Has ISIS been Eliminated from Eastern Afghanistan?

 

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American military dropped the largest bomb in its arsenal on an Islamic State cave complex in eastern Afghanistan in April,2017.It was thought that ISIS is going to be eliminated from Afghanistan in near future. But as the year comes to an end, the Islamic State is far from being vanquished in eastern Afghanistan. It has waged brutal attacks that have displaced thousands of families and forced even some Taliban fighters, who had long controlled the mountainous terrain, to seek government protection. The shifting dynamic has, in turn, threatened the American-backed government’s tenuous hold on the region. And two years into the joint United States-Afghanistan operation, a clear understanding of the Islamic State affiliate, the latest enemy in the long Afghan war, still evades even some of those charged with fighting it.

Part of the reason the two-year joint operation by the United States and Afghanistan against the Islamic State has made little progress is simply that the two forces are operating in a terrain where they have had little control for years. Air strikes and commando operations bring bursts of pressure, but the militants have release valves all around them. On one side is the porous border with Pakistan, where many of the fighters come from. Elsewhere is largely Taliban country.

Although the Taliban are known for their opposition to girls’ education, in Khogyani, the militants here allowed schooling, showing a willingness to drop a demand that had lost them hearts and minds before. In return for having nominal control, the government has paid the salaries of teachers and health workers that the Taliban could not afford.Abdul Jabar, who had been displaced from his home near the Pakistan border by recent battles between ISIS and the Taliban, said there was a two-story high school for girls close to his new home, with an enrollment of up to 1,600. Mir Haidar, who distributes vaccinations, said the three clinics there employed women, despite the Taliban’s past opposition to women in the workplace.

The Islamic State’s local affiliate in Afghanistan first emerged in 2014, swiftly gaining ground across Nangarhar Province. It quickly drew the attention of the United States military, which had scaled down its presence in Afghanistan to a small counterterrorism mission against Al Qaeda and a larger NATO mission to train Afghan forces to hold their ground against the Taliban.American and Afghan officials now have little reason to believe that the Afghan group, despite pledging allegiance to ISIS, maintains regular contact or receives directions from the Islamic State operating in Iraq and Syria. Instead, they say, the Islamic State in Afghanistan is largely made up of Pakistani militants pushed across the border by military operations in that country.
Credit: New York Times