Today, Explained - ISIS-K

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

The attack outside the Kabul airport on Thursday was perpetrated by an extremist group that doesn't think the Taliban is extreme enough. This episode was produced by Will Reid and Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Things are moving fast in Afghanistan. Just over a week ago, it seemed impossible to evacuate the airport in Kabul.

But as of Thursday morning, something like 100,000 people had already been airlifted out of the country. The impetus to move faster and faster and faster wasn't just about this August 31st deadline, but also the threat of terrorism, namely from a group called ISIS-K. And later on Thursday, ISIS-K struck. There are significant casualties, including some Americans from a suicide attack outside the country's main airport in Kabul. This happened about one hour ago in an area where thousands of people were waiting, hoping to try to get on a flight out of the country. Estimates say the attacks left something like 180 dead,

mostly Afghans trying to get out of the country, as well as at least 13 U.S. service members. President Biden has pledged revenge. For those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this. We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay. On the show today, we're going to dig into this group and how the United States and Taliban might actually work together to fight them. Dan Byman is here to help. He's a professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies program. Dan, who is ISIS-K?

So, as the name implies, this is a branch of the Islamic State. The Islamic State is a group that really comes out after the U.S. invasion of and occupation of Iraq. Another major piece of what America fought for in Iraq was lost today. Islamic militants seized control of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city with one and a half million people. It then emerges in public consciousness after the Syrian civil war. And in 2014, very dramatically with a series of beheadings becomes really known globally. They are the faces of merciless killers, ISIS militants here in their own video

intentionally unmasked and exposed to the world. In the video they behead those they force to the ground. And in 2014-2015 this is when it's at its peak. It's declaring a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. But it also says there are provinces around the Muslim world. And so there's a province in Libya, there's a province in Egypt. When you look at that map, Brian, and you see them popping up all over the place, fairly close to Italy even at this point.

That's right. And these unfettered areas where they can go unchecked leads U.S. authorities to believe they could be planning attacks to the West, including the U.S. All right, Brian Ross with us here this morning. Brian, thank you. Very importantly, they establish a province in Afghanistan, and this, as I think everyone knows,

is a longstanding theater for jihadists to fight, fighting the Soviet Union and then fighting the United States. So the Islamic State core was trying to kind of join that. And they set this up really starting, you know, when the group's at its peak in 2014. And they're using a bunch of people who are already in the game. Often these are disaffected people who are part of groups in

Pakistan and Afghanistan. On the far right is Abdullah Gul. And in the middle, behind the mask, a man known only by his alias, Abu Rashid. He speaks fluent Arabic and is the link man

between his group and their controllers in Iraq. He defected from the Taliban to answer the call of the caliphate. And they're forming them into a new group with a new brand, challenging not only the United States and the government the U.S. backed, but also the Taliban. So this is a group that has lots of enemies, but it is tied to a broader struggle around the Muslim world. And are they limited to Afghanistan? So they use the word Khorasan.

ISIL's long-term aim in the region is to reconstitute an historical province known as Khorasan. This would mean conquering territory in at least five modern states. Which is implying more broadly Central Asia, India, Pakistan. They're trying to say there's a region where they are supreme and they don't really, of course, control this region at all. But it's meant to be more than Afghanistan. It's meant to include kind of Afghanistan and many of its neighbors. And the United States is sure they carried out this attack yesterday

outside the Kabul International Airport. Every indicator seems to be it's this group. The Taliban want the United States out and have been, in a way, keeping the peace because the U.S. is doing what they want, which is leaving the country. Before the attack, there was very specific intelligence saying, hey, this group might do an attack and including at the Kabul airport. So it does seem like this specific group was predicted to do an attack. And all the indicators now show that it is this group. So I think you could say a high degree of confidence.

The former president bragged several times about completely wiping out ISIS. I think he may have even used the figure 100 percent. Three weeks ago, I was in Iraq and I was talking to some of our great generals. And I gave them the absolute go ahead. I said, go at it. How long it will it take? Once you get started, you said, sir, one week. I said, where did that come from one week? And he meant it. And it's about a week since they really got going. And they'll be informing us very soon, officially, that it's 100 percent. This attack yesterday implies he didn't 100% wipe ISIS out. Yeah, and really even going to the ISIS core in Iraq and Syria,

they're doing lots of attacks, especially in Iraq, and are pretty active there at a local level. So I would say to the credit of President Trump that he continued the efforts begun under President Obama that really got rid of the caliphate as an above-ground functioning government. So they lost their territory in Iraq and Syria. They lost all their control. And it really did hurt their brand and really weakened the movement. But they are still active around the world. They're active underground as an insurgency in Iraq and Syria.

And this attack is simply one of many that groups affiliated with the Islamic State are doing. So, no, they're not gone completely. But to be fair, they are weakened. And you mentioned that they are a foe of the Taliban. What is their relationship with the Taliban? So, the Islamic State of Khorasan considers the Taliban not sufficiently zealous. And so they have doctrinal disputes that they would play up and say that they're not properly implementing Islamic law. They are very critical of the Taliban for negotiating, whether it's with the United States or others. But this is also very much a power struggle, that these are individuals who are trying to kind of establish themselves in lieu of the Taliban leadership.

So they're seizing opportunities to criticize the Taliban. And now that they're going to be in opposition with the Taliban government, they'll try to exploit any governing mistakes the Taliban make and say, look, these guys aren't serious enough about Islamic law. They're not serious enough about providing services. Whatever they can, they'll find fault. So we can play up the doctrinal distinctions, but I think we also really have to stress the interpersonal rivalries and simple power struggles. What is their vision for the world?

Why are the Taliban not extreme enough for them? So if you look at what the Islamic State did in Iraq and Syria, they were even more brutal towards religious minorities. The Islamic State captured men, women, and children from the Yazidi minority group during its deadly rampage through northwest Iraq in August. Islamic State fighters killed scores, if not hundreds, of Yazidi men before carrying off their relatives. They were even harsher in terms of enforcing

Islamic law in daily life and they were also very aggressive regionally. They were always trying to expand and they were doing attacks in neighboring states, they were pushing everywhere they could. The fact is that ISIS has a lot of momentum right now. So what we're dealing with is a central government that has, in essence, practically lost control over large sections of the country and large sections of its armed forces. And there's a real question, which is, do the Taliban stop in Afghanistan, or do they start to spread what they're doing to Central Asia and to Pakistan? And in the past, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s,

they were focused on Afghanistan and trying to change Afghanistan rather than be a revolutionary force in the whole region. So ISIS-K and the Islamic State in general is pushing against this and is calling for being much more aggressive, not just in Afghanistan itself, but around the area. What did they accomplish yesterday with the attack outside the airport? ISIS-K was able to put itself back in the conversation. For the last few months, the Taliban have been dominating everything and scored a huge victory. The rapid collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government, the scenes of Americans fleeing in panic, in chaos, and leaving behind tons of equipment, all this is tremendous grist for the Taliban mill. But it also helps the Taliban's allies. So they've worked closely with

the al-Qaeda core. They've worked closely with a range of other groups. And this is a huge prestige bump. And these groups a huge prestige bump. And these groups are all competing for money and they're competing for recruits. So when you have a big success, you're going to get more followers. You're going to get more resources. And because the Islamic State in Khorasan was already under siege, it risked becoming irrelevant. And now you have a very dramatic attack on the United States. It's showing that, unlike the Taliban, it's willing to strike America.

And that's going to appeal to some people. And it's been reported that the Pentagon believes more attacks like this are on the way. We believe it is their desire to continue those attacks, and we expect those attacks to continue. And we're doing everything we can to be prepared for those attacks. That includes reaching out to the Taliban, who are actually providing the outer security cordon around the airfield, to make sure they know what we expect them to do to protect us. Does that seem right to you? Unfortunately, it does seem quite probable that there'll be more attacks. This is a tremendous opportunity for the Islamic State in that U.S. forces are all in one place,

and it's very hard for them to defend. They have to be in contact with the broader population in order to screen them. And as a result, we're going to see at least attempts by the Islamic State to follow up on this, to grab more attention. The only silver lining in all this is the Taliban will be paying even more attention to this. And this is a short-term problem because of the departure of U.S. forces. More with Dan in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp.

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The United States and Taliban have some common interests. And the biggest is going to be opposing ISIS-K. ISIS-K is violently opposed to Taliban and violently opposed to the United States. And there's already been some de facto cooperation in the past few years as the Taliban has gone after this group and the United States has. So I could imagine in the future, the United States indirectly sharing intelligence, perhaps via Pakistan, to say to the Taliban, hey, these guys are in this province or in this location, go kill them. And conversely, I could imagine the Taliban kind of passing on information saying, hey, if a 500-pound bomb happened to drop on this particular building, that would be a good thing and we're not going to be terribly upset by it.

So you could imagine de facto cooperation, even as there's active hostility on other areas, ranging from human rights to the al-Qaeda presence that the Taliban is continuing in Afghanistan. And is this how President Biden, as he seemed to promise yesterday, will retaliate for this attack President Biden, as he seemed to promise yesterday, will retaliate for this attack on Thursday, even while the United States is pulling out of Afghanistan? So the United States has a pretty long track record of killing ISIS-K leaders.

So we killed their founder. We killed several of his successors. So we have been able to successfully gather intelligence and act on it. Now, it's going to be harder because we don't have a ground presence. We're not in the same contact. We don't have the ability to know what's going on at the provincial level in the same level of detail. But that said, there still are intelligence opportunities.

And I think that President Biden is going to look for an opportunity to do a relatively high-profile hit on a senior ISIS-K figure and say, look, this is vengeance for the deaths of these Americans and a way of saying to Americans that we're still remaining vigilant. We will not be deterred by terrorists. We will not let them stop our mission. We will continue the evacuation. I've also ordered my commanders to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership, and facilities. We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose, in the moment of our choosing. Yeah, tell me more about how the United States fights a war on terror while essentially pulling out of its war on terror. This is a challenge the United States has faced in other parts of the Muslim world.

We see it in Libya, we see it in Somalia, we see it in Yemen. We see it in various places where the United States has to use a range of indirect means to go after terrorist groups in these areas. So this can be things like backing local forces. So there might be a local tribe or militia that's willing to kind of act as a spear point for U.S. efforts. The black ISIS flag was replaced by the banner of U.S.-backed forces in the city of Raqqa. It can be working with governments, in this case, telling the Taliban to crush a particular group.

At times, it might be a special operations force raid. It can be remote airstrikes or drone strikes that are going against leadership targets. He was, according to the U.S. government, a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Now Washington's acknowledged that it deliberately killed U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. And then a lot of it is making sure that the group in question is relatively isolated, that it's hard for money or people to get in and out. U.S. airstrikes have targeted poppy fields in Afghanistan's booming heroin trade. Opium production has played a crucial role in the country's rural economy and the Taliban's

insurgency for decades. So it's lots of different means, none of which are perfect or even close to perfect, but together can keep a group really off balance. And you wrote about this strategy for foreign affairs, and you called it the good enough doctrine. How come? So one thing that I hope Americans have realized 20 years after 9-11 is that we're not going to end terrorism, that there's still going to be some threat, and that efforts to do dramatic things like regime change in the Muslim world not only don't work too well, but actually fail when it comes to counterterrorism. So things like the Iraq War actually backfired and made the terrorism problem worse. But there are a series of efforts and a lot of it's intelligence and law enforcement cooperation. In the United States, it's working in a supportive way with the American Muslim population. And then there are things like,

you know, drone strikes and special forces raids that each by itself can reduce the danger and together it's quite effective. So some of the people who are listening may know the Swiss cheese model we talk about with COVID, where you have a combination of vaccines and masks and distancing that each help the problem, but don't solve it completely.

It's the same thing with counterterrorism, where each of these measures can reduce the danger and together are quite effective. But to stress, it doesn't eliminate the danger. We have to live with some risk. Does pulling out of Afghanistan in particular potentially create more risk? Pulling out of Afghanistan is unquestionably a win

for the broader jihadist cause. They said, hey, we beat the Soviet Union, and now after 20 years of fighting, we beat the American empire. There's a big question about whether the Taliban will allow al-Qaeda to do international terrorist attacks. Now, they're clearly going to allow al-Qaeda to persist in Afghanistan itself. But in the past, in the 1990s, of course going to allow al-Qaeda to persist in Afghanistan itself. But in the past, in the 1990s, of course, they opposed al-Qaeda's international terrorist attacks, but they still didn't do anything about it when it happened. So I think many listeners would say, well, it's not really significant opposition. After it happens, you don't really do anything.

But they paid a huge price for these attacks when the United States went in and overthrew them. So there's a question of whether the Taliban learned that lesson. Pakistan, which is the key backer of the Taliban, also have no interest in international terrorist attacks on the United States. It just attracts negative U.S. attention to Pakistan and to the region. So that's a factor as well. And the United States, in contrast to the pre-911 era, has all these means of, you know, striking training camps and going after leaders and following people in an intelligent sense. So there are all these possibilities that reduce the danger. But the danger of an attack has increased because the United States left Afghanistan.

I personally think it's something that good counterterrorism can manage, but it's not the sort of thing we can wish away. Where does this leave Afghanistan? I mean, so the Taliban is in control. ISIS-K is going to be attacking. Plus you have these Afghan resistance forces. I mean, how many groups are currently competing for power in Afghanistan? So this is a tricky question in Afghanistan itself because you'll have groups like the Taliban, but the Taliban are composed of networks. So you'll have factions within the Taliban. You have individual commanders. And as we saw when the Taliban gained power in the 90s, lost power after the U.S. invasion in 2001, and then gained power again, is lots of commanders will switch sides. So right now the Taliban are quite strong. They've captured a bunch of U.S. equipment. There's a huge prestige boost. They

have all this support from Pakistan. So they're going to be a very strong force in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan will probably know more stability than is known for many years because the core of the civil war that's going to diminish but the Taliban aren't going to have complete control of the country. Parts of it are simply very remote so geography is kind of an enemy and there'll be areas that the locals oppose the Taliban enough to fight effectively. There may be foreign governments, and we don't know this yet, but there may be some like the United States that actually support opposition to the Taliban.

So there are going to be a lot of challenges the Taliban face. But that said, they were pretty effective in the 90s in consolidating control, and I expect them to consolidate control over much of the country within the next year reasonably efficiently. So there is some chance for some sort of stability in Afghanistan, though it sounds like it does look like that stability will come from whatever the Taliban plans to do. I think that's exactly right. So it'll be stability with effectively a tyrannical government. And so the good news for Afghans is that the death and misery of civil war will diminish. And again, I think it will continue in parts of the country, but will be at a much lower level.

But it comes at an extremely steep price. And a lot of the progress we've seen in Afghanistan in the last 20 years is going to go away. We're almost exactly two weeks out from the 20-year anniversary of 9-11. I know you served on the 9-11 Commission. Do you feel like the United States is safer after two wars, hundreds of thousands dead and trillions spent on this war on terror? I want to answer your question very carefully. So I feel the U.S. homeland is definitely safer now than it was right before 9-11.

We have better homeland defense. There's better global intelligence cooperation. There are efforts to go after big havens wherever they might appear. And all that has kept the American homeland safer. However, there are parts of the world, and the Middle East is a big example, where you saw these massive civil wars develop. And they developed for lots of reasons. But the region itself is destabilized, and that's going to create kind of persistent problems that allow these armed groups, some of which are linked to al-Qaeda, some of which are linked to ISIS, and it allows them to persist. So I would say where you stand on this very much depends on where you live. And if you're an American living in the U.S. homeland, I think the risk is diminished. Again, not gone, but diminished.

If you're someone living in the Middle East, you're facing a lot of danger. Dan Byman is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. To speak to that ongoing danger Dan described, as of today, Afghans are still rushing towards the airport in Kabul in hopes to make it out. They're crowding around the very area where something like 180 people were killed yesterday. Our episode today was produced by Will Reed and Halima Shah. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. Thank you.