Today’s suicide bombing in Kabul has been claimed by Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K). ISIS in Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, claimed that an ISIS militant carried out the suicide attack, but provided no evidence to support the claim President Biden confirmed this in his remarks earlier this afternoon. At the remarks at the White House later …
ISIS has two strategic objectives. The Islamic State, organized around the doctrine of tawheed, seeks to destroy the civil space, often referred to as the grey zone, in which Muslims live their day to day lives as the citizens and residents of Muslim and non-Muslim states and societies alike. This civic space, especially in Western liberal states and societies that allows people from different religious and ethnic background to have membership in the state and society despite not necessarily belonging to the majority ethnic or religious group. The concept of extreme tawheed obliterates this space. It tells Muslims, specifically Sunni Muslims, that they cannot separate their religious lives from their civic ones and promotes this idea to non-Muslims. Moreover, its focus on being unable to be a good Muslim, a muwaheedun, unless one lives where tawheed has been established as the governing concept reinforces the argument that proper Muslims must relocate to the Islamic State and its self declared caliphate. It is also the Islamic State’s argument for expanding the caliphate. Additionally, it supports the assertion that Muslim communities in the West cannot assimilate, are susceptible to ISIS’s information operations, and are a threat to the domestic security of the states in which they reside.
The application of extreme tawheed to destroy the grey zone also seeks to set Muslims against Muslims. One of the hallmarks of Sunni Islam is ijma. Ijma, or consensus, is the belief that each community of Muslims determines how to organize themselves as Muslims. It is very similar to the five point Calvinist inheritance of the Evangelical denominations that developed within the US that each congregation determines how to organize its religious life for worship and adherence to the Gospels. Applying tawheed to Sunni Muslim life destroys the localism that is its hallmark. Additionally, it seems to pit the adopters of extreme tawheed against their friends and families. Any Sunni Muslim who does not accept and practice this form of tawheed is engaged in kufr and ridda and their apostasy and unbelief/incorrect belief must be corrected or they must be eradicated. Concepts of inclusion, tolerance, and multi-culturalism are anathema as a result of this extreme understanding of tawheed and to the Islamic State.
The Islamic State’s internal, or near geographic goals, are to consolidate their control over the territory they currently control and establish their version of tawheed within it. They then seek to expand their geographic holdings – the self declared Islamic State and caliphate – and enforce tawheed wherever they expand. They also seek to expand their version of tawheed throughout the Sunni Muslim world by destroying the grey zone for Muslims that live in Western states, as well as for those living throughout the Islamic world outside of ISIS’s control.
ISIS’s external, or far geographic, goals are to engage the far enemy and destroy it. The far enemy, as was the case with bin Laden, is the US and its allies. The Islamic State, however, has introduced an apocalyptic twist. Graeme Wood, reporting in The Atlantic, indicates that a central portion of the Islamic State’s theology is a belief in the Dabiq Prophecy. The Dabiq Prophecy is an apocalyptic prophecy found in Kitab Al-Fitan wa Ashrat As- Sa`ah/The Book Pertaining to the Turmoil and Portents of the Last Hour. The Dabiq Prophecy is specifically found in Chapter 9: Pertaining to the Conquest of Constantinople and the Appearance of the Dajjal and Descent of Jesus Son of Mary (Jesus Christ). These sections follow on from earlier hadith that retell more familiar end times prophecy, such as of Gog and Magog. The Islamic State’s leaders seem to equate the US with the antagonist described in the prophecy and place the location of the final battle in Dabiq, Syria.
The Islamic State does not have the ways and means to fully achieve their ends unless they can get the US and its allies and partners to provide the ways and means for them. ISIS cannot make Muslim citizens or residents of the US, France, or other EU states feel unwelcome. Only the citizens of the US, France, other EU states, and other states can do so. Moreover, the Islamic State cannot make the US, its allies, and its partners commit to a significant enough application of Landpower to allow them to claim that the Dabiq Prophecy is actually coming to pass.
The ways and means that the Islamic State does have at its disposal are to entice the US, its partners, and its allies into providing the ways and means to ISIS’s ends of destroying the grey zone, convincing Muslim citizens and residents of the US and other states that they are unwanted so that they relocate or undertake terrorist acts where they live, and to draw the US into a significant ground war in locations of ISIS’s choosing. Originally this was Syria because of the Dabiq Prophecy, but in the case of IS-K, it is Afghanistan. Engaging in terrorism as Psychological Operations is the Islamic State’s principal way of achieving the end of getting the US to provide it with the ways and means it does not have.
Psychological Operations are defined as: planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of Psychological Operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives.
The Islamic State has developed an extensive and highly professional Information Operations and Psychological Operations capability. Part of this was no doubt learned from the former Ba’athist Iraqi Sunni military and intelligence personnel who aligned themselves with the Islamic State as part of the ongoing Iraqi sectarian conflict. This could be clearly seen in the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks in suburban St. Michael, France in 2015. Within ten days the History Channel cable network was airing a documentary dealing with the Islamic State and the Paris attacks that included footage from embedded personnel reporting from within the portions of Syria and Iraq controlled by the Islamic State. The documentary included footage of fully stocked markets, police in uniform with clearly identified Islamic State markings, and people going about their daily lives. Exposing anyone in the US to these images would have been impossible without the attacks in Paris.
Today’s attacks seek to advance Islamic State Khorasan’s goals against both their near (the Taliban) and far enemies (the US). By successfully attacking Afghans attempting to reach and get into Hamid Karzai International airport (HKIA) and the US Marines conducting the security operation on site, IS-K makes the Taliban look weak and ineffectual. It both challenges the Taliban’s legitimacy in regard to governing Afghanistan and attacks their honor by making them look ineffectual in providing security. IS-K also seeks to draw the US back in to Afghanistan to prolong the conflict as part of engaging the far enemy/the US. The purpose here is to increase political pressure on President Biden to surge more US military personnel into Kabul in order to reinforce and extend the US’s security footprint. This would both abrogate the Biden administration’s adherence to the Trump administration negotiated withdrawal, putting the US and the Taliban back into conflict, while increasing the number of American targets for IS-K to attack.
Part of the reason IS-K undertook this attack is because like ISIS, like al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist Islamic movements, they read and watch the American news. They’ve seen the reporting bias about what the Biden administration is doing. They’ve seen the calls by reporters, pundits, the think tank denizens, former Trump administration officials, and Republican members of Congress for the Biden administration to send more military personnel back in, to retake Bagram and move operations there (this would be strategically irresponsible and tactically stupid!), and to create an open ended commitment to stay until every single US citizen and Afghan who wants to leave is out.
The leaders of Islamic State-Khorasan saw an opportunity to undertake a low risk to themselves – two suicide bombers – high reward operation to leverage the current information environment in the US to increase the pressure on the Biden administration. I expect there will be further attacks to both further capitalize on the news media and political feeding frenzy in the US right now in order to try to force the Biden administration to giving IS-K what it wants: more American military boots on the ground to both attack and to also become targets for the Taliban. I do not think this is going to work. I think that IS-K, like the American news media and Republican members of Congress, as well as other Republicans with presidential ambitions, have seriously misjudged President Biden. He is not going to budge. He will order and authorize exactly what he feels is necessary to complete the Non-combatant Evacuation Operation and when he has decided that this strategic objective has been met, he will end it. That may be on schedule for 31 August. It may be a week later. But it is not going to entail a surge of American military personnel to expand the operation. Finally, I do expect that US Special Operations Command has already been tasked with undertaking a focused, targeted mission against IS-K as an appropriate response to their attacks today.
Open thread!
* Ahmad Moussalli, Wahhabism, Salafism, and Islamism: Who is the Enemy, A Conflicts Forum Monograph, Spring 2015