An Islamic Emirates, The Taliban says ISIS is control by foreign intelligence, hints at United States, US.
Taliban spokesman in Qatar, Sohail Shaheen, said that the main bases of ISIS operating in Afghanistan are outside the country and are under the control of foreign intelligence.
He also noted that the Americans, with their statements about the involvement of ISIS, are trying to shield the true customers.
The Islamic Emirate strongly condemned the tragic attack on Crocus, Russia.
We eliminated the ISIS threat in Afghanistan after the end of the occupation, while they were still present in eastern and northern Afghanistan during the foreign occupation.
Now ISIS centers are located outside of Afghanistan under the control of foreign intelligence. The attack in Moscow must be carefully studied to identify the true masterminds. Senator Lindsey Graham is trying to distract the investigation at this sensitive stage.”
In fact, the Taliban also confirms that the militants who killed people in Crocus, Russia, had a customer among foreign intelligence services.
Previously, the Taliban has repeatedly accused the United States of direct ties with ISIS (wilayat Khorasan) and the use of ISIS by the Americans to carry out terrorist attacks.
The Taliban is a Sunni Islamist nationalist and pro-Pashtun movement founded in the early 1990s that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until October 2001.
The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, twenty years after their ouster by US troops. Under their harsh rule, they have cracked down on women’s rights and neglected basic services.
The group that has been linked to the deadly terrorist attack in Moscow on Friday is the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan called Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K.
ISIS-K was founded in 2015 by disaffected members of the Pakistani Taliban, who then embraced a more violent version of Islam. The group saw its ranks cut roughly in half, to about 1,500 to 2,000 fighters, by 2021 from a combination of American airstrikes and Afghan commando raids that killed many of its leaders.
The group got a dramatic second wind soon after the Taliban toppled the Afghan government that year. During the U.S. military withdrawal from the country, ISIS-K carried out a suicide bombing at the international airport in Kabul in August 2021 that killed 13 U.S. troops and as many as 170 civilians.
The attack raised ISIS-K’s international profile, positioning it as a major threat to the Taliban’s ability to govern.
Since then, the Taliban have been fighting pitched battles against ISIS-K in Afghanistan. So far, the Taliban’s security services have prevented the group from seizing territory or recruiting large numbers of former Taliban fighters bored in peacetime — among the worst-case scenarios laid out after Afghanistan’s Western-backed government collapsed.
