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The Taliban boast numbers well into the tens - likely hundreds - of thousands, whereas ISIS-K has seen its ranks dwindle to a few thousand active members. By comparison, ISIS endeavors to fold Afghanistan into a broader and borderless Islamic “caliphate.” Taliban prisoners watch through the door inside the prison after an attack by the Islamic State last year in Jalalabad. The Taliban’s strategic objectives have been focused on domestic control - influencing Afghanistan’s practices, communal norms and politics. While the Taliban have notoriously had close ties to al Qaeda, they never shared such a bond with the regional ISIS wing, which emerged in early 2015 and was ignited by disgruntled Taliban defector Hafiz Saeed Khan. When they weren’t waging separate attacks on Afghan security forces, they were waging war on each other through the rugged terrain.

While there is a Western tendency to conflate both Islamic extremist groups - Taliban and ISIS - as one and the same, the outfits are not collaborators but archrivals. Taliban fighters in a vehicle patrol a street in Kabul as last-ditch evacuation flights took off from Kabul airport after a suicide bombing on crowds trying to flee Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. While much of the US military presence in Afghanistan in recent years has been focused on eliminating the terrorist affiliate referred to as ISKP, ISK or ISIS-K, in reference to the historical area known as the Khorasan Province, the group was often viewed by Afghans themselves as a distracting sideshow compared to the tens of thousands of Taliban members.īut on Thursday, ISIS made its mark yet again, capitalizing on the chaos surrounding Hamid Karzai International Airport and those attempting to flee, claiming responsibility for a coordinated suicide bomb and gun assault that killed 13 US service members and at least 90 Afghans. “The ones that escape from here, it could take years, but they will eventually go to regroup in Afghanistan.”Īt the time, I did not think much of it. “You wait,” the senior Iraqi intelligence officer told me, his eyes wide and foreboding. Biden admin insists Americans are better off now than when Trump leftīiden vowed a return to normalcy - instead, we got a year of chaosĪmericans evacuated from Afghanistan by vets group land at JFKįive years ago, I sat in a stuffy trailer wedged inside a Baghdad military base just as the offensive to eliminate ISIS was ready to kick off.