The attack on Kabul airport, which caused dozens of victims, was claimed by the ISIS faction active in Afghanistan, known as Isis Khorasan, Isis-K or again Iskp, gives Islamic State Khorasan Province, or the Afghan province of Khorasan.
According to American sources, the claim is also believed to be credible by American intelligence officials who had indicated precisely in this faction the greatest danger for possible attacks.
The differences between Isis and the Taliban
Even if in recent history Islamic terrorist groups have intertwined and changed ‘group’ they belong to, it was not always enough for them to be on the opposite side of the ‘infidels’ to unite. Far from it.
The Taliban in the West always associated with Al Qaeda (and therefore attacked in 2001 when they were in power in Afghanistan) and the proximity between the two groups remains valid. So much so that on August 15 Al Qaeda – or what remains of it – rejoiced for the “historic victory” of its historic allies in Afghanistan, but for ISIS, which has never got along with them, the victorious Taliban more they are but traitorous “apostates” and “agents of the Americans”.
Taliban and Isis have been at war for some time and the Taliban have indicated on several occasions that they want to keep the Isis group away from the areas under its control.
Over the past six years, ISIS-K has contended with the Taliban for the monopoly of terrorist operations against military and civilian targets within the country. In the belief that the Pashtun ethnic group (the main ethnic group within the Taliban movement) is religiously “impure” and politically compromised with the American devil.
A hatred returned as, on August 15, the day of the fall of Kabul at the hands of the Taliban, the events that occurred in Pul-i-Charkhi, the city’s prison, would have been demonstrated. Of the five thousand detainees released by the Taliban, only one was reportedly executed on the spot by Koranic students: Abu Omar Khorasani, one of the top commanders of IS in Southeast Asia, detained for a year after being arrested by the then government police. Ghani.
What is Isis Khorasan, how it was born and how many militiamen it has
In the complex mosaic of militias and tribal intertwining that characterizes Afghanistan, Isis-Khorasan, the branch of Daesh in Central Asia, constitutes a great unknown. The news coming from intelligence sources on the terrorist formation, which arose in 2015, is fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. For example, the exact nature of relations with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has never been fully clarified, and relations with the Taliban, on paper, their sworn enemies, are ambiguous.
According to the UN, Isis-Khorasan has 2,200 armed militiamen concentrated in the mountain province of Kunar, on the border with Pakistan. A composite contingent, which includes Pakistani Pashtun militants who fled their country, Afghan deserters, Uzbek extremists and, in a more limited number, Arab veterans of what was the Syrian-Iraqi Islamic State.
Communications with other branches of the black caliphate, we read in an analysis written by Thomas Parker for the Washington Institute, are now limited to messages via mobile phones and funding reduced to a small trickle. However, more than one analyst had said that a return of the Taliban to power would offer the terrorists a chance to raise their heads.
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