Is Central Asia the new Levant for Western foreign jihadists?

Author: Kyle Orton

Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to jihadists on 15 August 2021, and this has emboldened the jihadist movement across the world, providing it with a morale boost and a model, as well as renewing the terrorist safe haven that incubated 9/11. 

The Afghanistan Factor

While the term “Taliban” can be used for the new-old rulers in Kabul, in reality, this is a coalition of jihadists controlled by Pakistan, specifically its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. The most visible elements in this coalition go by the names of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the Haqqani Network, but these nominally independent groups share ideology, a command structure, personnel, and resources.

As an example: Sirajuddin Haqqani, the publicly declared deputy emir of the Taliban, a most-wanted terrorist by the FBI who is now the “interior minister” in Kabul, is simultaneously head of the Haqqani Network and part of Al-Qaeda’s leadership. The Haqqanis themselves, while coy in public about the Al-Qaeda dimension because of the international implications, lose no opportunity to affirm that they are an integral part of the Taliban, denying that the Haqqani Network as such exists at all.

It can be said objectively that the U.S. needlessly surrendered Afghanistan to the jihadists, but the narrative of a Taliban victory over NATO is a powerful one and it has been hailed far and wide by Al-Qaeda-oriented militants as an example of what can be achieved if jihadists hold their nerve, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming military odds. 

In West Africa, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), whose leader of nearly two decades, Abd al-Malek Drukdel (Abu Musab Abd al-Wadud), had been killed a year earlier, and which was struggling to compete with Daesh, took inspiration from events in Afghanistan. The Al Qaeda-linked leader of the war against the government in Mali said that “two decades of patience” had paid off, while the demoralisation of anti-jihadist forces could be seen in the civil society leader who lamented, “I fear that we will meet the same fate as the Afghans”. 

The Yemeni branch, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), was likewise jubilant, not only at the humiliation of the West but the proof that jihad was a “realistic path” to success.

Syria and Jihadism

Perhaps the most important impact from Afghanistan was in Syria, where the northern Idlib province is ruled by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group that ostensibly severed its command links to Al-Qaeda in 2016 and really might have in 2017, since which time Al-Qaeda in Syria has been overtly reconstituted as Hurras al-Deen. Sweets were given out in Idlib after Kabul’s collapse, and days later HTS released a statement celebrating the Taliban takeover, as did the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Despite HTS having supposedly gone local, one HTS leader declared the Taliban prevailing was “a victory for [all] the Sunnis”. 

HTS has looked to the Taliban as a guide to becoming a jihadist group that can hold territory with international acquiesce, rather than—like Daesh—provoking an international reaction to destroy them. The Taliban began direct talks with the Americans and in 2020 convinced the U.S. to sign a so-called peace deal—in reality, a withdrawal agreement that gave the Taliban everything it wanted. HTS was quick to see that this was a “great victory” for jihadism, as its shari’a chief put it. Less explicit in public rhetoric, though by no means less important, HTS also had eyes on creating a relationship with Turkey that was, mutatis mutandis, akin to the Taliban’s with Pakistan. 

Trapped in one corner of Syria, surrounded by hostile parties, it might seem HTS is neutralised, but in significant ways, HTS has succeeded. In 2018, after Syrian government forces, Iran, and Russia had liquidated all the other “de-escalation zones”—the rebel-held areas theoretically protected by ceasefires—it appeared that Idlib’s turn would come at any moment. But it didn’t, and here Idlib still is, with HTS in charge, and Turkey having been drawn in ever-deeper to, in effect, underwrite the regime of a group it once pledged to eliminate.

A key consideration in HTS’ potential to run Idlib as a Hamas- or Hizballah-style de facto recognised statelet is whether it is seen as a foreign terrorism threat. The fact that earlier this month Daesh core’s “caliph” was, for a second time, found in Idlib, does not help. But HTS, once a front group for Daesh’s intrusion into Syria, has managed to distance itself from “external operations”. One way it has done this is by downplaying its foreign fighter element since it publicly broke with Al-Qaeda.

Jihadi Options in Afghanistan

A separate but related issue is whether jihadists in Syria itself will come to see HTS’ project as being at a dead-end and go to Afghanistan. The logistics of this route, either through Turkey or Iran, are not too difficult—Al-Qaeda sent emissaries the other way to mediate between HTS and Daesh in 2013, for example. But it does raise another interesting question: Would those who give up on HTS and go to Afghanistan be joining the Taliban/Al-Qaeda forces? Or would they be disillusioned with the entire Al-Qaeda-oriented world, which can seem dull and out of date, especially if subjected to the speeches of Al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri? Would they join the Daesh’s “Khorasan Province” (Daesh-K)? 

“Daesh-K” can claim a kind of “purity” that appeals to jihadi idealists, whether in Syria or Europe. The group is not, despite some claims from the fallen Afghan government, the instrument of a foreign intelligence service as the Taliban is. The Daesh-K narrative that the Taliban-Al Qaeda regime came into power through collaboration with the Americans is true enough that it has purchase, and is seemingly reinforced by the Taliban’s refusal to attack the Americans at the airport, unlike Daesh-K. The latter has robust transnational reach, into Kashmir and India, avoiding the “nationalist” label that it sees as having plagued Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In addition to this, Daesh-K has shown viability in its activities against the Taliban. 

Daesh-K has already attempted attacks in the West, and once it has a footing in Afghanistan it will once again function as a node for all of the group’s foreign attacks, particularly as Daesh continues to struggle in its Levantine centre, with American troops and drones hampering their efforts to reconstitute. These attacks are as much a challenge to Al-Qaeda and its derivatives as they are to the West. In response, the Taliban-Al Qaeda regime (and HTS), struggling to hold together their dominions, will have a choice. They might either continue on the current path set down by Al-Qaeda a decade ago of a more localist focus, avoiding the fate of Daesh by not provoking the ire of the West and instead of being able to bed down into societies. For now, this seems more likely. But with their home base in Afghanistan returned to them, and an ideological flank to protect, it is possible—and there have been some signs—that Al-Qaeda will get back into the foreign terrorism business and try to out-compete Daesh on its own terms.

Interconnected Foreign Fighter Flows

As Daesh’s front group, HTS lured European and other foreigners into Syria, more by offering a victim narrative (Sunni Muslims under siege from a heretical dictatorship and abandoned by the world) than by promising utopia, but both components were there. In Aleppo, HTS recruited and trained some of the leading foreign fighters that Daesh would steal away when HTS refused to come to heel, including Mohammed Emwazi or “Jihadi John”.

Emwazi is a classic case of someone recruited in one of the geographic “clusters” in Britain, where social and other (offline) militant networks pre-existed the Syrian conflict, laid down during previous foreign Islamist fighter mobilisations and until quite recently operating with a measure of tolerance from the British state, so long as the mischief they recruited and fundraised for took place abroad. These networks, created for one conflict, can and have provided the building blocks for the next mobilisation—successively, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Bosnia in the 1990s, Iraq in the 2000s, and Syria in the 2010s. Will the Syria infrastructure now be turned towards Afghanistan in the 2020s?

There is potential for such a thing all over Europe but in Britain, there is a special risk of this happening because a lot of the jihadist networks that in recent years sent people to Iraq and Syria were first laid down by Deobandis associated with the ISI, most infamously Masood Azhar, and had their focus on Kashmir. Moreover, there is a large population of South Asian descent in Britain, which moves back and forth to Pakistan every year in large numbers anyway. The investigation into the 7/7 attack noted that one reason the killers raised no red flags when they went for training at Al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan was that: “Extended visits to Pakistan by young men are not unusual.” With hundreds of thousands of young men staying “an average length of 41 days”, there seemed little amiss, on paper, about the travels of Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain.   

Another vulnerability Britain has is the well-organised campaign by Left-wing and Islamist forces—“the unholy alliance of the Red and the Black”, as the last Shah of Iran once put it—against the country’s counter-extremism policies, particularly the PREVENT strategy. It is a terrible irony that some of the most vulnerable and impressionable people, notably students, exactly those PREVENT seeks to protect from exploitation by Islamist extremists, are the ones most convinced by the “preventing PREVENT” lobbyists, who portray PREVENT as an anti-Muslim and repressive policy, using this narrative to further isolate and alienate British Muslims from the society around them—at which point Islamist groups step in to offer them community and “protection”.