KABUL / NANGARHAR / KUNAR, AFGHANISTAN — In spring 2020, the ISIS Afghan chapter, known locally as Islamic State in Khorasan Province, lost its last open strongholds in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar. Around the same time, Afghan authorities reported to have arrested several members of the group, including from the highest echelons of the movement. During the summer, we spoke to members of the group (who had been arrested or had surrendered) to shed light on the setbacks of ISIS-Afghanistan. They group has been been beaten back, but not yet defeated. They continue to claim brutal attacks.

Losing Territory

“There was no escape. Surrender to the [Afghan] government or the Taliban were the only possibilities,” said Sarim, a man in his mid-twenties, whose timid behaviour stands at odds with the fact that he used to be an ISIS fighter.

He used these words to describe the moment the group lost its remaining open presences in Kunar in the past spring, echoing several other of his former brothers-in-arms to whom we've spoken.

The loss of the handful of valleys in western Kunar—namely Dara-i Mazor in Nurgal District, Dewagal in Tsawkai District, Watapoor in the district with the same name, Korengal in Manogai District, and Lindalam and Digal in Chapa Dara District—was more than a minor setback for ISIS-Afghanistan. It meant the loss of its last open strongholds in Afghanistan, that had also become refuges for members of the group that had faced defeat elsewhere.

“After the fall of Momand [valley in Achin District of Nangahar Province] and the fall of Wazir Tangi [area in Nangarhar’s Khogyani District], I went to Dewagal in Kunar,” Sajid said. 

"Sajid" was an Indian who had joined ISIS-Afghanistan in 2016. He spoke to us from a prison in Kabul, asking that his name be changed in this article. He further explained that back then, in late 2019, the only options for ISIS fighters in Nangarhar had been fleeing to neighbouring Kunar, or to Pakistan.

This was also echoed in a UN report that was released in late May 2020, and shows that the ISIS-Afghanistan began to face grave problems in Afghanistan, where people usually refer to it by its Arabic name: daesh.

However, in autumn 2019, the convergence of Afghan and US ground and air operations and separate broad offensives against ISIS-Afghanistan by the Taliban (who oppose the group due to ideological differences and other reasons) put an end to the open presence of ISIS-Afghanistan in Nangarhar.

This led to the first wave of surrendering ISIS fighters. Specifically, the previously mentioned UN report noted that “[f]rom 19 October to 15 November [2019], 853 [ISIS-Afghanistan] members surrendered to Afghan [Government] Forces [in Nangarhar], comprising 376 male fighters, 261 women, and 216 children.”

Not all fighters surrendered.

“A group of some 350 fighters, including foreign fighters from India, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Syrian Arab Republic, were believed to have escaped to Kunar Province,” the UN report noted further.

In Kunar, ISIS-Afghanistan had already established a presence a few years ago. One of the Indians mentioned was Sajid. The statements of Sajid, as well as another imprisoned ISIS figher in Kabul (who comes from Tajikistan), suggested that the number of foreign ISIS fighters in Afghanistan was limited, and that they were from fewer countries than what was cited by the UN.

In fact, while the ISIS fighters we spoke to (as well as other sources) about a significant number of ISIS members from countries bordering Afghanistan—namely Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—their statements indicated that people from farther away places such as India and the Middle East were scarce. 

Sajid and other fleeing ISIS fighters found little respite in Kunar, as US and Afghan government forces, as well as the Taliban, shifted their operations targeting ISIS-Afghanistan to the province.

“We conducted operations in Kunar until last Hamal [month in the Afghan calendar corresponding to March/April 2020], when we defeated the group with the name Daesh,” the official Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed stated in a telephone conversation with us on 19th of July.

He was apparently claiming full credit for the defeat of ISIS in Kunar. The idea claim that the Taliban defeated ISIS in Kunar was contested by former Kunari ISIS fighters though.

“The Taliban attacks were not the reason [that ISIS lost its strongholds in Kunar]. Against the Taliban we had fought for years and they had not been able to beat us,” Qiomuddin, a wiry former local ISIS member from Dewagal said in the centre of the district Tsawkai.

Other former ISIS fighters told that we spoke to asserted the same: that it was not the Taliban, but the aerial bombardment conducted by US and Afghan government forces.

“[The aerial bombardment] was so heavy that we did not even had time to bury our dead,” Gul Mardod, a man from Dewagal who used to command a small group of Daesh fighters there, described his last days with Daesh in Kunar and the reason that he eventually surrendered.

While analysts confirmed that the aerial bombardments played a significant role in the defeat of Daesh in its last open strongholds in Kunar, the depiction of the former Daeshis that the Taliban had no part in it is questionable. This derives not only from the assessments of said analysts who follow the conflict via sources on the ground, but also from the fact that even a local officer of the National Directorate for Security (NDS), Afghanistan’s secret police which has no love for the Taliban, acknowledged that it was “the aerial bombardments and Taliban operations that subdued Daesh” in Tsawkai. Furthermore, an investigative report on the U.S. airstrikes against Daesh Khorasan quotes involved U.S. military sources as saying that U.S. forces conducted airstrikes against Daesh to indirectly support Taliban ground operations against said group. That the interviewed Daeshis denied the Taliban’s part in their downfall might be explained by the fact that most of them hold grudges against the Taliban that often were the reason that they had originally joined Daesh. Another possible explanation might be that they rather wanted to blame aerial attacks than admit defeat due to ground operations from another insurgent group that was not better equipped than them.

Neither Waliullah nor other foot soldiers or low-level commanders of ISIS-Afghanistan were detained. Several of the ISIS fighters we interviewed noted that this had been promised to them when they reached out to the government before capitulating. This was confirmed by the already mentioned NDS officer in Tsawkai, who said that “apart from six [high-ranking] leaders, all other surrendering ISIS were let go free [immediately].”

This of course raises some eyebrows, and was displayed by the Taliban as alleged proof of collusion between the Afghan government and ISIS-Afghanistan. When asked about the reasons for the leniency, the NDS officer gave us a simple explanation: “The surrendering Daeshis were given clemency based on an order from the Afghan president that offers all insurgents—not only Daeshis—amnesty if they join peace.”

Arrests

While Afghan ISIS fighters who surrendered weren’t detained, others, amongst them foreigners, were arrested and imprisoned—before and after ISIS Khorasan lost its remaining territories in Nangarhar and Kunar. This included the arrests of high-profile figures.

On April 4th, the NDS announced the arrest of the then leader of ISIS Khorasan, Aslam Farooqi, the nom de guerre of the Pakistani militant Abdullah Orakzai [pictured below], along with 19 other ISIS-Afghanistan fighters.

A little over a month later, on May 11th, the NDS claimed to have arrested Zia ul-Haq, known as Abu Omar Khorasani. He was, according to the NDS, the leader of ISIS in South Asia and the Far East (a strange title that does not correspond to territorial areas used with respect to the militants control) and, according to the UN , the predecessor of Farooqi.

Together with Zia ul-Haq, the NDS reportedly also arrested a man called Sahib, who was allegedly responsible for public relations, and a certain Abu Ali, the purported intelligence chief of ISIS’s South Asia branch.

While the official statements did not mention any locations, several sources indicated that the first arrest took place in Kandahar and the second in Kabul.

Several months later, on August 5th, the Afghan Ministry of Defence claimed to have arrested Mohammad Sayed, describing him as “a high-level [ISIS] commander responsible for transferring foreign fighters from abroad to Afghanistan” and a “key planner” of the attack on a provincial prison in Nangarhar in August.

The arrest reportedly took place in an otherwise unspecified location in Kunar.

On October 11th, the NDS claimed the arrest of 10 men who were accused of being involved in an IED attack on Afghanistan’s First Vice President Amrullah Saleh, that took place on September 9th.

While the NDS in its official statement did not explicitly accuse them of being ISIS, according to released videos of their confessions, some of the arrested men stated that they were in fact ISIS.

The place of the arrest was unclear, however, the fact that the attack on Saleh happened in Kabul City indicates that it might also have been in Kabul.

As well as that, Afghan security forces also claimed to have, since July, arrested numerous other ISIS-Afghanistan fighters in at least a dozen cases, almost all of them in Nangarhar.

The claims of Afghan security forces regarding the identity and position of the arrested men could usually not be independently verified, as Daesh in Afghanistan does not openly advertise its leaders and the inner workings of the group remain opaque — even more so since it was forced underground. Accordingly, it cannot be ruled out that Afghan officials have — whether deliberately or not — misrepresented the positions or value of their arrestees. This is all the more the case as some NDS claims are questionable. For example, on 10th of September the NDS asserted to have arrested a man by the name of Obaidullah who was allegedly in charge of Daesh’s “war in the northern and northeastern provinces of Afghanistan” and who confessed to have been instructed to bomb a mosque in the northern city of Kunduz.

However, the fact that there are at best only unconfirmed and doubtful rumours but no credible indications for Daesh activity in northern or northeastern Afghanistan casts doubt over the NDS claim. Even if the arrested man should have had the purported links to the current Daesh Khorasan leader, Shuhab al-Muhajir, his case would, hence, rather be a singular and strange oddity than an indicator for a significant Daesh presence in northern or northeastern Afghanistan.

The alleged arrest of Aslam Farooqi, the then leader of Daesh Khorasan, in Kandahar also stunned observers, as — with the exception of a very short-lived and insignificant attempt to establish Daesh in Helmand in its very early days in 2015 — the self-proclaimed caliphate has
never had any presence in southern Afghanistan. What added to the puzzle was the fact that in the days and first few weeks after the claimed arrest, even local sources were unable to confirm what or if anything had happened in Kandahar. This might have been due to the fact that the operation was apparently conducted by NDS special units from Kabul and kept quiet.

Later, information from various sources, including a Daeshi who claimed to have evaded the arrest of Farooqi and his comrades in Kandahar by chance as well as the imprisoned Indian Daeshi, thickened and indeed pointed to an arrest in Kandahar. What exactly Farooqi and his men were doing in Kandahar could not be definitively determined. However, a former insurgent who has contacts to Daeshis told Popular Front that “Farooqi might have been on his way to a camp of Daesh’s Pakistan branch in the Pakistani part of Balochistan.” In this regard, Sajid, the Indian Daeshi who was also arrested in Kandahar, said that he and some of his brothers-in-arms had followed the invitation of a friend to go to Pakistan and went the long way from Kunar to Kandahar as their contacts claimed that there it would be “easy to cross the border.” Sajid did not have any specific information about a camp and only heard rumours without knowing whether this would have been their intended end destination. “When I was making my way to Kandahar, I [also] didn’t know that he [Farooqi] was present there. He was there, but I never saw [him]. When we got captured and we were with amir [Farooqi’s] people then I saw him. I was wondering what he was doing here,” Sajid added. That said, the information given by Sajid, and two other former Daeshis, one Pakistani and one from Tajikistan, who had been arrested in different places in Afghanistan suggested that the attempted escape of a number of Daeshis was improvised and, in numerous cases, unsuccessful. In any event, the arrests of several Daesh leaders made the already opaque leadership structure of Daesh even more obscure. While the announcement of a new leader for Daesh Khorasan had appeared on a Daesh propaganda channel on the messaging app Telegram in mid-June, information about the new alleged leader, a certain Dr. Shuhab al-Muhajir, is scarce and conflicting (see for example here , here , and here ).

Beaten But Not Defeated

In view of the mass surrenders and the arrests, the Tajikistani prisoner exclaimed in July that “there is no more Daesh [in Afghanistan],” corroborating assessments that there is currently indeed no sign of any relevant open Daesh presence in Afghanistan anymore.

This, however, does not mean that Daesh is finished in Afghanistan, as some Daeshis continue to pursue their activities underground. For example, the already mentioned local NDS agent in Kunar asserted that some Daeshis continue to covertly operate in Kunar’s Tsawkai District.

This was corroborated by the surrender of 36 Daeshis on 11th of October in Kunar; local sources confirmed this claim of the Afghan government, noting that the Daeshis capitulated in various locations in Kunar, including Tsawkai.

The continuing existence of Daesh in Afghanistan — in particular in and around Kabul and in Nangarhar — is also corroborated by official Daesh claims for attacks in Afghanistan. After the number of such claims had, during and following Daesh’s loss of its last remaining territories in Kunar in late spring and early summer, notably declined, it then increased again from late July onwards. Specifically, between 27th of July and 2nd of November Daesh Khorasan claimed at least 32 attacks in Afghanistan. Twenty of these attacks took place in Nangarhar (almost all in or around the provincial capital Jalalabad); five in Kabul City; four in Bagram District in Parwan Province neighbouring Kabul, where the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan is located; and three in the western city of Herat. In some cases, it could not be independently verified whether such attacks actually happened. Furthermore, it should be kept in mind that for at least some of these attacks it remained unclear whether they were indeed conducted by Daesh. In any event, the attacks since late July were — with three major exceptions — all small in scale.

Continuation of Bloody Attacks

The more recent of the three exceptions were an attack by gunmen on Kabul University on 2nd of November, which killed at least 22 people and wounded at least 27 more , and a suicide bombing against an educational centre in a predominantly Shiite part of Kabul City on 24th of October, which killed at least 24 people and wounded at least 57 more. While both attacks were horrific, they were relatively crude and easy to execute. Specifically, both attacks were directed at only lightly guarded civilian targets. In the case of the suicide bombing from 24th of October, the attacker did not even reach his target, as he was spotted by guards before he could enter the educational centre and then detonated his explosive device outside. And the attackers in Kabul University had reportedly disguised themselves with uniforms to evade the light controls.

This contrasts with the other exception, which consisted of a complex attack on the provincial prison in Jalalabad that was launched by 11 Daeshis in the evening on 2nd of August and dragged on for around 23 hours before Afghan security forces managed to kill the last assailants on 3rd of August. The assault, which killed at least 29 people and wounded dozens more, started with the detonation of a car bomb, after which some armed inghimasis (men who immerse themselves in battle and fight to death—essentially suicide fighters) managed to penetrate the prison and break over 1,000 prisoners free, amongst them Daeshis. At the same time, other assailants took up firing positions in a private building near the prison and another group of Daeshis shelled the close-by Jalalabad Airfield, a military base, with mortars which was apparently unsuccessful though. Most of the prisoners were swiftly recaptured, but about 270, most of them Daeshis, remained on the loose, according to an AFP report from the day after the end of the attack; it could not be determined how many of them have been recaptured since then. Be that as it may, not only the brazenness of the attack, but also the scale of the accompanying propaganda operation was exceptional. The regular short claim of responsibility was followed by longer, detailed statements and an audio statement about the chain of events, infographics in several languages, pictures, as well as a video of the 11 assailants in front of black Daesh banners, and, eventually, a long feature in Al Naba, the main periodic news product issued by Daesh Central. Although the elements of this propaganda exploitation were as such not new, the scale dwarfed the touting of previous Daesh attacks in Afghanistan.

It is further noteworthy that, on 1st of August, i.e. only one day before the raid on the prison in Jalalabad, the NDS claimed to have killed Zia al-Rahman known as Assadullah Orakzai who was reportedly responsible for intelligence of Daesh Khorasan; while the NDS statement did not indicate where this happened, other reports mentioned Jalalabad.

These attacks corroborated an assessment of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency from July, according to which “even after the Afghan government arrested several senior [Islamic State Khorasan] members (…), [Islamic State Khorasan] will likely continue to conduct attacks in an effort to remain relevant, project an image of strength, and encourage recruitment.”

That said, the comparatively small number of large Daesh attacks during the past months as well as the fact that almost all of the large attacks were not particularly sophisticated suggests that Daesh Khorasan’s capabilities to stage operations are more limited than in the past and that complex attacks such as the raid on the prison in Jalalabad will likely remain exceptions.

As the mentioned attacks against an educational centre and the university in Kabul show, this does not mean though that Daesh Khorasan is not able to cause devastating casualties.

Connections with Other ISIS Groups

Whether or to what extent such still covertly active Daesh groups are acting on orders from above or whether they are more independent and, in particular in the case of alleged Daesh groups in rural areas, may even be rather self-affiliated with Daesh than an effectively integrated part of a bigger organisation, could not be definitively determined.

However, statements of the surrendered and imprisoned Daeshis interviewed by Popular Front suggested that several of the Daesh groups in Kunar and Nangarhar had, even when they still openly ruled some areas, little, if any contact with each other or Daeshis outside Afghanistan.

In this context, it has to be noted that this could have also been by design to ensure that the arrest of members of one group would not compromise others and that coordination might have taken place only on higher levels. This would, however, also have limited the
coordination between such groups.

In this regard, it has to be noted that, according to a study based on interviews with former and active Daeshis in and around Kabul, there has, at least in the past, been some contact and coordination between Daeshis operating in and around Kabul and the then-leadership of Daesh Khorasan who resided in back then Daesh-controlled territories in Nangarhar.

However, the loss of all openly Daesh-controlled territories in Nangarhar as well as the arrests and killing of Daesh Khorasan leaders most likely had a significant impact on such connetions. In any event, given that claims from Daesh Khorasan continue to be released via established central Daesh propaganda channels on messaging apps such as Hoop Messenger and Telegram which cover all the provinces of the self-declared caliphate from West Africa to the Philippines, there was and still is at least some propaganda link between Daesh Khorasan and the wider organisation of the self-declared Islamic State.

Resurgence?

Finally, it is important to note that a resurgence of Daesh in Afghanistan beyond cells that continue to conduct mostly small terrorist attacks can — although there are currently no signs for this — not be ruled out.

In this regard, it has to be mentioned that a letter issued by Daesh on 3rd of August invited former Daesh members who had surrendered to the Afghan government to repent and rejoin the group.

The former insurgent with contacts to Daesh confirmed the authenticity of the letter to Popular Front, adding that he himself would know about 12 men who had followed the invitation. He explained though that these men went to Pakistan to join Daesh’s Pakistan branch rather than Daesh Khorasan. Other knowledgable sources in Kunar and Nangarhar, amongst them a former Daeshi as well as several NDS agents, were either not aware of the mentioned letter or said that it was only published online and had, as of late August, no visible impact on the ground. A later assertion of an NDS agent in Kunar, according to which some former Daeshis in Kunar’s Korengal valley had, as of late September, again pledged allegiance to the group, could neither be confirmed nor disproved. In view of this, it remained unclear
whether some of the surrendered Daeshis had rejoined Daesh in Afghanistan.

Be that as it may, as the majority of the interviewed Daeshis did not appear to regret their activities for the group or at best see them as minor indiscretions, it is not a far stretch to imagine that they or other people like them might have again followed or will follow the call of the caliphate. Or to say it with the words of two of the surrendered and free Daeshis in Kunar:

“If the jihad [holy war] is right and just, I would again wage jihad.”

Franz J. Marty is a freelance journalist based in Afghanistan. He writes on a broad range of topics, but focuses on security and military issues. You can follow him @franzjmarty on Twitter.