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Thursday March 28, 2024

Kabul attack

By Editorial Board
December 30, 2017

One of the bloodiest years in Afghanistan since the US invasion in 2001 took an even more violent turn on Thursday after an Islamic State suicide attack on a building in Kabul that houses a Shia cultural centre and a media organisation killed more than 40 people. The IS claimed it was targeting the Shia cultural centre, in keeping with the modus operandi of the militant group of fomenting sectarian tensions in a country that had been spared Sunni-Shia clashes before the emergence of the group. In August, IS killed 20 people in an attack on an imambargah in Kabul; and it has also targeted security forces, Sunni mosques and even a cricket stadium. Much of the focus in Afghanistan has been on the Afghan Taliban, especially after US President Donald Trump announced he would be sending more troops to the country to try and defeat the group. But it is the IS which has emerged as a potentially more lethal outfit and one which has no interest in negotiations and peace deals. Just recently, US Vice President Mike Pence had said that the IS had crumbled around the world. He specifically mentioned Afghanistan as one of the countries where the group was on the run. As the scores of recent IS attacks show, that is far from the truth.

The Afghan government deserves some portion of the blame for allowing the IS to claim so much space in the country. When the militant group first established itself in 2015, its cadres comprised members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and the local Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The TTP had sought refuge in Afghanistan after being driven out of the tribal areas of Pakistan during Operation Zarb-e-Azb. Rather than targeting them, the Afghan government is believed to have left the TTP alone – perhaps due to the Afghan government’s belief that Pakistan has been soft on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network, or perhaps because it was too occupied fighting other enemies. Since the IS has also been embroiled in clashes with the Afghan Taliban, it is possible the Afghan government even believed ignoring it could help vanquish what it sees as the greater enemy. As the IS experiences in Syria and Iraq have shown, that is never a good idea. The group has proven to be dangerous and destructive, and its introduction of the sectarian component to an already complicated war could spiral out of control. The Afghan government now needs to realise it has to deal with multiple enemies at the same time.