WINNING THE WoT:

The terrorist group that calls itself the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, provided one of the last searing images of the United States' 20-year counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan when two of its suicide bombers killed thirteen U.S. troops at Kabul's international airport, the deadliest day for U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan since 2011. 

But with that attack, ISIS also meant to demonstrate that the Taliban were unfit to protect Afghanistan.  Instead, ISIS's attack hastened the final U.S. troop withdrawal from Kabul, allowing the Taliban to finalize its fait accompli takeover of Afghanistan. Now, jihadists of all stripes are rejuvenated by the Taliban's victory, but with one notable exception: ISIS. The group that once was able to take half of Iraq and Syria still lurks with designs against the Taliban and the world. That's why the United States should not discount ISIS-K's threat in Afghanistan and beyond. 

The Islamic State needed Afghanistan's chaos. It has not regrouped since the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019 and the loss of its territorial caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Al-Qaeda also has been a shell of its former self, even long before U.S. troops killed Osama bin Laden. In fact, terrorist attacks worldwide in 2020 markedly decreased. And in Afghanistan, ISIS-K was competing directly with al-Qaeda for dwindling fighters and funding there, amid thousands of U.S. and NATO troops. [...]

Like its parent, ISIS-K quickly became known for its indiscriminate brutality, attacking religious minorities, government officials, and those who resisted the group's austere form of Islam. Totalitarian in nature, ISIS-K members would kill anybody that would not accede to the group's desire to control all aspects of an individual's social, political, and religious life. As ISIS-K's followers slaughtered innocents from 2016-2020, they would use complex attacks, often combining suicide bombings and small-arms, to wreak havoc. In 2020, ISIS-K attacked a maternity ward in a Shiite neighborhood of Kabul, killing more than 20 women and newborns. 

ISIS-K also believes that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are too locally focused and disinterested in establishing a global caliphate. In 2015, Al-Qaeda's former leader Ayman al-Zawahiri chastised ISIS's al-Baghdadi for anointing himself caliph of the self-declared Islamic State. Al-Qaeda was always opposed to creating a global caliphate too quickly, citing the need to govern successfully by tending to the masses. ISIS instead bet on its ability to metastasize globally and for a time eclipsed the already-diminished al-Qaeda within jihadist circles. 

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