Afghanistan Terrorism Report: November 2022

Afghanistan Terrorism Report November 2022 

By Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler and Joshua Fisher-Birch

Following is the November 2022 installment of “Afghanistan Terrorism Report.” The authors provide a monthly analysis concerning the developing terrorist threat in Afghanistan as well as a comprehensive overview of that month’s al-Qaeda and ISIS-K propaganda.

Following several months of hiatus, CEP has resumed its monthly monitoring of ISIS-K and al-Qaeda-linked online propaganda outlets. During the summer, the Taliban regime continued to consolidate power in Afghanistan. Continued factionalism led to several changes in Taliban governors and officials over the summer. This, however, did not slow down the overall trend towards a return to some of the central aspects of Taliban rule prior to 2001, such as the continuously deteriorating treatment of women, further reduction of basic freedoms and fundamental rights, increasing ethnic discrimination, and growing interference in humanitarian deliveries. In November, Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada ordered Taliban judges to strictly implement Sharia law in all regions of the country. This resulted in an uptick of reports of public corporal punishments, including in Kabul, as well as the first official public execution in a sports stadium in Farah province. To underline the symbolism of this execution, several Taliban ministers had traveled to Farah to witness it. Of particular security concern are also reports by officials from countries neighboring Afghanistan that the Taliban have begun issuing Afghan passports to members of terrorist organizations present in the country. This will, of course, complicate the identification of potential foreign terrorists leaving Afghanistan as these will likely travel with original Afghan passports and potentially changed identities.

The campaign of terror attacks and assassinations claimed by ISIS-K in Afghanistan seems to have slowed down slightly towards the end of 2022. However, nevertheless, in November, ISIS-K demonstrated its ability not only to conduct attacks in the west, north, and east of the county and, as in previous months, in Pakistan (see map below), ISIS-K also claimed responsibility for an attack on a Shiite shrine in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz at the end of October, more than 1000 km from the Afghan border. Therefore, ISIS-K remains a significant factor of insecurity within Afghanistan but increasingly also in neighboring countries.

https://www.mappr.co/political-maps/afghanistan-provinces-map/

ISIS-K also continued its campaign of targeted assassinations of well-known Afghan clerics. After killing Mujib Rahman Ansari in Herat at the beginning of September, Qari Najibullah Azizi was killed in Kabul in November. This campaign is clearly aimed at intimidating the Salafi clerical establishment in the country. Both Ansari and Azizi were considered Salafi clerics but maintained good relationships with the Taliban regime.

ISIS-K also continued its propaganda campaign attempting to delegitimize the Taliban regime ideologically. Not only did pro-ISIS-K outlets continue to criticize what they perceive as the lax attitude of the regime towards Shiites and other religions in the country and what ISIS-K hardliners define as deviant behavior. For example, a meeting of the Taliban governor of Kandahar with Hazara representatives was criticized by pro-ISIS-K propaganda and several messages highlighted the deviancy that former Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s grave is maintained by the Taliban. In this regard, the propaganda messages attempt to equate Mullah Omar’s grave with the Shiite tradition of shrines for significant religious figures, a practice that a fundamentalist Sunni interpretation of Islam equates with heresy.

In addition to this ideological criticism, pro-ISIS-K propaganda messages also began highlighting the Taliban mismanagement of international aid. Several messages in November reinterpreted the monthly cash injections by the United Nations, which airlifts several million U.S. dollars each month into the country, as well as cash donations from international donors as payments from the U.S. government to the Taliban for their fight against ISIS-K. Similar to propaganda messages in June, a pro-ISIS-K propaganda message cited a report by the Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (SIGAR) and argued that the Taliban are not specifying for what purpose funds that they receive are used. Furthermore, pro-ISIS-K propaganda also cited the annual report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) on the development of opium cultivation in Afghanistan, highlighting that the areas on which poppies are cultivated in Afghanistan increased by 32 percent between 2021 and 2022. The UNODC report was released at the end of October 2022, and the new planting season for poppies in Afghanistan begins at the end of October/beginning of November every year. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether the April 2022 drug ban by the Taliban will have a measurable impact on opium production in 2023.

Voice of Khorasan, an ISIS-K-linked web magazine, is also central to this ideological propaganda campaign. In its November 2022 editions, the magazine again strongly criticized the Taliban as nationalists, equating them with Hamas and Hezbollah and linking them to Iran to further delegitimize the regime. Furthermore, the magazine also named a list of what the magazine termed “Muslim traitors.” This list included the deceased leader of the Taliban, Akhtar Mansour, and current deputy prime minister of the Taliban regime Mullah Baradar alongside ex-presidents of Afghanistan Karzai and Ghani, as well as historic Afghan rulers Shah Shujah and Amanullah Khan. This peculiar list also includes Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Colonel Imam, a Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) operative credited with training the early Taliban forces, and assassinated by the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2011. The article argues that the Taliban, while claiming to follow the “correct” religious path, befriends Russia and China and met with representatives of the U.S. and Qatar and joined them in their war against ISIS-K.

Finally, highlighting the growing importance of West Africa and the Sahel region for ISIS, the November 1 edition of Voice of Khorasan also included an article on the history of French colonialism in Africa. This peculiar geographic focus appears to have been triggered by the official end of the French military counterterrorism Operation Barkhane in the Sahel at the beginning of November 2022. Given the security vacuum left behind by the French forces, this article could be indicate that ISIS may be planning to expand its operations into regions in which currently the al-Qaeda coalition Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), the primary adversary of Barkhane, operates. Currently, ISIS’s center of gravity in the region is the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), which formed out of the Nigerian al-Qaeda affiliate Boko Haram and primarily operates in the Lake Chad Basin.

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