This gap partly stemmed from the Taliban’s desire to shore up its legitimacy by obfuscating reality and convincing the international community that the country was free of terrorist threats upon its takeover-a goal it pursued through vigorous disinformation.įor example, after U.S. Yet the agency did not begin reporting arrests of ISKP members until July 2022. Shortly after taking power, the current Taliban government established its internal security arm, the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), in October 2021. On the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the situation is a stark reminder that Afghanistan under the Taliban is a top vector for jihadist operations abroad. Yet unlike many previous groups that relied on stable safe havens to gain more time and space for planning and training, ISKP has actually grown weaker in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s second year in power-while paradoxically expanding its external operations capacity. Today, the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province (ISKP) has adopted the same strategy in Afghanistan. The long list includes actors such as the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (when it hijacked Air France Flight 8969 in 1994), al-Qaeda (most infamously via the 9/11 attacks, but also through plots by local branches al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabab, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), and the Islamic State (e.g., in Syria and Libya ). Over the past three decades, successive jihadist organizations have sought to conduct external operations beyond their local battlefields, often from safe havens abroad. Two decades after the 9/11 attacks, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is once again becoming a haven for terrorist activities abroad-but this time by a local Islamic State branch.
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