Taliban members were seen near Hamid Karzai International Airport because thousands of Afghans were eager to flee the Afghan capital Kabul.
Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
- Analysts weighed the situation in Afghanistan.
- They believe that the Taliban will assist Al Qaeda in the country in a secret way different from their previous assistance.
- The Taliban occupied the capital Kabul.
Analysts say the Taliban will be more cautious in providing support to Al-Qaida in Afghanistan than when they openly accepted terrorist networks in the early days of their administration.
After the first conquest of Kabul in 1996, the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime provided al Qaeda with a safe training camp and even described its leader Osama bin Laden as a “guest” of the country.
But after being overthrown in 2001 in retaliation for the attacks planned in the United States on September 11, the incoming Taliban authorities in Kabul are expected to adopt a new approach this time.
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“If the Taliban in 2021 are different from the Taliban in 2001, it’s not because they have eased their religious obscurity, but because they don’t want to make the same strategic mistake, that is, they blindly support Al Qaeda, which makes them lose power. ,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a jihadist expert at the University of Political Sciences in Paris.
Filiu told AFP that he hopes that the Taliban will once again provide security for bin Laden’s successor, Ayman Zawahiri and others, on the grounds that there is a personal connection between the two organizations.
For example, the fathers of Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mullah Yaqoob are both senior leaders of the modern Taliban and have been linked to Bin Laden in the past.
When the Taliban leader Haibatullah Ahunzada was appointed in 2016, Zawahiri praised him, calling him the “Emir of Believers.”
protect
According to a US agreement reached with the Taliban under the leadership of former President Donald Trump last year, the Taliban promised to prevent jihadist groups from using the country as a base.
Taliban members were seen near Hamid Karzai International Airport because thousands of Afghans were eager to flee the Afghan capital Kabul.
The then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed in an interview in March 2020 that the organization had “breakthrough” from Al Qaeda.
But Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, said, “The Taliban have never sincerely severed ties with Al Qaeda, and we should not expect them to do so.”
“After all, it is not a question of severing relations between two political or military groups, but the severance of relations between brothers and brothers, and the severance of relations between cousins and cousins,” he told AFP.
Edmund Fitton-Brown, the head of the UN mission to monitor the Islamic State terrorist organization, Al-Qaida and the Taliban, came to the same conclusion.
“We believe that the top leadership of Al Qaeda is still under the protection of the Taliban,” he told the US news network NBC in February this year.
hidden
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a security expert and researcher at George Washington University, predicts that this time the links between the Taliban and Al Qaeda will be different.
Tamini told AFP: “It will be more hidden. It will not be so public. I don’t think they will allow them to open training camps that can be spotted from the outside and may face bombing attacks.”
The Taliban may try to do something similar to the Iranian policy. They put some AQ leaders under house arrest while giving them some leeway, such as communicating with affiliates.
Iran denies any connection with Al Qaeda or harbouring its agents, even though American media reported in 2020 that the network’s number two figure had been assassinated by Israeli agents in Tehran.
Rubin said that the lightning-fast takeover by the Taliban was a major intelligence failure, which may indicate that the West is capable of responding to new threats from Al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
“Think about what the CIA has missed: the Taliban has begun political negotiations with local officials across the country to win their defection, and the CIA has missed the deployment of the Taliban’s troops across the country to pre-arrange them for each country. The fact of the attack. The capital city,” he said.
Another possible consequence of the Taliban’s takeover may be a battle with the local branch of the Islamic State organization formed by Taliban defectors in 2014.
Filiu from Politecnico de Paris stated that the Taliban “will never forgive this betrayal and will fight to the end to crush this jihadist organization.”
“The Taliban will undoubtedly exaggerate their suppression of the Islamic State to improve their image in the eyes of the West,” he added.
