Islamic State and the Haqqani Network in Afghanistan

[pieter]

TOLOnews (Pashto/Persian: طلوع‌نیوز) is Afghanistan's first 24/7 news channel, owned by MOBY Group, launched in August, 2010. Its sister channels are TOLO TV and Lemar TV in Afghanistan.

The channel is available on terrestrial across Afghanistan and satellite across the region. Its news bulletins are available on its website.

TOLOnews broadcasts in Dari and Pashto, and is available via the internet and social media in English, Dari and Pashto. Its website, www.tolonews.com, is one of the most popular news sites in Afghanistan.

[pieter]

The Haqqani network is an Afghan terrorist insurgent group that used asymmetric warfare to fight against US-led NATO forces and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin Haqqani have led the group. It is an offshoot of the Taliban. US State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, described the Taliban and Haqqani network as separate entities.

Its former leader Jalaluddin Haqqani fought for Yunus Khalis's mujahideen faction in the 1980s. The Haqqani network pledged allegiance to the Taliban in 1995, and have been an increasingly incorporated wing of the group ever since. In the past, the Taliban and Haqqani leaders have denied the existence of the "network", calling it no different from the Taliban.

In the 1980s, the Haqqani network was one of the most favored CIA-funded anti-Soviet terrorists groups by the Reagan administration. In 2012, the United States designated the Haqqani network as a terrorist organization. In 2015, Pakistan also banned the Haqqani network as part of its National Action Plan.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haqqani_network
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirajuddin_Haqqani
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalaluddin_Haqqani

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

The Tenacious, Toxic Haqqani Network



While global jihadist franchises al-Qaeda and ISIS compete for the public spotlight, the Haqqani Network has steadily and stealthily acted as a formidable insurgent force
in Afghanistan. The group has skillfully established and utilized ties to a wide array of militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while also maintaining close ties to
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). In the Haqqani Network's willingness to be submerged within the Afghan Taliban movement, it often draws attention away from
itself and allows the mainstream Taliban to take credit for leadership of the insurgency. The ISI's relationship with the Haqqani Network remains a thorn in U.S.-Pakistan
relations, and will undoubtedly continue to plague relations with the coming of the next U.S. administration.

Key Points
♦ The Haqqani Network is the strongest and most disciplined force in the Afghan insurgency
♦ The Afghan Taliban is heaviliy reliant on the Haqqani Network, despite appearances to the contrary
♦ The Haqqani Network has woven a web of alliances with fellow jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba
♦ Pakistan's ISI considers the Haqqani Network an asset to help expand its influence in Afghanistan, as well as counter Indian influence, and is unlikely to alter this policy in the near future, despite U.S. pressure
♦ Washington's counterinsurgency strategy has accomplished little in terms of dismantling the Haqqani Network

www.oneindia.com/img/2016/11/al-qaeda-terrorist-23-1479868723.jpg

presswire18.com/how-dangerous-is-the-haqqani-network-why-became-enemy-number-1-for-india-in-afghanistan/

[pieter]

The Haqqani network according to the Institute for the Study of War



The Haqqani network, which has the backing of elements within the Pakistani security establishment, is one of Afghanistan’s most experienced and sophisticated insurgent organizations.


Maulawi Jalaluddin Haqqani (1939 – 3 September 2018) was an Afghan leader of the Haqqani network, an insurgent group fighting in guerilla warfare against US-led NATO forces and the now former government of Afghanistan they support.


The Taliban have entrusted the security of the Afghan capital to the Haqqani network, which was listed by the US as a terror group in 2012 and has long been blamed for several brazen attacks on foreign forces across the war-infested country, particularly in Kabul.

- Although the Haqqani network is officially subsumed under the larger Taliban umbrella organization led by Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqanis maintain distinct command and control, and lines of operations.

Siraj Haqqani, the son of the famous anti-Soviet fighter Jalaluddin Haqqani, is the current leader of the Haqqani network. Siraj is more extreme than his father and maintains closer ties to al-Qaeda and other foreign extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.


Siraj Haqqani, the son of the famous anti-Soviet fighter Jalaluddin Haqqani, is the current leader of the Haqqani network.

- The Haqqani network maintains a safe haven in North Waziristan, Pakistan, across Afghanistan’s southeastern border. The Pakistani Army has consistently refused to launch a military operation in North Waziristan despite the presence of al-Qaeda senior leadership.

- Elements within the Pakistani security establishment continue to view the Haqqani network as a useful ally and proxy force to represent their interests in Afghanistan. To this end, Haqqani forces have repeatedly targeted Indian infrastructure and construction projects in Afghanistan.

Between 2002 and 2004, the Haqqani network reconstituted their operations in their historical stronghold of Loya-Paktia, which encompasses the provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika in southeastern Afghanistan.



The Haqqani network was able to expand beyond Loya-Paktia towards Kabul from 2005 to 2006, providing the network with the ability to execute attacks in the Afghan capital.

- From 2008 to 2009, the network launched an offensive aimed at strengthening their positions in Loya-Paktia, while projecting suicide bombers into Kabul to launch some the most lethal attacks of any insurgent group in Afghanistan.

- Until recently, U.S. and coalition troops lacked sufficient forces to reverse the momentum of the Haqqani network. The massive increase of special operations forces over the past year, combined with the increase in the number of conventional forces to execute counterinsurgency operations, is beginning to disrupt and degrade the Haqqani network’s infrastructure and operations.

- An increased drone campaign against senior Haqqani safe havens in North Waziristan has disrupted the network’s ability to plan and execute operations, and have targeted al-Qaeda senior leadership and other foreign terrorists.

Despite recent progress, Haqqani network operations can regenerate if not continually pressured. Therefore, efforts to neutralize the Haqqani network’s operation in Afghanistan require continuous and aggressive counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan in addition to sustained counterinsurgency operations in key populations in and around the Southeast.


The Haqqani network was formed by Jalaluddin Haqqani (in the centre), who gained prominence in the 1980s as a hero of the anti-Soviet jihad Zubair MIR AFP/File

[pieter]

The Haqqani Network



Narrative Summary

The Haqqani Network (HN) is a Sunni Islamist militant organization operating in the southeastern region of Afghanistan and the northwestern Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan. Renowned mujahideen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani formed the Haqqani Network in the late 1970s. One of the earliest Afghan Islamists and an Islamic scholar, Jalaluddin Haqqani played a pivotal role in the political order of Afghanistan’s southeastern provinces of Khost, Paktya, and Paktika (collectively referred to as Loya Paktya).



HN’s first declaration of jihad came in the summer of 1973 after Mohammad Daud Kahan’s coup unseated the Afghan monarch, Zahir Shah. Jalaluddin Haqqani traveled to Pakistan with other Afghan Islamists for training and support to combat the new Afghan regime. Available historical records cite HN’s first attack in 1975, when Jalaluddin and his fighters launched an assault against the pro-Daoud governor in Ziruk district of Paktika province, Afghanistan. This attack established HN’s credentials as a prominent mujahideen commander in the region. HN rose to prominence in the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s as part of the mujahideen.

In the 1980s, HN was one of a few renowned guerilla forces with the sufficient military infrastructure, political ties, and resource links in Pakistan to effectively conduct a sustained campaign against the Soviet-backed Afghan regime. In the decade that followed, HN was an integral actor in enabling the Quetta Shura Taliban’s broader organized violence in the northern region of Afghanistan and in its conquest of Kabul in 1996. As the Quetta Shura Taliban rose to power, HN nominally deferred to the Afghan Taliban’s authority, with Jalaluddin Haqqani serving as its Minister of Tribal and Border Affairs from 1996 through 2001.



During this period, HN also cultivated a closer, personal relationship with Osama bin Laden, some of whose earliest Al Qaeda training centers for Afghan Mujahideen and foreign fighters were organized under HN’s protection across Loya Paktya. HN reportedly facilitated Al Qaeda’s escape during the U.S. battle at Tora Bora in 2001, enabling the jihadists to move from Afghanistan to a safe haven in Pakistan. Jalaluddin Haqqani served as HN’s leader until his son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, began to assume greater command of the group in 2004, along with several of his close relatives.

Since 2001, HN has sought to drive the U.S.-led NATO coalition out of Afghanistan and help re-establish Taliban rule in the country. Over the last decade, HN has evolved from a relatively small, tribal-based jihadist network into one of the most influential terrorist organizations in South Asia. It is largely responsible for the violence in Kabul and attacks against the NATO coalition.

HN’s ascent to new positions of influence has much to do with how it emerged and skillfully organized against Western forces and policies post-9/11. HN’s senior leadership continues to depend on a traditionally hierarchical military structure in order to be centrally controlled, adaptive, and decisive in its campaigns. The network’s senior leaders also recognized the importance of locating its central military command in safe havens in Pakistan, thereby minimizing HN core leadership exposure to Western counterterrorism measures across sovereign borders. In Afghanistan today, however, HN increasingly employs decentralized models in which separate, distinct types of military and political structures exist side-by-side.

Unlike the “shadow” structures of the Quetta Shura Taliban in southern Afghanistan, HN opted instead to maintain a far more opportunistic system, focusing on expanding its Islamist organization by usurping existing Afghan administrative structures across the country.



In strategic regions, especially where the network controlled territory, district-level Afghan state and non-state leaders who did not adhere to HN’s military-political campaign were either suppressed or killed and replaced by new HN-approved leaders to reorient local municipalities toward the jihadists’ aims. In this way, HN’s political targeting often amounted to a sustained Islamist militant offensive against not only the Afghan state and population, but also against Western effort.

Over the last decade, rather than launching Al Qaeda style global jihad against the West, HN’s post-9/11 leadership employs political acts in pursuit of power, co-opting, infiltrating, and in some cases overtaking Western-backed Afghan institutions of governance across the war zone in a quest to consolidate power over the sovereign state and population.

In 2008, for example, Sirajuddin Haqqani engaged in a tactical alliance with a key commander in northern Afghanistan, Abdul Rauf Zakir, who requested financial assistance from HN in exchange for expanding HN’s influence and operations in Kabul and in select northern provinces of Afghanistan, namely, Takhar, Kunduz, and Baghlan. Over time, Zakir has become a close confidante of Sirajuddin Haqqni, serving as the chief of suicide operations for HN, and facilitating HN’s military training program and high-profile suicide attacks.



HN’s most notable alleged attacks include a suicide bombing of a U.S. base in Khost province in 2009, a 19-hour siege on the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in 2011, and an assault on a U.S. Consulate near the Iran border in 2013. Since the 2013 death of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, HN has become the only group with the cohesion, influence, and geographic reach to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth”—a territorial buffer on its western border. Its efforts have helped the Afghan Taliban credibly control or contest territory accounting for about one-third of the Afghan population.

For its part, Pakistan denies sponsoring Islamist militant proxies, but Western and Afghan officials say Islamabad also sponsors terrorism, in order to undermine Afghanistan and India. In 2011, Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called HN a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Haqqani Network remains an active militant threat in Afghanistan. In August 2016, Sirajuddin Haqqani was named deputy to the newly appointed Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.

On May 31, 2017, Haqqani Network detonated a car bomb in Kabul, killing more than 150 and wounded nearly 500 people. Afghan intelligence blamed the violence on HN, which continues to maintain close ties to the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Pakistan’s ISI. On October 11, 2017, the Pakistani military recovered several hostages from the group.

For more reading click on this link: web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/print_view/363

www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2021/08/25/who-is-who-in-talibans-haqqani-network/
web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/print_view/363

[pieter]

Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan



Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Urdu: تحریک طالبان پاکستان‎, lit. 'Taliban Movement in Pakistan' abbr. TTP), alternatively referred to as the Pakistani Taliban, is a Pashtun Islamist armed student group that is an umbrella organization of various student militant groups based along the Afghan–Pakistani border. Most Taliban groups in Pakistan coalesce under the TTP. In December 2007, about 13 groups united under the leadership of Baitullah Mehsud to form the TTP.



Among the stated objectives of TTP is resistance against the Pakistani state. The TTP's aim is to overthrow the government of Pakistan by waging a terrorist campaign against the Pakistan armed forces and the state. The TTP depends on the tribal belt along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, from which it draws its recruits. The TTP receives ideological guidance from and maintains ties with al-Qaeda.



Many of the militants who originally belonged to the TTP were killed as a result of the military operations that the Pakistan Armed Forces conducted in order to destroy the TTP's infrastructure and base of support in Pakistan. However, some of the TTP militants escaped into Afghanistan through the ungoverned areas of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. In Afghanistan, some of the TTP militants joined Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – Khorasan Province, while others remained part of the TTP. As of 2019, there are around 3,000 to 4,000 TTP militants in Afghanistan, according to a United States Department of Defense report.



In 2020, after years of factionalism and infighting, the TTP under the leadership of Noor Wali Mehsud underwent reorganization and reunification. Between July and November 2020, the Amjad Farouqi group, one faction of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Musa Shaheed Karwan group, Mehsud factions of the TTP, Mohmand Taliban, Bajaur Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, and Hizb-ul-Ahrar merged with TTP. This reorganization has made TTP more deadly and has led to increased attacks.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehrik-i-Taliban_Pakistan

[pieter]

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan


The flag of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU, Uzbek: Ўзбекистон исломий ҳаракати/Oʻzbekiston islomiy harakati) was a militant Islamist group formed in 1998 by the Islamic ideologue Tahir Yuldashev, and former Soviet paratrooper Juma Namangani—both ethnic Uzbeks from the Fergana Valley. Its original objective was to overthrow President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, and to create an Islamic state under Sharia; however, in subsequent years, it reinvented itself as an ally of Al-Qaeda.


The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan has released videos showing some religious schools training children as fighters

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan also maintained relations with Afghan Taliban in 1990s. However, later on, relations between both the Afghan Talibans and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan started declining. In mid-2015, its leadership publicly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and announced that the IMU was part of the group's regional branch. In 2016, it was reported that a new faction of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan emerged after the group became part of Islamic State (IS). The new faction retained the group's name and was independent of Islamic State (IS). It has also indicated that it is loyal to al-Qaeda and the Taliban and shared their views against the Islamic State (IS).



Operating out of bases in Tajikistan and Taliban-controlled areas of northern Afghanistan, the IMU launched a series of raids into southern Kyrgyzstan in the years 1999 and 2000. The IMU suffered heavy casualties in 2001–2002 during the American-led invasion of Afghanistan. Namangani was killed, while Yuldeshev and many of the IMU's remaining fighters escaped with remnants of the Taliban to Waziristan, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Since then, the IMU has focused on fighting the Pakistan Forces in the Tribal Areas, and NATO and Afghan forces in northern Afghanistan.

[pieter]

Lashkar-e-Taiba


The flag of Lashkar-e-Taiba

Lashkar-e-Taiba is an Islamist militant organisation operating in Pakistan. It was founded in 1987 by Hafiz Saeed, Abdullah Azzam and Zafar Iqbal with funding from Osama bin Laden.



Lashkar-e-Taiba has been accused by India of attacking military and civilian targets in India, most notably the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the 2019 Pulwama attack on Armed Forces. Its stated objective is to merge the whole Kashmir with Pakistan. The organization is designated as a terrorist organisation by Pakistan, India, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia, Australia, and the United Nations (under the UNSC Resolution 1267 Al-Qaeda Sanctions List). Though formally banned by Pakistan, the general view of India and some Western analysts, including of experts such as former French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière and New America Foundation president Steve Coll, is that Pakistan's main intelligence agency continues to give LeT help and protection. The Indian government's view is that Pakistan, particularly through its intelligence agency, has both supported the group and sheltered the group's leader Hafiz Saeed; Hafiz Saeed is currently imprisoned by Pakistan.



Whilst LeT remains banned in Pakistan, the political arm of the group, Jamat ud Dawah (JuD) has also remained banned for spans of time. However the group is still active in Pakistan.


Lashkar-e-Taiba militants