THERE IS NO AFGHANISTAN; CUT KANDAHAR LOOSE:

While Islamic orthodoxy may agree that the rulings on women's work and education are un- and even anti-Islamic, harming the community of Believers, Islam has no equivalent to excommunication and Sunni Islam in particular tends to emphasise obedience to the ruler, even if he is flawed. Further, during the decades of their struggle, the Taliban needed to remain unified and indivisible. To show division and disagreement publicly is a big step.

On the other hand, if the reasonable Taliban elements find some courage, they will find conditions to be favourable. Highly respected Islamic authorities inside the country, such as the renowned Professor Abdul Samad Qazizadah, or Maulawi Jalilullah Mawlawizadeh, the head of a madrassa in Herat, have publicly denounced the rulings as having no basis in Islam and as having the potential to destroy the country and ruin the good name of Islam before a world audience. Their words carry weight. And while it is short of excommunication, last week's declaration by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation -- which represents 57 member states -- disavowing the Taliban rulings on female education and employment should give dissidents within the group the theological and political backing to openly oppose these policies. It would qualify them for significant intra-Islamic aid and support if they managed to take the rudder.

Outside Afghanistan, the international community had been cautiously inclined towards accepting the Taliban government. That's out of the question now, as long as the Kandahar Krazies are in charge. But if they were to be removed, and the moderate wing prevailed, they could expect significant help and support. This last part isn't a heavy lift. If they were then to rescind the female employment ban, open girls' schools, readmit women to the universities, and take steps to a more inclusive government, it would change everything. Add to that, if the Kandahar Hardliners -- several of whom are on global terrorism lists -- were no longer part of the government, sanctions could be lifted and the country's frozen assets released.

Many of these moderate Taliban members took on the United States and Nato. Will they have the guts to take on the small circle of hardliners who are upending the peace dividend and leading the country into ruin? With civil war on the horizon, they may not have much choice.

It was Aug. 15, 2021, and the last U.S. troops were still sheltering at Kabul airport, waiting for the war to end, when the purge began. For 20 years the Taliban had been waging an insurgency in the name of jihad against foreign occupation. But with success now assured and their greatest enemy in retreat, they were already switching focus to another, more insidious, threat: their fellow Muslims in the Islamic State group. This time they would do their killing in the shadows. The first stage of their plan centered on a prison in Kabul's heavily fortified diplomatic zone and was scheduled to unfold the same day the Afghan capital fell. Officials in the crumbling U.S.-backed government referred to the jail as Directorate 40. Locals knew it only as another set of nondescript buildings hidden behind a high perimeter wall. Located close to the Ministry of Defense, the U.S. Embassy and NATO's headquarters, near where the Taliban hung the butchered corpse of the former communist president Mohammad Najibullah when they first took power in 1996, it was a fitting location from which to start settling old scores. There was just one problem: The man at the top of their hit list knew they were coming for him.

As the leader of the Islamic State in South and Central Asia, Abu Omar Khorasani took a certain satisfaction from being the most feared and despised prisoner in Directorate 40. That morning it did not even cross his mind that the Taliban's victory might bring an end to Afghanistan's suffering. Nor did he think it was likely to bring him freedom. Instead, he regarded the Americans' withdrawal as an opportunity to reignite his own armed struggle, either back on the battlefield himself or as a martyr whose death would inspire other Muslims to rise up in his name. Khorasani had been in Directorate 40 for 10 months and, though he had not been tortured like other prisoners held before him in the custody of the intelligence service, confinement had taken its toll. His naturally wiry build had given way to a slight paunch and a solid, muscular physique; his hair was heavily receded at the front and hung down at the back in long, lank curls that spilled toward his shoulders. He looked a decade older than his 37 years, but his mind was still sharp and his sense of purpose undimmed. In truth, there was something of the philosophical sadist about Khorasani, and he was able to cope better than most with life in prison. He loved to read and write and frequently lost himself in the labyrinth of his own thoughts. Although he saw himself as a soldier, he would be better described as an ideologue who liked to intellectualize the horrific violence he unleashed. It was this characteristic that made him a dead man walking.

Under Khorasani's leadership, the Islamic State's Afghanistan chapter had been locked in a brutal, low-level civil war against the Taliban for years, only to be defeated and pushed to the brink of irrelevance. Hundreds of his men had died or been forced into hiding, and in spring 2020, he had been arrested. Every day since then his feelings of anger and humiliation had steadily grown. Directorate 40 held the most senior insurgents left in Afghanistan's prison system and, in many cases, their wives and children as well. Only a fraction of the 1,500 or so inmates were affiliated with the Islamic State, however. The vast majority of them were Taliban commanders who hated Khorasani and everything he espoused. Given the odds stacked against him, a less obdurate man might have spent those final few hours before the Taliban's victory trying to save his own skin by asking for the other prisoners' forgiveness. But that was not Khorasani's style. He had been an outsider for much of his life and no amount of time in jail could smooth the chip on his shoulder.

Khorasani was born in the district of Sawkay, or Chawkay, in Kunar, eastern Afghanistan, on Dec. 24, 1983. The second son of a typically large family, he was actually named Zia-ul-Haq Zia. He underwent his primary education at a local madrassa, an Islamic religious school, until the sixth grade, before transferring to madrassas in Bajaur and Peshawar in Pakistan, where he went on to learn calligraphy and achieve a master's degree in Islamic studies. He was fluent in Pashto, Dari, Arabic and Urdu, and proficient in English, and as a young man he had loved nothing more than learning. At one point while in Pakistan, he even enrolled in an online Islamic studies course run by an institute in Canada. Although it would be easy to depict him as evil given his later actions, no one who knew him well in his youth ever described him as such. Nor did anyone suggest he was insane. Those close to Khorasani back then regarded him as polite, erudite and confident in his own skin. But he was also an outsider. Unlike most Sunni Muslims in Afghanistan, Khorasani was brought up as a Salafi -- a member of an austere branch of the faith that is prevalent in Saudi Arabia and looks only to the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate followers for guidance. His parents raised him that way, as part of a small but thriving community that had existed in Kunar for decades. In keeping with Salafi custom, Khorasani practiced his religion conservatively as a young man but didn't try to impose his beliefs on others. In 2000, before his graduation in Pakistan, he married the uneducated granddaughter of one of his aunts. Female guests at the wedding ceremony in the Mohmand tribal agency played the "daf" -- a tambourine made of goatskin. Khorasani regarded music as un-Islamic, but he was about 16 years old at the time and willing to bend the rules of his faith if it made other people happy. He and his wife would go on to have 10 children together -- six sons and four daughters.

Khorasani returned to Kunar from Pakistan in 2004 and took a job as a teacher in Sawkay before going on to become the principal of the local madrassa he attended as a child. Later, he also found work with an international NGO that paid him $500 a month -- a good salary by Afghan standards. Had life worked out slightly differently, then, Khorasani might have turned into exactly the kind of Muslim that America professed to want at the forefront of its quest to remake post-9/11 Afghanistan in its own democratic, progressive image: intelligent and hardworking; devout but not extreme; a partner of the West. No one is quite sure why, or when, he chose a different future for himself, but in 2015, Khorasani gave an inflammatory speech against the Afghan government to students at his local mosque. Soon afterward he left home to join the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP).

By the time the Taliban were preparing to hunt him down last summer he had helped ignite a wave of violence unlike anything his country had ever seen: ISKP fighters had blown up funerals and rampaged through Kabul University. They had denounced Shiite Muslims as apostates and targeted them with a methodical brutality that carried many of the hallmarks of genocide. In Directorate 40, however, Khorasani did not feel the need to justify this to the Taliban or anyone else; all he asked for was the chance to be allowed to continue his work.

Khorasani shared a cell with one of his sons, a son-in-law and another close relative, each of them fellow members of ISKP. They did their best to keep their spirits up, but it was not easy. All prison systems have their internal social hierarchies and Directorate 40 was no different. The Talib inmates regarded Khorasani as a direct challenge to their political and religious authority. Their animosity went far deeper than the fratricidal violence ISKP had managed to unleash across Afghanistan. For the most ideologically committed Talibs, Salafism was a distortion of Sunni Islam and an affront to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence that they, and millions of Afghans, followed. Khorasani and the other ISKP members believed the opposite was true, and it was impossible for either side to compromise, at a national level or within Directorate 40 itself. Throughout his confinement, Khorasani had lived with Talib inmates calling him and his family "Kharijites" -- regressive and rebellious Muslims who had willingly defected from Islam's true teachings. In turn, he viewed the Talibs as "munafiqun," hypocrites who had sold out the jihad by negotiating with the Americans during the long withdrawal process leading up to last summer. Tension had often erupted at prayer times when the Talibs jeered and insulted the ISKP prisoners because of the distinct way they prayed. The fall of the Afghan government on Aug. 15 last year promised both sides the reckoning they had been waiting for.

About 3 p.m. that day, word spread through the prison that the guards and wardens had removed their uniforms and donned civilian clothes. Usually unarmed, they now carried guns as they began to open the cells without explaining anything. The first prisoners to be released were in the women's block, where wives of many of the inmates lived with their children. Then it was the men's turn. Khorasani was waiting for his cell door to be opened when he stood up and began to talk excitedly as if reciting the fragments of a litany to himself. He told anyone who would listen about two recent dreams that had stayed with him. "In one I saw the women and children of this prison being freed," he said. "In the second I was martyred here. Now, praise be to God, I have just seen the first dream come true." In a sort of ecstatic trance, Khorasani started to write on a wall inside his cell, determined to get the dreams down on record lest they be his last will and testament. He had just finished his frantic scribbling when the guards arrived and ushered him toward the exit.

The heat was stifling as the male prisoners shuffled through the yard in their dark green uniforms with orange trim. Khorasani joined them, accompanied by his son, son-in-law and another relative, but he did not stand out except through reputation. Like a lot of men from Kunar, he was tall. His eyes, as someone who knew him fondly recalled, were "the color of dates," his beard the length of a clenched fist. Safely lost among the crowd of prisoners, he was almost away and free when a burst of gunfire split the air, the shots fired straight into the brilliant blue sky. Then another burst rang out, only this time tighter and deliberately directed. A man in front of Khorasani fell first, before he too crumpled, bleeding, to the ground. His son-in-law rushed to help, shouting for some inmates who were trained in first aid. They hauled him up and hurried him back inside to the medical room. Smashing the room's locked cupboards open, they found enough painkillers to keep Khorasani conscious. Bleeding heavily in their arms, he was lucid and calm, and told them he had been shot in the abdomen. By now, though, they had found the entrance wound and knew he was wrong: A single bullet had hit him in the back and become lodged in his stomach. Khorasani told them not to worry, that he felt OK but that if he became a martyr, it would fulfill the second dream he had written about in his cell. Within 20 minutes he was dead. [...]

At 5:50 p.m. on Aug. 26, 2021, an ISKP suicide bomber blew himself up outside Kabul airport, killing at least 170 Afghan civilians who were among the crowds trying to escape the Taliban takeover. Thirteen U.S. service members, including 11 Marines, were also killed -- the last American casualties of the war. Three days later, on Aug. 29, the U.S. launched its final drone strike of the war on what it initially claimed was an ISKP cell planning another suicide attack. It later admitted the strike had killed 10 civilians, including seven children. The day-to-day running of ISKP was now in the hands of a new governor, Shahab al-Muhajir, an experienced militant who previously served the Islamic State central in Iraq and Syria. Other biographical details about him, including exactly where he is from, are contested. The U.S. State Department would soon offer a $10 million reward for information on his whereabouts. Another high-profile ISKP attack occurred on Nov. 2, when militants stormed the same hospital that the group hit in 2017. Those killed included a senior Taliban commander, Mawlawi Hamdullah Mukhlis.

A pattern of escalation was quickly developing. The Taliban were hunting down ISKP members, and ISKP was trying to hit back even harder. Both groups portrayed the bloodletting as another kind of jihad, but their civil war had become a typical struggle for power. The purge that began with the killing of Khorasani continued under the auspices of the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), the intelligence service of the Taliban administration. The GDI is led by a former Guantanamo detainee, Abdul-Haq Wassiq, who is part of the older generation of Taliban who came of age pre-9/11, but it draws much of its power and strategic acumen from Talibs with ties to the Haqqani Network. Drilled for years in urban and rural combat and well accustomed to secrecy and discipline, the Haqqanis proved ready and willing to take the fight to ISKP.

A Taliban commander whose work involves occasional coordination with the GDI gave us an insight into how the intelligence service liked to operate. Stationed in the Bagrami district of eastern Kabul, he had been tasked with setting up security checks in the area soon after the Taliban's victory last summer. It seemed like a routine task until members of the GDI summoned him to a briefing. "One of them gave us full details about the threat posed by Daesh [ISKP], warned us that Daesh fighters were in the Taliban's ranks and told us about possible attacks by them," he recalled. A few days later, the GDI contacted the commander's team leader and passed on information about an ISKP safe house where fighters who had managed to escape from Afghan jails were hiding out. The commander and his team went to the house -- a single-story, mud-brick structure -- and were greeted by a young man who claimed to be living there with his family. The Taliban searched the house and found no firm evidence of ISKP activity. But there were no women at all in the compound and that was unusual for a family home. They ended up arresting four middle-aged men from eastern Afghanistan and three other males the commander described as "very young boys." The prisoners were blindfolded and handed over to the GDI that same day without even being questioned.

In Kabul, Kunar and Nangarhar, innocent members of Afghanistan's Salafi community began to complain of being sucked into the war between the Taliban and ISKP, targeted by the new government for no reason other than their faith. Rumors of summary executions were rife and reported in some detail by Human Rights Watch. In September 2021, a Salafi cleric, Sheikh Abu Obaidullah Mutawakil, was found dead in Kabul after disappearing. The Taliban denied responsibility for his murder and any other disappearances. That December, the Taliban's GDI released a slick propaganda video bragging of its operations "against the Kharijites." A voiceover said ISKP members were "letting the infidels rest but fighting against Muslims." They were deviants who misinterpreted the Quran and sowed "fitna" (sedition), the video said. Fighting and killing them was therefore not only permissible, according to the Hadith, but also encouraged. Any Muslim who did so would find themselves closer to God in the afterlife.

Almost a year has passed since the Taliban retook power. Across the country, ISKP safe houses continue to be raided, and ISKP continues to respond with suicide bombings designed to sow sectarianism, targeting Shiites, Sufis and Sikhs. In northern Afghanistan, ISKP has also fired rockets toward Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The Taliban have struggled with the mundane challenges of government and are divided over key policy issues, yet they still have far more support from the public than ISKP is ever likely to enjoy. Afghanistan is a multiethnic, multicultural country with a long history that cannot be erased by the grandiose aims of the invaders and ideologues who have sought to shape it in their image over recent decades. But it is also a troubled, fractious place full of people still trying to come to terms with the horrors they have lived through. Those cracks offer ISKP a glimmer of hope.

Khorasani never gave up on his goal of establishing a radical Islamic state, and the men who survive him will not either. 

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