U.N.: ISIS Present in Every Province of Afghanistan After Only 3 Months of Taliban Rule

The United Nations special envoy for Afghanistan warned this week that the Islamic State’s local faction now had significant representation in every province of the country, three months after the Taliban jihadist group took control over the country and a week after the Taliban insisted ISIS was not a problem.

The Islamic State’s subsidiary in Afghanistan is known as the ISIS Khorasan Province (ISIS-K). Its numbers are believed to have grown significantly following the collapse of the ISIS “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria in 2017. The group grew into a significant nuisance for the Taliban during the last days of the Afghan War, as ISIS jihadists attempted to overrun Taliban territory and take over key assets like opium-cultivating poppy fields. The two groups are both, however, Sunni jihadist organizations, and the Taliban has attempted to reason with the Islamic State since coming to power.

American military officials believe that the Taliban freed thousands of ISIS prisoners as it took over former American assets following their abandonment in August, greatly increasing the Islamic State’s operational ability in the country.

United Nations Special Representative for Afghanistan Deborah Lyons offered the global institution a dire update on Wednesday regarding the situation in the country.

“With the Taliban takeover, the Afghan people now feel abandoned, forgotten, and indeed punished by circumstances that are not their fault,” Lyons lamented. “To abandon the Afghan people now would be a historic mistake—a mistake that has been made before with tragic consequences.”

Lyons appeared to give the Taliban significant credit for appearing to be open to collaboration with the United Nations and for an alleged improvement in the “overall security situation” in Afghanistan –with the Islamic State threat a glaring exception to that assessment.

“Once limited to a few provinces and Kabul, ISILKP [ISIS Khorasan] now seems to be present in nearly all provinces and increasingly active,” Lyons revealed. “The number of attacks has increased significantly, from last year to this year. In 2020 – 60, so far this year – 334 attacks attributed to ISILKP or, in fact, claimed by ISILKP.”

“The Taliban insist that they are waging a concerted campaign against ISILKP, but this campaign is worrying in that it appears to rely heavily on extra-judicial detentions and killings of suspected ISILKP members,” Lyons noted, adding that the Taliban is “making genuine efforts to present itself as a government.”

Taliban fighters stand guard at an entrance gate of the Sardar Mohammad Dawood Khan military hospital in Kabul on November 3, 2021, a day after an attack claimed by the Taliban’s hardline rivals the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), in which at least 19 people were killed. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)

Like many others in the U.N. apparatus, Lyons urged “dialogue” with the Taliban and humanitarian support. She described her experience with Taliban jihadists as “generally useful and constructive” and credited the Taliban with providing security to U.N. workers – a claim that contradicts Reuters reporting revealing attacks on U.N. workers by Taliban members in August.

Lyons asserted that “a sustained and structured policy dialogue between the Taliban de facto authorities, other Afghan stakeholders and the wider region and international community” would be necessary to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe, as the Afghan economy and much of society simply collapsed when the U.S.-backed government abandoned the country to the Taliban in August.

The Taliban, currently operating as the government of Afghanistan, has repeatedly attempted to assure the international community that the Islamic State is not a significant threat to their rule or the Afghan people, despite ongoing bombings and other terrorist attacks that ISIS-K has claimed to orchestrate. At the beginning of the month, Taliban spokesman Bilal Karimi told the Afghan outlet Khaama Press that the Islamic State “is just a phenomenon and does not exist at all in Afghanistan leave alone recruiting people in the country.”

In more elaborate remarks, Khalil Hamraz, a spokesman for the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence, told reporters at a press conference last week that Taliban jihadists had arrested over 600 ISIS jihadists and killed 33 “important” Islamic State leaders, including fundraisers and propagandists. Top Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, present at the same press conference, asserted that the Islamic State was “not considered a threat” in the country and had a “not large” presence in Afghanistan.

To the extent that the Islamic State is a threat to the population of Afghanistan, is it largely the doing of the Taliban itself. The Pentagon told reporters that it had reason to believe Taliban terrorists had liberated “thousands” of prisoners in former American facilities at Bagram Airbase, a U.S. base before President Joe Biden abruptly withdrew from the site.

“I don’t know the exact number — clearly it’s in the thousands when you consider both prisons, because both of them were taken over by the Taliban and emptied,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby confirmed shortly after the Taliban’s seizure of power in August.

The Taliban took over the country on August 15 after a rapid campaign across Afghanistan to seize territory from the government of former President Ashraf Ghani. That day, Ghani fled Kabul, allowing the jihadists to storm the capital city. The Taliban began its takeover in earnest after President Biden announced in April that he would break an agreement between Washington and the Taliban that would have seen U.S. troops depart in May 2021. Instead, Biden extended the war – first through September, then cutting the deadline to August.

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