The Islamic State group is gaining ground in Afghanistan, winning over a growing number of sympathizers and recruiting followers in 25 of the country’s 34 provinces, a UN report said Friday. The jihadist group, which controls large areas of Syria and Iraq, has been trying to establish itself in Afghanistan, challenging the Taliban on their own turf. Afghan security forces told UN sanctions monitors that about 10 percent of the Taliban insurgency are IS sympathizers, according to the report by the UN’s al-Qaeda monitoring team.“The number of groups and individuals who are openly declaring either loyalty to or sympathy with ISIL continues to grow in a number of provinces in Afghanistan,” said the report.Afghan government sources said “sightings of the groups with some form of ISIL branding” or sympathy were reported in 25 provinces in the war-torn country, it added. The IS-backed groups “regularly engage” Afghan military forces, but fighting with other parts of the insurgency are rare, except in Nangarhar province where they are battling the Taliban for control of the drug trade. Among the prominent IS fighters, the report singled out Abdul Rauf Khadem, a former Taliban adviser to Mullah Omar, who visited Iraq in October 2014 and has since formed his own group in Helmand and Farah provinces. Khadem allegedly has been recruiting followers by paying out large sums of money. Despite all this alarming evidence, the Afghan security forces bafflingly do not view the mounting presence of IS as an “immediate increased threat”. The report lays out the reasons why IS is such a contagious global threat that needs to be stopped by all means: the network of IS grows simply by converting already existing militant groups to its agenda. The concept of IS has been found to have a disturbingly wide appeal and therefore all the group needs to do to expand into another territory is to tap into networks that are already present and appropriate them for its reprehensible endgame. As is happening in Afghanistan, it merely had to send a few dozen trainers and recruiters from its base in Syria and Iraq to coordinate with the new converts and already it has become a massive new threat for the Afghan regime and the stability of the region. Afghanistan should wake up to this threat as quickly as possible because the new enemy is inexplicably even worse and tougher to deal with than its old one. Similarly, Pakistan should look at IS’s expansion in Afghanistan and re-evaluate its disastrous policy of denial. The terrorist linkages in Pakistan are prone to be seduced by the IS and if that eventuality is not stopped, Pakistan will be caught unawares and will soon be faced with yet another and even deadlier terrorist threat.
pk.shafaqna.com
