With spate of attacks, Islamic State group begins bloody new chapter in Afghanistan

The first blast ripped through a school in Kabul, the Afghan capital, killing high school students. Days later, explosions destroyed two mosques and a minibus in the north of the country. The following week, three more explosions targeted Shiite and Sufi Muslims.

The attacks of the past two weeks have left at least 100 people dead, figures from hospitals suggest, and stoked fears that Afghanistan is heading into a violent spring, as the Islamic State’s affiliate in the country tries to undermine the Taliban government and assert its newfound reach.

The sudden spate of attacks across the country has upended the relative calm that followed the Taliban’s seizing of power in August, which ended 20 years of war. And by targeting civilians — the Hazara Shiite, an ethnic minority, and Sufis, who practice a mystical form of Islam, in recent weeks — they have stirred dread that the country may not be able to escape a long cycle of violence.

The Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan — known as Islamic State Khorasan — has claimed responsibility for four of the seven recent major attacks, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist organisations. Those that remain unclaimed fit the profile of previous attacks by the group, which considers Shiites and Sufis heretics.

With the attacks, the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate has undercut the Taliban’s claim that they had extinguished any threat from the Islamic State in the country. It has also reinforced concerns about a potential resurgence of extremist groups in Afghanistan that could eventually pose an international threat.

Last month the Islamic State claimed it had fired rockets into Uzbekistan from northern Afghanistan — the first such purported attack by the group on a Central Asian nation.

“ISIS-K is resilient; it survived years of airstrikes from Nato forces and ground operations from the Taliban during its insurgency,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center, a think tank in Washington, using an alternate name for the Islamic State Khorasan. “Now after the Taliban takeover and the US departure, ISIS-K has emerged even stronger.”

The Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate was established in 2015 by disaffected Pakistani Taliban fighters. The group’s ideology took hold partly because many villages there are home to Salafi Muslims, the same branch of Sunni Islam as the Islamic State. Salafists are a smaller minority among the Taliban, who mostly follow the Hanafi school.