The security forces conducted a series of airstrikes and Special Operations against Taliban militants in Ghazni, Wardak and Logar provinces, like reported by khaama.com.

The military officials said Friday that the Special Forces killed a Taliban fighter, wounded another militant and arrested 6 others during separate raids in GElan districts of Ghazni.

The officials further added that the Special Forces killed 3 Taliban militants during a separate operation in Chak district of Wardak province.

Furthermore, the Special Forces killed 3 Taliban militants during an operation in Baraki Barak district of Logar.

The security forces also conducted an airstrike in Pul-e-Alam district of Logar and killed 3 Taliban militants.

The Taliban group has not commented regarding the operations so far.

The Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K) has been active in Afghanistan since 2015, with its fighters pledging allegiance to ISIS central command that once operated out of the eastern Syrian city of Raqqa, where its members beheaded hostages, raped sex slaves and killed hundreds over a range of accusations including sorcery.

Both the Afghan National Army and the US military, as well as the Taliban, fight the extremist group in Afghanistan, like reported by thenational.ae.

“There are an estimated 4,000-6,000 fighters and one fourth of them are foreigners,” explains Lt General Abdul Hadi Khalid, a researcher at the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies and former Vice Minister of Interior.

Afghan’s spy agency puts the numbers much lower, saying that only about 3,000 remain after thorough military operations and most fighters enter the country through the Iranian-Afghan border.

A Pakistani native, Bilal, from a religious lower middle class family, came to Afghanistan eight years ago, originally joining the Taliban, but the group’s changing ideology has pushed him away. He eventually joined IS-K two years ago.

As the Taliban and the US negotiate a peace deal in Doha, Bilal says that he is ready for a violent future.

“With ongoing peace talks, IS-K recruitment has increased. This includes recruitment from foreign fighters who are already in Afghanistan, but work with networks in their home countries,” a government security official tells The National.

“We will see if they become bigger once a peace deal is signed, but we estimate that around 5-10 per cent of Talibs might join Daesh then,” he says, using the group’s Arabic name.

Bilal claims that his move to join the group wasn’t a financial calculation but his personal wish to fight ‘jihad’.

“IS-K is giving money and power to people and it’s appealing,” explains Mahmood Marhoon, an author and researcher at Kabul University. “Most of the people who join are young, and while it’s tough to put a finger on exact numbers, the group is definitely stepping up their recruitment.”

The Ministry of Defence’s spokesperson, Zubair Arif insists that 95 per cent of the group has been “finished,” contrary to other expert opinion.

“We fought hard to remove them in Nangarhar and Kunar,” he says. “Many of them are foreigners and enter Afghanistan through all borders, even through Kabul’s international airport.”

The threat is not far-fetched, especially in the country’s eastern provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar and Nuristan, where the group has gained some territory over the past six months, according to a Pentagon report released in July.

“Regionally, the group continues to evade, counter, and resist sustained CT [counter-terrorism] pressure,” the report said.

According to a new UN report, out of the almost 4,000 civilian casualties in the first months of 2019, 11 per cent could be attributed to IS-K.

The Taliban and IS-K have been fighting each other, often for ideological reasons.

Both groups accuse each other of not being Islamic. In the past year, IS-K has taken over large forest areas, previously under Taliban control, with a booming wood and mining industry helping fund their activities.

“Daesh is also gaining strength in eastern Afghanistan because they are fighting ideologically,” explains Nadir, 35, a former Taliban trainer. After 12 years of educating fighters in suicide attack methods, Nadir, has left the insurgents behind to focus on his university studies.

“The Taliban’s ideology is becoming weak and it means that several of their fighters have joined Daesh – including Bilal,” he says.

IS-K territory is mainly constrained to eastern Afghanistan, yet new, small pockets are emerging across the country.

“We see them in the north, in provinces like Takhar and Badakhshan,” explains Lt General Khalid.

“Salafism is active in some northern areas and that’s where IS-K is finding ground.”

Bilal says the Taliban has changed. “They are not fighting infidels anymore, but they come to the negotiation table with them.”

He says that the group has managed to set up a semi-functioning state system, including schools, courtrooms and medical centres. “Some women have even joined their husbands here.”

“Local people see our good Islamic laws and want to join us. The young men I know – some of them are Uzbeks, Indians, Iranians, Chinese, even a few Europeans –want to give their lives for Islam,” Bilal explains.

“People have been brainwashed,” explains former terrorist trainer Nadir, who is using a fake name to conceal his identity. He’s known Bilal for many years, having once taught him how to build suicide vests.

But, for Bilal, joining the holy war was a decision he made after studying in one of Pakistan’s madrassas, religious schools.

“Foreign forces have come here to attack us and destroy our home, so we have to do the same,” the young man explains. “We do this to terrorise people and stir fear,” he says.

A few years ago, his family from Pakistan’s Karachi visited him in Afghanistan, an uncommon move. “My mother came to find me a wife, but I refused,” he says. “I live right on the frontline and if I die, my wife would be alone.” He now shares a house with two other single Pakistani fighters.

Bilal says he has come to Jalalabad to catch up with friends, but he’s manoeuvring through the city by avoiding checkpoints and hiding from the police.

“We’re targeting people, but we’re also a target here,” Bilal explains. “It’s only in the Daesh areas that I feel safe.”

The Afghan security forces repulsed a Taliban attack on security posts in Farah province of Afghanistan, like reported by khaama.com.

The Provincial Police Headquarters of Farah in a statement said the Taliban militants attacked the security posts on Highway No.1 in Bala Bolok district on Tuesday night.

The statement further added that the security forces killed 7 militants of Mullah Mustaghfir and Mullah Hayatullah Muhajir during the clash.

The Provincial Police Headquarters also added that the security forces also wounded 3 other militants during the clash.

Meanwhile, the Provincial Police Headquarters said two police soldiers also sustained injuries during the clash.

The Taliban group has not commented in this regard so far.

The Afghan Special Forces killed 9 Taliban militants during the operations in central Wardak province, like reported by khaama.com.

The informed military sources said Tuesday that the Special Force killed or detained 13 Taliban militants during an operation in Nerkh district of Wardak.

The sources further added that the Special Forces also arrested 4 Taliban militants during the same operation.

Furthermore, the Special Forces killed 5 Taliban militants during a similar raid which they conducted in Maidan Shahr district of Wardak.

The Afghan security forces killed or wounded 15 Taliban militants during the operations in Kandahar province of Afghanistan, like reported by khaama.com.

The 205th Atal Corps in a statement said the security forces conducted the operations in Mujahid and Jagrum areas of Maiwand district.

The statement further added that the security forces killed 8 Taliban militants and wounded 7 others.

Furthermore, the 205th Atal Corps said the Afghan forces also discovered and defued 17 improvised explosive devices in Maiwand, Khakriz and Panjwai districts of Kandahar.

The Taliban group has not commented operations so far.

The Afghan Special Forces freed two oil tankers who were abducted by Taliban militants in northern Faryab province, like reported by khaama.com.

The Special Operations Corps in a statement said the Special Forces conducted an operation in Chashma-e Sher area of Baghlan province.

The statement further added that the Special Forces killed 5 Taliban militants and freed 2 oil tankes drivers during the raid.

Furthermore, the Special Operations Corps said the Air Forces also supported the Special Forces during the operation.

The Taliban group has not commented regarding the operation so far.

The Afghan security forces killed one of the most dangerous leaders of Taliban group during an operation in Jawzjan province, like reported by khaama.com.

The 209th Shaheen Corps in a statement said the security forces killed Dadullah alias Surkhabai, one of the most dangerous leaders of Taliban during operation in Jawzjan.

The statement further added that the security forces killed Dadullah and his 3 companions i Shorabi Village of Qarqin district.

Teh 209th Shaheen Corps also added that the security forces also destroyed a Taliban compound and cleared several villages during the same operation.

At least 11 civilians were killed and dozens more wounded Monday after their vehicle hit a bomb in southern Afghanistan that officials told AFP had been planted by the Taliban, like reported by thenews.com.pk.

The deaths come just one week after Taliban and Afghan officials unveiled a “roadmap for peace” in which they pledged to eliminate civilian casualties. Monday’s incident occurred around 2:00 pm when a vehicle carrying many passengers hit a roadside bomb planted by the Taliban, provincial police chief Tadin Khan said.

It was not immediately clear if the victims had been travelling in a bus or in the back of a large truck. “In the blast, 11 people were martyred and 34 others were wounded. Women and children are among the victims,” Khan said.

Afghan military spokesman Ahmad Sadiq Esa confirmed the toll, while Kandahar governor Hayatullah Hayat said 13 were killed. No group claimed immediate responsibility. The Taliban did not immediately comment.

Kandahar is considered the birthplace of the Taliban, who still control some parts of the province. Insurgents often use roadside bombs and landmines to target Afghan security forces — but the lethal weapons also inflict heavy casualties on civilians. Years of conflict have left Afghanistan strewn with landmines, unexploded mortars, rockets and homemade bombs — and many are picked up by curious children.

According to the United Nations, almost 4,000 civilians — including more than 900 children — were killed in Afghanistan last year, with another 7,000 wounded, making it the deadliest year to date for civilians in Afghanistan´s conflict.

The Taliban and a group of Afghans met for a historic summit in the Qatari capital Doha last week, as part of US-led peace talks, where they pledged to reduce civilian casualties to “zero”.

Four weeks after his body had been blown apart by a Hellfire missile, Al-Qaeda third-in-command Mustafa Abu al-Yazid delivered his last testament, like reported by firstpost.com. “I bring you good tidings,” his voice declared, through a tape posted online in the summer of 2010. “Last February’s India operation was against a Jewish locale in the west of the Indian capital, in the area of the German bakeries—a fact that the enemy tried to hide—and close to 20 Jews were killed”.

Few Indian counter-terrorism analysts believed the speech made sense: indeed, it was wrong on every significant detail, bar the fact that Pune’s Germany Bakery had indeed been bombed. That operation, though, was known to have been conducted by the Indian Mujahideen’s Mohammed Ahmed Siddibappa, also known as Yasin Bhatkal—with no known connections to Al-Qaeda.

Now, it’s clear India should have listened harder. The speech in fact described the first meetings between Indian jihadists and Al-Qaeda, leading up to last week’s declaration of war against India by Al-Qaeda’s chief. Even now, though, many experts dismiss the Al-Qaeda threat, arguing the real threat comes from Inter-Services Intelligence backed jihadist groups, not a mainly-Arab organisation without local roots.

This comforting wisdom is simply wrong: Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri’s war against India isn’t a new adventure, but a homecoming. Even worse, from India’s point of view, the dice are rolling the jihadist group’s way.

In 1980, when al-Zawahiri arrived in Peshawar to help lay the foundations for the Afghan jihad, he was no stranger to the milieu he found himself amidst. His maternal grandfather, Abdul-Wahab Azzam, a professor of oriental literature and president of Cairo University, had served as Egypt’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Yemen—and, in 1954, Pakistan. He had, notably, translated the poet-laureate of South Asian Islamists Mohammad Iqbal into Arabic.

For decades before the world started paying attention, Islamists in the Arab-speaking world and South Asia had engaged each other, laying the intellectual foundations for the long war they hoped would come. Karachi was the crucible for the process—and al-Zawahiri’s grandfather a key catalyst.

In his years as envoy to Pakistan, Azzam’s closest friends included Said Ramadan—son-in-law of the Islamist ideologue Hassan al-Banna, and the de-facto foreign minister of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Pakistan’s prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, had met Ramadan in 1948, when he visited Karachi to attend a World Muslim Congress. The relationship flowered through the early 1950s, with Khan even giving the Muslim Brotherhood leader a weekly radio programme to air his views.

Ramadan, journalist Caroline Fourest has recorded, “was omnipresent in the media, arguing, on every occasion, for legislation based on the Shari’a”. Ironically, this enterprise had support from the Central Intelligence Agency, which saw the Muslim Brotherhood as a hedge against communism.

The most important relationship to develop during this time was that between the leader of the Jama’at-e-Islami, Abul’ Ala Maududi, and the Egyptian Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb—then, a rising star in the Muslim Brotherhood. Introduced through Ramadan, the two men laid the foundations for the ideology that would flower into Al-Qaeda.

Persuaded that Hindu revivalism posed an existential threat to Islam in South Asia, Maududi advocated for a Shari’a-based, militarist state. Islam, he insisted, was not just a religion; it “is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the entire world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.”

Thus, Maududi concluded, it was imperative for Muslims to “seize the authority of state, for an evil system takes root and flourishes under the patronage of an evil government and a pious cultural order can never be established until the authority of government is wrested from the wicked.” To do this, Muslims must “eliminate un-lslamic governments and establish the power of Islamic government in their place”.

In his book Milestones—which fired the minds of generations of jihadists, including al-Zawahiri—Qutb seized on Maududi’s ideas. He acknowledged the intellectual debt, reproducing extended tracts in the Jama’at leaders’ 1939 essay, Jihad in the Way of Allah.

“Let me tell you what is it that makes the destiny of a nation,” Iqbal’s poem Bal-e-Jibril says, “the sword and dagger must take precedence over singing and dancing”: for everyone from Maududi to Ramadan, and Qutb to al-Zawahiri, this much was apparent.

“Liberating the Muslim nation,” wrote al-Zawahiri in Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, released by al-Qaeda on the eve of 9/11, “confronting the enemies of Islam and launching a jihad against them, require a Muslim authority, established on a Muslim land, that raises the banner of jihad and rallies the Muslims around it”. He warned jihadists: “Without achieving this goal, our actions will mean nothing more than mere, repeated disturbances.”

Almost two decades later, it’s clear events didn’t pan out as al-Zawahiri hoped. Even though Al-Qaeda-affiliated movements today control far more territory than in 2001, there are no signs of the kind of revolution that would enable the creation of a state to act as a vanguard for the jihad.

From 2011, when al-Zawahiri took charge of Al-Qaeda, his mind has turned ever-more to South Asia. Building a subcontinental front to wage jihad, he believes, began to become an operational objective—its intimate alliance with the Taliban offering the keys to unlock the strategic objective of state power.

Early in 1996, when Osama bin Laden returned to set up base in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, references to India began appearing in Al-Qaeda literature. That year, for example, he issued a declaration condemning “massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, the Philippines, Pattani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya, and Bosnia-Herzegovina”.

Al-Zawahiri’s 2001 book, similarly, called on Muslims to discharge “a religious duty of which the nation had long been deprived, by fighting in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Chechnya”.

After 9/11, the anti-India references in Al-Qaeda literature became more marked, appealing to the regional Islamist milieu by charging the Pakistani state of collaboration with Hindus and Jews. In September, 2003, for example, al-Zawahiri invoked India to warn Pakistanis that their President, General Pervez Musharraf, was plotting to “hand you over to the Hindus and flee to enjoy his secret accounts.”

Then, in 2007, Pakistani military ruler General Pervez Musharraf ordered troops to storm the neo-fundamentalist Lal Masjid seminary in Islamabad—catalysing a fateful shift in the politics of jihadist groups.

Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the seminary’s chief, was a graduate of one of Pakistan’s most famous Islamist centres, the Jamia Uloom-e-Islamia, which counts among its alumni Masood Azhar, the leader of the Jaish-e-Muhammad, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, who headed the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, and Fazl-ur-Rehman Khalil, the leader of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.

Led by al-Zawahiri, a new phalanx of jihadists hostile to the Pakistan Army emerged in Miranshah. There, Al-Qaeda allied with Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri, the leader of Brigade 313 and a former Kashmir jihadist.

From multiple accounts, it’s clear at least some numbers of former members of the Indian Mujahideen—India’s most successful urban terrorist group—moved to join this grouping in Miranshah. Interestingly, jailed 26/11 perpetrator David Headley had told the FBI of a “Karachi project” run by Kashmiri, with plans to target India.

This group included Sana-ul-Haq, the Uttar Pradesh-born, Deoband-educated jihadist who now runs Al-Qaeda’s south Asia operations. Haq became involved in jihadist circles following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, the year after he graduated from Deoband. He left India, and joined the Jamia Uloom-e-Islamia in Karachi.

Haq was mentored by Nizamuddin Shamzai, a powerful cleric closely linked to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who had bragged of being treated as a “state guest” in Mullah Muhammad Omar’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Later, he briefly taught at at the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania seminary in Peshawar, before becoming an instructor at the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen’s training camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

In 2013, Haq delivered an exhortation specifically targeting Muslims in India—the first of its kind in global jihadist writing. He invoked anti-Muslim communal violence in India, saying “the Red Fort in front of the mosque cries tears of blood at your slavery and mass killing at the hands of the Hindus”.

Even though Al-Qaeda is yet to stage operations of any significance against India, it has steadily developed the infrastructure it needs for a sustained campaign. In Kashmir, Al-Qaeda’s fledgling unit has attracted a small but steady flow of jihadists.

For India, new dangers lie ahead. First up, the apparently-inexorable return of the Taliban to state power in Afghanistan will give its Al-Qaeda allies the shelter of state power—a necessary condition, as al-Zawahiri understood, for the success of the jihad. Having learned from 9/11, Al-Qaeda will refrain from targeting the West, for fear of losing its state.

To demonstrate its jihadist credentials—and compete for legitimacy with rivals like the Lashkar—Al-Qaeda will instead focus on strategically less-dangerous targets, like India. For its part, the Pakistani state is likely to welcome such a project. Forced to temper its anti-India operations by international pressure, the ISI will see in Al-Qaeda a means to pursue its tactical ends by proxy.

Put simply, the jihadist threat is likely to become infinitely more complex, and dangerous, in the years to come. New Delhi would be wise to begin preparing itself to fight al-Zawahiri’s new war.

The Afghan forces conducted operations in the outskirts of Qalat city of Zabul inflicting heavy casualties on Taliban militants, like reported by khaama.com.

The 205th Atal Corps in a statement said the security forces conducted the operations as part of Khalid-98 operations.

The statement further added that the security forces killed 10 Taliban militants during the operations.

Furthermore, the 205th Atal Corps said the security forces also wounded 15 Taliban militants during the same operations.

The Taliban group has not commented regarding the operations so far.