The Taliban has long accused Washington of funding ISIS, and now they’re indirectly right, as a growing number of US-trained Afghan soldiers and intelligence officials are joining the terrorist group’s ranks to fight the Taliban.
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 Wall Street Journal, a “relatively small, but growing” number of former Afghan soldiers and spies are flocking to the only outfit currently resisting Taliban rule – Islamic State terrorist group.
Islamic State’s (IS, formerly ISIS) Afghan offshoot, IS-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 IS-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. IS-K, by contrast, view Shiites and other Muslim sects as apostates and aim to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate, as IS attempted to do several years ago in Iraq and Syria.
Initially suppressed by the Taliban, IS-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 IS-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.
http://globalreportage.org/2021/11/02/us-trained-afghan-soldiers-spies-joining-isis-terrorists-to-resist-taliban/
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