afghan military is on track to bolster ISIS-K’s ranks, the disaffected Iraqi soldiers left without a job following the US invasion in 2003 ended up providing a steady stream of recruits for ISIS several years later.

The US security establishment has already begun to sound the alarm about ISIS-K’s resurgence, with US Undersecretary of Defense Colin Kahl telling the Senate last week that the group could be in a position to attack the West from Afghanistan within six months.

The Taliban, at least publicly, are unperturbed. “We are not faced with a threat nor are we worried about them,” Mawlawi Zubair, a senior Taliban commander, told the Wall Street Journal. “There is no need, not even a tiny need, for us to seek assistance from anyone against ISIS".

 

Tags :

Afghanistan US Taliban ISIS

Comments
Name :
Email :
* Text :
Send

Gallery

Photo

Film

Gaza schools are the targets of the Zionist regimes attacks

Gaza schools are the targets of the Zionist regimes attacks