Claim of Taliban-ISIS ties reappears
Some Afghans insist groups cooperating on deadly attacks; U.S. disputes idea
ISLAMABAD — Afghan officials at some of the highest echelons of power in Kabul are reviving claims that the Taliban and the Islamic State in Afghanistan are aiding each other in carrying out attacks and sharing training pipelines.
This month, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani linked a deadly attack on a maternity ward in the capital with a rise in Taliban violence elsewhere in the country. And Ghani’s national security adviser blamed the massacre on Taliban “sponsors” who “have now subcontracted their terror to other entities.”
The evidence for such links has been repeatedly disputed by U.S. officials and Taliban leaders. But Afghan leaders’ persistence in making the claim highlights the depth of mistrust between the government and Taliban at a critical point in the peace process.
The accusations touch on one of the few public conditions in the U.S.-Taliban peace deal: that the Taliban prevent groups like the Islamic State from operating on Afghan soil.
No group publicly claimed responsibility for the maternity ward attack, but U.S. officials issued a public rejection of the Afghan government claims. U.S. special representative Zalmay Khalilzad tweeted the United States blamed the Islamic State for the bloodshed.
The U.S. military command in Kabul’s “initial assessment” also implicated the Islamic State, according to spokesman, Col. Sonny Leggett.
The Taliban has denied any links to the Islamic State in Afghanistan, citing ideological differences and a long history of battlefield clashes.
“They call us as infidels and polytheists, God forbid. And we consider them … expelled from Islam,” Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said in an interview.
Mujahid also pointed to years of intense fighting between the Islamic State group and the Taliban.
“We have suffered heavily, we lost many mujahedeen,” he said.
Taliban fighters played a key role in a series of battlefield victories against Islamic State militants in eastern Afghanistan last year. U.S. air power backing Afghan ground troops led the offensive, but U.S. officials described the role of Taliban ground forces as critical at that time.
The acting director of Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency reinforced the government’s claims after the maternity ward attack, saying that the Taliban is working with the Islamic State and that “relations between the Taliban and other terrorist groups have expanded.” Speaking at a news conference, Ahmad Zia Saraj said his agency had fingerprints of captured Islamic State fighters that match those of suspected Taliban militants, suggesting links between the two factions.
“There isn’t any deliberate, active link,” between the Taliban and the Islamic State, said Omar Zakhelwal, a former finance minister from 2009 to 2015 and Afghan ambassador to Pakistan from 2015 to 2018. Zakhelwal conceded that some disgruntled Taliban fighters may have switched allegiances and joined the Islamic State or vice versa. But he said that does not prove cooperation between the two groups.
Taliban fighters and the Islamic State also may draw upon the same training pipelines when recruiting suicide bombers or gunmen for high-profile attacks, according to analysts.
And on Afghanistan’s complex battlefield, there could be instances of low-level cooperation between local commanders “when they view each other as fellow travelers or make nonaggression pacts of one form or another,” said Johnny Walsh, a senior Afghanistan expert at the United States Institute for Peace.
Increasingly, senior Afghan officials are citing direct Taliban-Islamic State cooperation when defending arguments against pursing peace talks with the Taliban.
Another senior Afghan official said of the Taliban and Islamic State, “they both carry out terrorist attacks so they’re all just terrorists.”