Jalalabad jail attack
In an unprecedentedly bold attack by Islamic State (IS) on a jail in Jalalabad on August 2, 2020, 29-31 people were killed (including 10 militants). The death toll could rise as some wounded victims remain critical. The jail in question held 1,793 IS and Taliban prisoners, of whom 1,025 escaped during the attack but most were subsequently recaptured, 430 remained inside the jail, and about 300 are still missing. The attack came a day after a top commander of IS, Asadullah Orakzai, was killed. The attack kicked off with an explosives-packed vehicle being detonated outside the prison, after which an intense firefight erupted between the prison guards and the militants who were able to entrench themselves in the prison watchtowers, a nearby market and a five-storey building. Eventually the defenders prevailed after a night and a day, but the nature of the attack and the ability of IS to take positions inside and outside the prison suggests a degree of intelligence and perhaps support inside the population that raises alarm. The Afghan government had declared in 2019 that IS had been completely defeated in Nangarhar province but after this latest dastardly attack local officials conceded it still had a presence in the province that gave it its first foothold in 2015. IS has been responsible for some deadly attacks in the past, including a suicide bombing at the funeral of a police commander on May 12, 2020 that killed 32 mourners.
IS has been defeated in Iraq and Syria, putting paid to its grandiose claims of setting up a ‘caliphate’. But it remains a deadly threat in eastern Afghanistan, outside the ambit of the peace agreement signed between the US and the Taliban in February 2020 in Doha. That agreement was supposed to be followed by intra-Afghan talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government in March 2020, but the plan has been delayed by infighting within the Afghan government and differences over the prisoner swap between it and the Taliban. The three-day ceasefire over Eid has expired, with no response so far from the Taliban to the Afghan government’s overture to extend the ceasefire and pave the way for the start of the intra-Afghan dialogue. However, Taliban intentions can be gauged from the strategy they seem to have adopted since the Doha agreement. This seems to consist of not attacking US or other foreign troops while giving a free hand to its fighters to target Afghan government forces and civilians not considered supportive of the Taliban. Even over the Eid ceasefire, the Taliban carried out 38 violations of the truce, killing 20 civilians and wounding 40. Naturally this selective targeting strategy has served to deepen the mistrust of Kabul for the Taliban’s commitment to a peace dialogue. Troubling as the impasse in the intra-Afghan talks is, it needs to be recognised that the chaos in Afghanistan provides fertile soil for groups like IS not bound by any means to a peace process. Not only that, given the origins of IS in the Middle East, any foothold it retains in Afghanistan potentially offers an attractive base to the remnants (and perhaps fresh recruits) of IS. The US, whose President Donald Trump now wants a further reduction of US troops in the country to around 5,000, the Afghan government and the Taliban ironically have a common interest in seeing through the peace process to deny IS this opportunity. Perhaps when they are finally done with mutual bloodletting, these parties could make common cause against IS. But only if they see the looming threat with sufficient clarity.
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