IS-K: Who are the Islamic State jihadists blamed for Moscow attack?

March 26, 2024 Current News Articles

By Frank Gardner

BBC security correspondent

March 25, 2024

Despite attempts by President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s state-controlled media to pin the blame for Friday’s deadly Moscow theatre attack on Ukraine, more details are emerging about the jihadist group IS-K, believed to have been behind it.

Who or what is IS-K?

IS-K is an abbreviation of Islamic State-Khorasan – a regional affiliate of the Islamic State group, which has been proscribed as a terror organisation by governments across the world.

It is focused on Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan and into Central Asia.

The group has given itself the name Khorasan as that was part of an historic Islamic caliphate spanning that region.

IS-K has been around for nine years but in recent months it has emerged as the most dangerous branch of the Islamic State group, with a long reach and a reputation for extreme brutality and cruelty.

Along with what is left of the group’s wider leadership in Syria and Iraq, IS-K aspires to a pan-national Islamic caliphate ruled through an ultra-strict interpretation of Sharia, Islamic law.

In Afghanistan it is waging a sporadic but still deadly insurgency against the country’s rulers, the Taliban, who it opposes on ideological grounds.

Has IS-K carried out attacks before?

It targeted the chaotic evacuation from Kabul airport in 2021 with a suicide bomb, killing 170 Afghans and 13 US servicemen.

The following year it targeted the Russian embassy in Kabul, killing at least six people and injuring others.

The group has carried out indiscriminate attacks on a maternity ward, bus stations and policemen.

In January this year, IS-K carried out a double bombing of a shrine in Kerman, Iran, killing nearly 100 Iranians.

In Russia it has carried out numerous small-scale attacks, the most recent being in 2020 – and already this year the FSB, Russia’s internal security service, says it has stopped several terror plots.

Who were the Moscow attackers?

According to Russian state media at least three of the men are Tajiks from the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan, which used to be part of the Soviet Union.

It is obvious from their battered and bruised appearance in court that they have been especially harshly interrogated to the point of torture.

The problem with that is according to international norms, their confessions will be worthless – people will say anything to make the pain stop, including confessing to a narrative that is simply untrue.

Reports have emerged that one of the men was seen carrying out surveillance of the venue in early March, around the time the US warned Russia there was an imminent threat of a terrorist attack on a public space – a warning the Kremlin dismissed at the time as “propaganda”.

Another report says at least two of the attackers arrived in Russia recently, implying that this was a “hit team” sent by IS-K, rather than a sleeper cell of residents.

Why did they target Russia?

There are several reasons.

IS-K consider most of the world to be their enemies. Russia is high up on their list, along with the US, Europe, Israel, Jews, Christians, Shia Muslims, the Taliban and all rulers of Muslim-majority states, who they consider to be “apostates”.

Islamic State’s hostility to Russia goes back to the Chechen wars in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Moscow’s forces devastated the Chechen capital Grozny.

More recently, Russia entered the Syrian civil war on the side of its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, and the Russian air force has carried out countless bombings of rebel and civilian positions, killing large numbers of Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda-linked fighters.

In Afghanistan, IS-K view Russia as being an ally of the Taliban, which is why they attacked the Russian embassy in Kabul in 2022.

They also bear a grudge for the 10 years of brutal Soviet occupation of that country from 1979-89.

Then there is the situation inside Russia itself.

Russia is viewed by IS-K as very much a Christian country and their video posted after the Moscow attack talks about killing Christians.

Tajik and other Central Asian migrant workers are sometimes subject to a degree of harassment and suspicion by the FSB as it seeks to head off terrorist attacks.

Finally, Russia – a nation currently distracted by its full-scale war with its neighbour Ukraine – may simply have been a convenient target of opportunity for IS-K, a place where weapons were available and their enemy’s guard was down.

What do we still not know about the Moscow attack?

There remain a number of unanswered questions about this whole episode.

For example, why were the attackers able to wander at will around the Crocus Hall with absolutely no apparent sense of urgency?

In a country where the police and special services, notably the FSB, are omnipresent, these gunmen behaved as if they knew they were not going to be interrupted by a police SWAT team.

Then there are the weapons – not just handguns but powerful, modern automatic assault rifles. How were they able to acquire these and smuggle them undetected into the venue?

Unlike many jihadist gunmen on a raid like this, these men were not wearing suicide vests or belts, in the manner of those who prefer death to capture.

And yet, it did not take long for the Russian authorities – the same Russian authorities who failed to stop the worst terror plot in 20 years unfolding beneath their noses – to round up the suspects and put them on trial.

All this is prompting some analysts to speculate about some sort of so-called “inside job” by the Kremlin, or a “false flag operation” to garner popular support for the war on Ukraine.

However, there is no hard evidence to support that theory and US intelligence has confirmed that in their view, it was Islamic State behind this hideous attack.

Russian massacre suspects’ homeland is plagued by poverty and religious strife

March 26, 2024 Current News Articles

BY JIM HEINTZ

Associates Press

March 25, 2024

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by authorities as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate to Russia each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences.

Along with grinding poverty, Tajikistan is rife with religious tensions. Hard-line Islamists were one of the main forces opposing the government in a 1990s civil war that devastated the country. The militants claiming responsibility for the Moscow massacre that killed 139 people — a branch of the Islamic State group in neighboring Afghanistan — reportedly recruit heavily from Tajikistan.

The four suspects who were arraigned in a Moscow court late Sunday on terrorism charges appeared to have been beaten or injured during their detention. One was wheeled in on a gurney clad only in a hospital gown.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday described the suspects as “radical Islamists,” and he repeated his accusation that Ukraine might have played a role despite its strong denials.

Here is a look at the people, militant groups and political history connected to the Moscow attack:

THE SUSPECTS

The eldest defendant is Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, 32, who may have been living in Russia illegally. He was shown sitting in a glass cage in the courtroom with a black eye and bruised face.

Mirzoyev reportedly had obtained a three-month residency permit in the city of Novosibirsk, but it had expired. In video of his interrogation shared on Russian social media, he reportedly says he recently was living in a Moscow hostel with another of the suspects. The court said he is married and has four children, but it was unclear if he was employed.

Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, 30, is apparently unemployed. Registered as a resident in Russia, he could not remember in what city, according to Russian news reports. When he appeared in court, his head was awkwardly bandaged after Russian officers reportedly sawed off one of his ears.

Shamsidin Fariduni, 25, apparently had the most stable life of the four suspects. He was registered in Krasnogorsk, the Moscow suburb where the killings took place, and worked in a flooring factory. He reportedly told interrogators that he was offered 500,000 rubles (about $5,425) to carry out the attack — the equivalent of about 2.5 years of the average wage in Tajikistan.

Mukhammadsobir Fayzov, 19, was brought into the courtroom on a gurney, with a catheter attached and one eye injured or missing, and he appeared to fade in an out of consciousness. He had worked as an apprentice in a barbershop in the declining textile-mill city of Ivanovo, but reports said he left that job in November.

ISLAMIC TENSIONS IN TAJIKISTAN

As many as 1.5 million Tajik migrants are estimated to be in Russia after fleeing the poverty and unemployment that plague their landlocked, mountainous country. An array of mineral resources are present in Tajikistan, but the industry has been slow to develop because of belated foreign investment and poor geological data, among other factors.

Although its nearly 10 million people are overwhelmingly Muslim, tensions connected to Islam are common.

Islamists were a key opponent during a 1992-97 civil war in which the government killed as many as 150,000 people and devastated the economy. When the war ended, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon took steps to sharply curtail religious freedoms.

The government limited how many mosques could be built, prohibited women and children under 18 from attending mosques at all, and banned religious instruction outside the home for children. Critics say the limits encouraged people to turn to underground and radical Muslim factions via the internet.

Tajikistan has not made any official statement about the arrest of the four men suspected in the attack. But Rahmon was quoted by his government’s press service as telling Putin in a phone call that “terrorists have neither nationality, nor a homeland, nor religion.”

ISLAMIC STATE VS. RUSSIA

Most attacks tied to Islamic extremists that afflicted Russia in the past quarter century were committed by Chechen separatists, such as the 2004 Beslan school seizure that killed more than 300 people — or were blamed on them, as in the 1999 apartment bombings that triggered the second Russia-Chechnya war.

But attacks that began in 2015 were claimed by or attributed to the Islamic State group. The group opposed Russia’s intervention in Syria, where Moscow sought to tip the balance in favor of President Bashar Assad’s forces.

The U.S. government has said it had intelligence confirming IS was responsible for the weekend attack in Moscow.

After IS declared a caliphate in large parts of Syria and Iraq in June 2014, thousands of men and women from around the world came to join the extremist group. Those included thousands from the former Soviet Union, among them hundreds from Tajikistan.

One of the most prominent figures to join IS was Gulmurod Khalimov, who was an officer with Tajikistan’s special forces before defecting and joining IS in Syria in 2015. In 2017, the Russian military said Khalimov was killed in a Russian airstrike in Syria.

IS claimed responsibility for the 2015 bombing of a Russian airliner that was bringing tourists home from the Egyptian resort Sharm al-Sheik. Two years later, it claimed to be behind the suicide bombing of a subway train in St. Petersburg that killed 15 people.

Two weeks before the Moscow theater massacre, Russian officials said they had wiped out members of an IS cell that was planning to attack a synagogue. Earlier in the month, it reported killing six IS fighters in the Ingushetia region adjacent to Chechnya.

Bassem Mroue in Beirut, Lebanon, contributed to this report.

Stoning Punishment Based on Sharia: Mujahid

March 26, 2024 Current News Articles

Sodaba Nazhand

Tolo News

26 March 2024

Moscow Claims Washington Supports Daesh, Al-Qaeda

March 26, 2024 Current News Articles

Mitra Majeedy

Tolo News

26 March 2024

Philadelphia college student hopes to pave the way for more Afghan women to join the medical field

March 26, 2024 Current News Articles

“Women will come over and tell you, ‘Thank you so much for having this. We are all alone in Philadelphia. Most of our family is in Afghanistan, but coming here we weren’t able to feel that separation and that loneliness.’ And that just makes everything worth it,” Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine student Abdul Faruq said.

She and others started the group Afghans of Philadelphia x Sola in 2021 to help families who were fleeing from the Taliban.

Her own family also left Afghanistan shortly after she was born more than 20 years ago in search of more opportunities.”Being a woman was very difficult there,” Abdul Faruq said. “There’re certain areas where they can’t even go outside alone without a male chaperone. They can’t go to school, get a higher education. So, I, their first child, was born and I was a girl so I feel like it was that extra push for them to get out in order to speak a better future.”

Her family eventually found their new home in Northeast Philly.

“Coming to Philadelphia, which is known as the City of Brotherly Love, it’s like a great combination between Afghans and Philadelphia because we’re both so hospitable and there’s just so much love and diversity here,” Abdul Faruq said.

Now the 26-year-old is a first-year medical student at PCOM.

“Not only are there not a lot of Afghans represented overall in the community, but there’s even less in medicine and there’s even less female Afghans in medicine as well,” Abdul Faruq said. “Just being part of that group, I feel like it’s a way to inspire others as well.”

She hopes to do that through her role as co-president of the American Medical Women’s Association on campus.

Each accomplishment is a reminder to her family that she will always remember where she came from.

“If I can at least change one person’s perspective on what Afghanistan is and who the people are from there and their culture, then I feel like I’ve done a tremendous job because there is just so much more to our culture,” Abdul Faruq said.

Once Abdul Faruq is done with medical school, she hopes to go back to Afghanistan and open up a clinic there to provide healthcare to communities.

Marcella Baietto is a bilingual reporter with CBS News Philadelphia. She’s originally from Phoenix, Arizona, but considers El Salvador her second home since much of her family still lives there.

Moscow concert hall attack: How did ISIL recoup, five years after ‘defeat’?

March 26, 2024 Current News Articles

By Charu Sudan Kasturi

Al Jazeera

The group’s Afghanistan arm in particular has gained since the return of the Taliban — even though the two are enemies — say analysts.

On Thursday morning, US State Department official Ian McCary sat down in a blue suit, red tie and brown shoes for a question-and-answer session at The Washington Institute to mark the fifth anniversary of the “defeat” of ISIL (ISIS) in Syria.

The US-led coalition, along with its local partners, had on March 23, 2019 pushed the armed group out of Baghuz in Syria — a country where it once had its de facto capital, in Raqqa. “This was and remains a milestone in our continued efforts to ensure ISIS cannot resurge,” McCary said in his comments.

Just a day later, gunmen would barge into a packed concert hall in Moscow, Russia, spraying music lovers with bullets and setting the venue on fire, on the eve of that “milestone” victory.

More than 130 people have been killed, including three children, and over 100 others have been injured, in the worst such attack that Russia has witnessed in two decades.

ISIL’s Afghanistan arm — also known as the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K) – swiftly claimed responsibility. The United States has said that its intelligence suggests the claim is accurate.

On ISKP social media channels, supporters have been celebrating the attack, according to analysts. It’s the latest sign, say strategic experts, of how ISIL has recovered from some of its setbacks in Syria and Iraq, and how Afghanistan has emerged as a vital staging ground for its growing ambitions.

“Should the attack in Russia be definitively attributed to ISKP, it would underscore the group’s resolve to align its actions with its pronounced objectives — targeting countries that play pivotal roles in the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and South and Central Asia,” said Amira Jadoon, assistant professor of political science at the South Carolina-based Clemson University, and co-author of the 2023 book, The Islamic State in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Strategic Alliances and Rivalries.

The Russia concert attack comes two months after suicide bombings in Kerman, Iran, killed more than 90 people and injured nearly 300 others. ISKP claimed responsibility for those attacks too.

While Russia — seen by ISIL as an oppressor of Muslims in Chechnya, Syria and Afghanistan (during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s) — and Shia-majority Iran have long been in the crosshairs of the armed group, there’s a broader strategic intent behind recent attacks too, said Jadoon.

“By directing its aggression towards nations such as Iran and Russia, ISKP not only confronts regional heavyweights but also underscores its political relevance and operational reach on the global stage,” she told Al Jazeera.

Yet analysts say that none of this would have been possible without the group’s success in building a safe base in Afghanistan — and actually bolstering its presence in that country even after its archenemy, the Taliban, took control of that nation in August 2021.

‘More breathing room’

At the height of its influence, ISIL controlled about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq.

Faced with military pressure from a range of otherwise battling regional players — a US-led alliance, Russia and Iran — as well as the governments of those two countries, it lost 95 percent of that territory by the end of 2017. The March 2019 loss of Baghuz eliminated the group’s physical control of any town, city or region in Iraq or Syria.

Meanwhile, its Afghanistan affiliate, the ISKP was continuing to build its reputation as a deadly force: In May 2020, it was blamed for an attack on a maternity ward in Kabul that killed 24 people, including women and infants. Six months later, its fighters attacked Kabul University, killing at least 22 students and teachers.

Then, as the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, ISKP sent a chilling message to its local nemesis and to the hurriedly departing US military, with devastating bombings at Kabul airport that killed at least 175 civilians and 13 US soldiers.

Since then, “ISKP in Afghanistan has grown in strength significantly”, said Kabir Taneja, a fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation and author of the 2019 book, The ISIS Peril. Its attacks have spilled over the border into Pakistan too, where the group bombed an election rally last July, killing more than 50 people.

And the Taliban’s power grab in Afghanistan has helped, said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Washington-based Wilson Center.

“ISIS-K may be a rival of the Taliban, but ISIS-K benefitted from the Taliban’s takeover, and also the US withdrawal,” Kugelman told Al Jazeera.

“The Taliban staged prison breaks that ended up freeing ISIS-K fighters,” he said. The collapse of the US-backed Afghan military gave the ISKP opportunities to seize weapons. And the Taliban’s lack of an air force has given the group a chance to take and hold ground.

“The absence of NATO air strikes — perhaps the most effective tactic used to manage the ISIS-K threat — gives the group more breathing room, especially because the Taliban can’t operate airpower,” Kugelman said. “In effect, ISIS-K has benefited from an enabling environment in Afghanistan, emboldening it to expand its focus far beyond its bastion areas.”

New ambitions

It isn’t just the ISKP that has grown its influence — the main ISIL has too, said Taneja.

“ISIS in its original regions of operations, Syria and Iraq, also sees [an] uptick in operational capabilities,” he told Al Jazeera. ISIL, Taneja said, today exists in a form of “suspension, where it’s ideologically powerful even if politically, tactically or strategically not that powerful any more.

“And how to combat this is the big question at a time when big power completion and global geopolitical churn has put counterterrorism on the back burner.”

As for the ISKP, the attacks in Russia and Iran are crucial for the group “to remain relevant, amplify its reputation and sustain its strategically diverse cadre”, Jadoon said, referring to the different reasons fighters are drawn to the group — from anger towards specific countries to opposition to the Taliban.

“In essence, orchestrating international attacks beyond the confines of Pakistan and Afghanistan is a deliberate tactic within ISKP’s strategy to globalise its campaign,” she said.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

First Intl Water Conference to Be Held Soon in Kabul

March 26, 2024 Current News Articles

Sevanal-Naveed

Tolo News

25 March 2024

Roza Otunbayeva, and Raffaella Iodice, pledged that they will cooperate with the government and people of Afghanistan in various sectors.

Abdul Rasheed Iqbal, chancellor of Kabul Polytechnic University, said that lecturers and scientists from several countries, including Russia, India, Pakistan, and Iran, are interested in participating in this conference.

“We plan to organize an international water conference at Kabul Polytechnic University at the end of September 2024, and this will be the first international water conference in Kabul,” Abdul Rasheed Iqbal said during a tree planting campaign program.

At the same time, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, Sadrazam Osmani, stated that Afghanistan currently needs global assistance in the sectors of climate change, water management, and forest development.

He called on international organizations and the European Union to help Afghanistan in mitigating the impacts of climate change.

“Our country is greatly harmed, and the reason is that greenhouse gas production in Afghanistan is low, yet its vulnerability is high,” Sadrazam Osmani added.

Roza Otunbayeva, the head of UNAMA, and the European Union Chargée d’Affaires to Afghanistan, who also attended the program, pledged that they will cooperate with the government and people of Afghanistan in various sectors.

“Afghanistan faces very severe climate change, and today we are here again — those programs which you have and all the international organizations, the international community, will do our best to help your country in this regard also,” said Roza Otunbayeva.

“We acknowledge and we are here to acknowledge that Afghanistan, despite being one of the countries least responsible for the emission of greenhouse gasses, is one of the most affected,” said Raffaella Iodice, the EU Chargée d’Affaires to Afghanistan.

Previously, officials of the Islamic Emirate have stated that Afghanistan ranks sixth among the countries most affected by climate change, and international aid in this sector has decreased in Afghanistan.

Russia Criticizes US’s 20-Year Presence in Afghanistan

March 26, 2024 Current News Articles

Mitra Majeedy

Tolo News

25 March 2024

Meanwhile, the Islamic Emirate said that America invaded Afghanistan to manage Central Asian countries and its rivals.

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, criticized the 20-year presence of the United States in Afghanistan in an interview with TASS news agency, stating that the US did not combat terrorism in Afghanistan.

Sergey Lavrov also said that Moscow, following the events of September 11th, was among the first countries that did not oppose the presence of the US in Afghanistan; however, according to the Russian Foreign Minister, terrorism was not dealt with over these twenty years.

According to TASS, “Lavrov also recalled that the United States came to Afghanistan with the sympathies of the UN Security Council after the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.”

“President Putin was the first to call US President George W. Bush and offered help and support. No one objected or called the entry of American coalition troops into Afghanistan an aggression or occupation. Everyone understood that such a terrorist attack must be held accountable. Twenty years of stay in Afghanistan showed that the Americans did not fight any kind of terrorism,” Lavrov said as quoted by TASS.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Emirate said that America invaded Afghanistan to manage Central Asian countries and its rivals.

“They had come to occupy and permanently conquer Afghanistan, to build their military bases on our soil, to control Central Asia from Afghanistan, and to threaten some of their rival countries from here,” Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate, told TOLOnews.

“We have realized that the intense competition between the Americans and the Russians is underway. They accuse each other over geopolitical competitions for resources; however, in the case of Afghanistan, it is sufficient that the Americans failed in counter-terrorism and nation-building in Afghanistan,” said Shir Aqa Rohani, a political analyst.

“It’s okay that there was a significant change in the economy, especially in the lives of the people, because billions of dollars flowed into Afghanistan during the twenty-year presence of the United States and other NATO countries; however, the specific goal that the United States had come for — to fight terrorist groups — unfortunately, was not achieved,” said Najib Rahman Shamal, another political analyst.

Russian officials spoke of counter-terrorism after the recent deadly attack on a concert hall in the Krasnogorsk region of Moscow, which resulted in the death of more than 140 people and injured 182 others.

ISIS-K, Group Tied to Moscow Attack, Has Grown Bolder and More Violent

March 24, 2024 Current News Articles

By Christina Goldbaum

The New York Times

March 24, 2024

The militant group violently opposes the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan, where it is based. It is increasingly targeting foreign foes.

Few know better than the Taliban what a relentless foe the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan can be.

Much of the West considers the Taliban, which reclaimed power in the country in 2021, to be an extremist Islamic movement. But the Islamic State Khorasan, the affiliate that has been linked by U.S. officials to a terrorist attack in suburban Moscow on Friday, has slammed the Taliban government, calling the group’s version of Islamic rule insufficiently hard-line.

The Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, is one of the last significant antagonists that the Taliban face in Afghanistan. It has carried out a bloody drumbeat of attacks throughout the country in recent years, seeking to use the violence to undermine the Taliban’s relationships with regional allies and to portray the government as incapable of providing security in Afghanistan, experts say.

In the months after the Taliban seized power, ISIS-K carried out near daily attacks on their soldiers at roadside checkpoints and in neighborhoods that are home to the country’s Hazara ethnic minority. The following year, ISIS-K fighters attacked the Russian Embassy in Kabul, tried to assassinate Pakistan’s top diplomat to Afghanistan and sent gunmen into a prominent hotel in Kabul that was home to many Chinese nationals, seeking to undermine the Taliban’s promise of restoring peace.

More recently, ISIS-K’s attacks have grown bolder and stretched beyond Afghanistan’s borders: The group killed at least 43 people in an assault on a political rally in northern Pakistan in July. It killed at least 84 people in two suicide bombings in Iran in January. Now, U.S. officials say ISIS-K was behind the attack in Moscow, which killed at least 133 people.

In recent months, ISIS-K has threatened attacks against the Chinese, Indian and Iranian Embassies in Afghanistan. It has also released a flood of anti-Russian propaganda, denouncing the Kremlin for its interventions in Syria and condemning the Taliban for engaging with the Russian authorities decades after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

“ISIS-K has long been motivated by the logic of outbidding in its attacks,” said Asfandyar Mir, a senior expert at the United States Institute of Peace. “It seeks to outperform rival jihadis by carrying out more audacious attacks to distinguish its jihadi brand and assert leadership of the global jihadi vanguard.”

ISIS-K was established in 2015 by disaffected fighters of the Pakistani Taliban, an ideological twin and ally of the Taliban in Afghanistan. ISIS-K’s ideology spread partly because many villages in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan are home to Salafi Muslims, the same branch of Sunni Islam as the Islamic State. The Taliban, in contrast, mostly follow the Hanafi school of Islam.

From its early days, ISIS-K has been at odds with the Taliban, fighting over turf in eastern Afghanistan and later denouncing the Taliban’s new government for not instituting what it views as true Shariah law. ISIS-K propaganda has sharply criticized the Taliban for working to establish diplomatic relations with non-Muslim countries, including the United States and Russia, describing the efforts as a betrayal of the global jihadist struggle.

Before the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan ended in 2021, American airstrikes and Afghan commando raids had contained ISIS-K mostly to eastern Afghanistan. But after the withdrawal of Western troops, the Islamic State’s reach expanded to nearly all of the country’s 34 provinces, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

Since seizing power, the Taliban have carried out a relentless and often ruthless counterterrorism campaign to squash ISIS-K. Those efforts have prevented the group from taking any territory in Afghanistan and pushed many of its fighters into Pakistan, experts say. Taliban security forces killed at least eight of ISIS-K’s leaders in the country last year, according to U.S. officials.

The crackdown drew condemnation from human rights groups that claimed Taliban security forces were summarily executing and forcibly causing disappearances of people accused of being affiliated with the Islamic State in eastern Afghanistan, the group’s historic stronghold.

U.N. monitors also cautioned this year that the Taliban’s counterterrorism operations against ISIS-K “appear to be more focused on the internal threat posed to them than the external operations of the group.”

But even as ISIS-K cells have come under mounting pressure from Taliban security forces, the group has proved resilient and remained active across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Just a day before the attack near Moscow, the group carried out a suicide bombing in Kandahar, Afghanistan — the birthplace of the Taliban movement — sending a powerful message that even Taliban soldiers in the group’s heartland were not safe.

“The success by the Afghan Taliban didn’t change the degree of threat that the Islamic State Khorasan posed in Afghanistan,” said Riccardo Valle, the director of research at the Khorasan Diary, a research platform based in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. “It simply forced the Islamic State to shift its military tactics.”

Now, rather than staging small hit-and-run attacks on low-level Taliban soldiers and police officers, ISIS-K has turned its focus to major attacks in Afghanistan and beyond, experts say.

Its propaganda has also painted the Taliban as “betraying the history of Afghanistan and betraying their religion by making friends with their former enemies,” Mr. Valle said, referring to Russia.

The messaging has stoked new fears of attacks by people who are not directly associated with ISIS-K but inspired by the group, experts say. It has also sought to drive a wedge between the Taliban and major powers like Russia, China and Iran that have recently warmed up to the Taliban authorities.

While no country has officially recognized the Taliban government, Russia accepted a military attaché from the Taliban in Moscow this month. China accepted a Taliban ambassador to the country. Both moves were seen as confidence-building measures.

After the attack in Moscow, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s foreign ministry, said in a statement on social media that the country “condemns in the strongest terms the recent terrorist attack in Moscow” and “considers it a blatant violation of all human standards.”

He added: “Regional countries must take a coordinated, clear & resolute position against such incidents directed at regional destabilization.”

Zia ur-Rehman contributed reporting.

Christina Goldbaum is the Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief for The Times.

Taliban Chief Defends Islamic Criminal Justice System, Including Stoning Women for Adultery

March 24, 2024 Current News Articles

By Ayaz Gul

Voice of America

March 24, 2024

The leader of Afghanistan’s fundamentalist Taliban government has said it is determined to enforce the Islamic criminal justice system, including the public stoning of women for adultery.

“Our mission is to enforce sharia and Allah’s Hudud [law],” said Hibatullah Akhundzada in an audio clip Taliban officials said was from his latest speech. They did not say where the reclusive leader spoke, but Akhundzada lives in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and rarely leaves what is known as the Taliban’s historical birthplace and political headquarters.

He primarily addressed Western critics of the Taliban government, which Akhundzada is effectively controlling from Kandahar, through edicts based on his strict interpretation of Islam.

“You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles,” said the Taliban chief.

“Just as you claim to be striving for the freedom of entire humanity, so do I. I represent Allah, and you represent Satan,” Akhundzada said.

He criticized Western human rights values and women’s freedoms, saying Taliban religious scholars would persistently resist the West and its form of democracy in Afghanistan. “Thanks to these scholars, such a democracy was evicted from this land,” the Taliban leader said.

The Taliban returned to power in August 2021, when the then-internationally backed government collapsed, and U.S.-led Western nations withdrew all their troops after nearly 20 years of involvement in the Afghan war.

Taliban authorities have since publicly flogged hundreds of Afghans, including women, for theft, robbery, and committing “moral crimes” in sports stadiums in the presence of thousands of onlookers. At least four men have also been publicly executed after having been convicted of murder by Taliban courts.

UN Presses Taliban Again to End ‘Heartbreaking’ Curbs on Afghan Women

Akhundzada has suspended girls’ education in Afghanistan beyond the sixth grade and prohibited many women from public and private workplaces, including the United Nations and other aid organizations.

Women are not allowed to undertake long road and air trips unless accompanied by a male relative, and cannot visit public places, such as parks, gyms, and bathhouses.

The Taliban leader defends his governance, saying it is aligned with Afghan culture and Islam.

The new academic year started in Afghanistan last week, but girls above 12 were excluded for the third consecutive year.

The United Nations and the world at large have been urging the Taliban to reverse all sanctions on women and halt corporal punishments and public executions of convicts.

“It is heartbreaking to mark another year where school doors open without the participation of Afghan girls above the age of 12,” Rina Amiri, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan women and human rights, said Saturday on X, formerly known as Twitter.

She reiterated the U.S. call for the Taliban to reverse their “destructive decrees,” saying they are destroying the potential of more than 50% of Afghanistan’s population.

“The Taliban’s relentless, discriminatory edicts against women & girls are keeping Afghanistan poor & aid-dependent, & forcing Afghan families to leave. There is no substitute for all Afghans participating in the formal education system, which has existed for over 100 years,” Amiri wrote.

The international community has not granted formal recognition to the de facto Afghan authorities, citing human rights concerns, especially the harsh treatment of women.

By Frank Gardner

BBC security correspondent

Who or what is IS-K?

Has IS-K carried out attacks before?

Who were the Moscow attackers?

Why did they target Russia?

What do we still not know about the Moscow attack?

THE SUSPECTS

ISLAMIC TENSIONS IN TAJIKISTAN

ISLAMIC STATE VS. RUSSIA

‘More breathing room’

New ambitions

UN Presses Taliban Again to End ‘Heartbreaking’ Curbs on Afghan Women

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