Enduring Terror Forever: From Al-Qaeda to ISIS-K
By Pepe
Escobar
September
07, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House
- It
was 20 years ago today. Asia Times published
Get Osama! Now! Or Else…The
rest is history.
Retrospectively,
this sounds like news from another galaxy. Before Planet 9/11.
Before GWOT (Global War on Terror). Before the Forever Wars.
Before the social network era. Before the Russia-China strategic
partnership. Before the
Dronification of State Violence.
Before techno-feudalism.
Allow me to get
a little personal. I was back in Peshawar – the Islamic Rome,
capital of the tribal areas – 20 years ago after a dizzying loop
around Pakistan, tribal territory, a botched smuggling op to
Kunar, biding time in Tajikistan, arriving by Soviet helicopter
in the Panjshir valley, a harrowing road trip to Faizabad, and a
UN flight that took ages to arrive.
In the Panjshir, I had
finally met “the Lion”, commander Masoud, then plotting a
counter-offensive against the Taliban. He told me he was
fighting a triad: the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI.
Less than three weeks later he was assassinated – by two
al-Qaeda ops disguised as a camera crew, two days before 9/11.
No one, 20 years ago,
could possibly imagine the subsequent slings and arrows of
outrageous – terror – fortune. Two decades, $2.3
trillion and at least 240,000 Afghan deaths later, the Taliban
are back where they were: ruling Afghanistan. Masoud Jr
in theory leads a “resistance” in the Panjshir – actually a CIA
ops channeled through CIA asset Amrullah Saleh, former Afghan
Vice-President.
Al-Qaeda is a harmless
skeleton, even rehabilitated in Syria as “moderate rebels; the
new bogeyman in town is ISIS-K, a spin-off of the Islamic State
in “Syraq”.
After negotiating a
stunning package deal with the Taliban, the Empire of Chaos is
concluding a humiliating evacuation from the land it bombed into
democracy and submitted for two decades. Once again the US was
de facto expelled by a peasant guerrilla army, this time mostly
consisting of Pashtuns, descendants of the White Huns – a nomad
confederation – as well as the Sakas, nomadic Iranic peoples of
the Eurasian steppes.
The CIA shadow army
ISIS-K,
the new viper’s nest, opens multiple Pandora boxes that may lead
to the new incarnation of the Forever Wars.
ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for the horrific Kabul suicide
bombing.
ISIS-K is apparently
led by one ghostly emir Shahab al-Mujahir (no photo, no
biography details), supposed to be an urban warfare expert who
previously worked as a mere mid-level commander for the Haqqani
network.
In 2020 media-savvy
ISIS-K released one of his audio messages in Pashto. Yet he may
not be Pashtun, but actually from some latitude in the Middle
East, and not fluent in the language.
Even
CENTCOM commander Gen Mackenzie has admitted that the US
military are sharing intel on ISIS-K with the Taliban
– or rather vice-versa: Taliban spokesman Zahibullah Mujahid in
Kabul stressed that they warned the Americans in the first place
about an imminent threat to the airport.
The
Pentagon-Taliban collaboration is by now established. The
perennial CIA shadow wars are a completely different ball game.
I have shown in
this
in-depth investigation how the
top priority for the Taliban is to target the ramifications of
the CIA shadow army in Afghanistan, deployed via the Khost
Protection Force (KPF) and inside the National Directorate of
Security (NDS).
The CIA army, as I
explain, was a two-headed hydra. Older units harked back to 2001
and were very close to the CIA. The most powerful was the KPF,
based at the CIA’s Camp Chapman in Khost, which operated totally
outside Afghan law, not to mention budget.
The other head of the
hydra were the NDS’s own Afghan Special Forces: four main units,
each operating in its own regional area. The NDS was funded by
the CIA and for all practical purposes, operatives were trained
and weaponized by the CIA.
So the NDS was a de
facto CIA proxy. And here we have the direct connection to Saleh,
who was trained by the CIA in the US when the Taliban was in
power in the late 1990s. Afterwards, Saleh became the head of
the NDS – which happened to work very closely with RAW, Indian
intel. Now he’s a “resistance leader” in the Panjshir.
My
investigation was confirmed right away by the deployment of
Task Force Pineapple last week,
an operation carried out by CIA/Special Forces to extract the
last sensitive intel assets from Kabul who were being chased by
the Taliban.
In parallel, serious
questions are piling up regarding the Kabul suicide bombing and
the immediate MQ-9 Reaper response targeting an “ISIS-K planner”
in eastern Afghanistan.
This page
has been carefully tracking prime
information regarding what could be described as the Abbey Gate
Massacre, not surprisingly
buried by Western mainstream
media.
The You Tube
channel Kabul Lovers, for instance, is engaging in street-level
journalism that puts to shame every multi-million dollar TV
network. A military officer who examined the bodies of many of
the bombing victims at Kabul Emergency Hospital claimed that
most were not victims of the suicide bombing: “All victims were
killed by American bullets, except maybe 20 people out of 100.”
The full, original report, in Dari, is
here.
Scott Ritter, for
his part, has emphasized the need of “perspective” on the
claimed drone strike against ISIS-K “from an actual drone expert
like
Daniel Hale, but they put him
in jail for telling the truth about how bad our drone program
actually is when it comes to killing the right people.”
By now it’s
established that contrary to Pentagon claims, the drone strike
hit
a random
house in Jalalabad, not a
moving vehicle, and there was “collateral damage”: at least 3
civilians.
And the civilian death
toll of a subsequent missile strike on another alleged “ISIS-K
planner” in a car in Kabul is already at 9 – including 6
children.
The
Syria-Afghanistan rat line
The much-lauded
Pentagon offensive against ISIS in “Syraq” has been derided all
across the Axis of Resistance as a massive farce.
Over the years, we have
had exposés coming from Moscow; Tehran; Damascus; Hezbollah; and
some of the People’s Mobilization Units (PMUs) in Iraq.
Hezbollah’s
secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly asserted how
“the US have been using helicopters to save ISIS terrorists from
complete annihilation in Iraq/Syria and transporting them to
Afghanistan to keep them as insurgents in Central Asia against
Russia, China and Iran.”
The extremely
well informed Russian Special Presidential Envoy for
Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, has pointed out that Russia had
received the
same information from local
tribal leaders. Even former President Hamid Karzai – now a key
negotiator forming the next Taliban-led government in Kabul –
has branded ISIS-K a “tool” of the United States.
It’s important to
remember that ISIS-K has become much more powerful in
Afghanistan since 2020 because of what I describe as a shadowy
transportation ratline from Idlib in Syria to Kunar and
Nangarhar in eastern Afghanistan.
Of course there is no
smoking gun – yet: but what we do have is a serious working
hypothesis that ISIS-K may be just another CIA shadow army, in
collaboration with the NDS.
All that, if confirmed,
would point to a dark future: the continuation of the
Forever Wars by other means – and tactics. Yet never
underestimate the counter-power of those no-nonsense descendants
of White Huns and Sakas.
Pepe Escobar
is correspondent-at-large at
Asia Times.
His latest book is
2030.
Follow him on
Facebook.
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