The Associated Press has reported that the Islamic State is now active in southern Afghanistan.
CAMP SHORABAK, Afghanistan -- Afghan officials confirmed for the first time Monday that the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is active in the south, recruiting fighters, flying black flags and, according to some sources, even battling Taliban militants.
The sources, including an Afghan general and a provincial governor, said a man identified as Mullah Abdul Rauf was actively recruiting fighters for the group, which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq.
ISIS active in south Afghanistan, officials confirm for first time, Associated Press
This all concerns
Abdul Rauf Khadim, a.k.a. Abdul Rauf Aliza, who was captured by the forces of Rashid Dostum, the current Vice President, at the fall of Kunduz in 2001.
The first of the nine to be captured, Abdul Rauf Aliza, remains something of an enigma to this day. Seized in November 2001 during the fall of Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan, he was held, with thousands of other men, in a filthy, overcrowded prison in Sheberghan run by General Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, and was then transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airbase with nine other Afghan prisoners.
The Stories of the Afghans Just Released from Guantánamo: Intelligence Failures, Battlefield Myths and Unaccountable Prisons in Afghanistan, Andy Worthington
During interrogation at Guantanamo, Abdul Rauf seems to have effectively hidden his real role with the Taliban, presenting himself as a forced low-level conscript.
Analyst Note: Detainee has been uncooperative in terms of his complete involvement with the Taliban and the opium trade.
Administrative Review Board Input for Guantanamo Detainee, ISN: US9AF-000108DP, Department of Defense
He also has a pretty good rant about how new accusations kept piling on.
Things just keep on appearing the longer I stay here. I explained very clearly about some of these accusations with the interrogator. They never existed back when I was captured. I don't know where these things come from and did not cause all of these allegations that are on me right now.
Summarized Review Board Detainee Statement, Department of Defense
So they didn't know who he really was, but piled on other unsubstantiated charges. A double intelligence failure, assuming the goal of the interrogation was intelligence.
Mike Martin, in his book about Helmand, points out that a military tribunal questioning Abdul Rauf was pretty well clueless about some basic facts of Afghan politics, thinking that the Northern Alliance is Pashtun:
Q: The Northern Alliance is also Pashtun, why did you not side or join with them?
Combat Status Review Tribunal Transcript, Department of Defense
Abdul Rauf has a similar observation:
I don't know if you guys know how the government used to operate in Afghanistan.
Summarized Review Board Detainee Statement, Department of Defense
This level of knowledge, with the repeated intelligence failures, can be behind U.S. decisions on whether someone is to be imprisoned or freed. And also behind decisions on whether someone will be killed.
In late 2007, Abdul Rauf was released to Afghanistan, and imprisoned at Pul-e-Charkhi. From where he somehow managed to either escape, or be released.
In 2010, at the time of the surge, Cathy Gannon, sourcing strongman Sher Mohammed Akundzada and unnamed officials, said Abdul Rauf had rejoined the Taliban.
Abdul Rauf, who told his U.S. interrogators he had only loose connections to the Taliban, spent time in an Afghan jail before being freed last year.
He rejoined the Taliban, they said. Akundzada said he warned authorities against releasing both him and Qayyum.
Former Gitmo detainee said running Afghan battles, Associated Press
In 2013, Ron Moreau, sourcing anonymous Taliban officials, said Abdul Rauf was leading a dissident movement that wanted Mullah Omar to prove he was still alive.
The point man for the dissidents’ operation is Abdul Rauf Khadim, a one-time Kabul garrison commander and former Guantánamo prisoner, who was sidelined by the shura in 2010 in Mullah Omar’s name. “Let’s solve the mystery of Mullah Omar’s long silence in order to save him and the Taliban,” he is telling his likeminded commanders and former ministers. Khadim is in charge of writing a letter to the ruling council that will be signed by this group of 20 or more dissidents, asking the shura to prove that Mullah Omar is alive and active and is actually issuing the orders that some members of the shura claim are coming from him. Khadim says the letter will also say that if no proof is forthcoming within a yet-to-be specified time limit then the insurgency should nominate a new supreme leader who would be acceptable to most Taliban.
Taliban Forces Desperate to Hear from Their Absent Leader, Mullah Omar, Daily Beast
Other news stories have him arrested but then released by Pakistan, and even as the leader of the Quetta Shura.
The Associated Press story that the Islamic State is now operating in Afghanistan has been picked up and accepted across the political spectrum, by say Hot Air, and Antiwar.com, and the Washington Post.
The BBC pulls in the Khorasan Group, which had come, last we knew, from either Iran or Pakistan depending on source, was then targeted in Syria, and is now recruiting in Wardak.
There are also accounts that a group called Khorasan has been attempting to recruit fighters in Wardak province.
Khorasan is an old name for Afghanistan, and is a word that carried mythical overtones for some Muslims after an ancient prophecy that black flags would once again fly in Khorasan before the end of the world.
Islamic State 'recruiting Afghan fighters', BBC
Pajhwok reports refugees from Pakistan having IS links.
Matin said the families included Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens, who forced residents to leave their homes. “These people are spreading fear and terror in the area,” the governor charged.
The households are living in Nawbahar, Aab Band, Nawa and Shamalzai districts, close to the Pakistan border, where the security situation has been unstable. Security organs are probing the families.
An influential individual from Nawa district, wishing not to be named, told Pajhwok Afghan News a number of armed men with links to the Islamic State had infiltrated into his area last week.
Paktika, Ghazni refuges suspected of having kinks to IS, Pajhwok
For a number of reasons, the reporting about the Islamic State operating in Afghanistan should be treated with caution. One, that Afghan officials can hype a threat according to current needs. Abdul Rauf as head of the Quetta Shura, to Abdul Rauf as siding with the Islamic State, as a good example.
And Sher Mohamed Akundzada and his brother Amir Mohammad Akundzada, important sources of our information about Abdul Rauf, might not be the most reliable of narrators.
"We should treat reports of ISIS in Afghanistan with caution, because of the historic weakness of foreign-linked Islamist groups in the country, and because Afghan officials have a tendency to play up the ISIS threat as a way of trying to capture the West's flagging attention," Anand Gopal, an analyst and author of a book on the US war in Afghanistan, told VICE News. "With that being said, however, it does appear that a few disgruntled Afghan Taliban members are rebranding themselves as ISIS."
Disgruntled Ex-Taliban Members Now Fighting and Recruiting For the Islamic State in Afghanistan, VICE News
The Guantanamo tribunal deciding whether Abdul Rauf should or shouldn't continue to be imprisoned, and assessing the truth of his story, rather amazingly did this not knowing from the Northern Alliance.
But 13 years into this war, for a news story concerning the extremely murky politics of southern Afghanistan, and needing to assess the truth of the matter from unreliable source, are we much better?
As metaphor for the war in Afghanistan, Americans making high stakes decisions based on insufficient knowledge, seems to me certainly what we have done there. To often disastrous result.