The Special Units Leading the Taliban's Fight against the Islamic State
The Taliban movement became critically divided as news spread in 2015 that its leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had died from natural causes in 2013. The death had been covered up by his confidants for more than two years until it was revealed by Afghan intelligence. Among those trying to exploit the situation were strategists of the Islamic State group. They hoped to exploit emerging rifts among the Taliban to expand the Islamic State’s reach in the region.
The Islamic State’s branch in Afghanistan, Pakistan and adjacent areas, named by the group as Khorasan, had emerged out of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), whose members had arrived in Nangarhar province from Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions after fleeing a 2010 Pakistan military operation against them. The Afghan Taliban had tried and failed to bring them under their own command. Some of the TTP fighters, such as the Lashkar-e-Islam leader Mangal Bagh, were instead courted by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan intelligence service, which hoped to use them against Pakistan as retaliation for the Pakistani government’s support for the Afghan Taliban. TTP fighters often clashed with the Afghan Taliban.
The situation for the TTP had changed in November 2013 with the death of its leader Hakimullah Mehsud in a U.S. drone strike. The already fissiparous TTP had fragmented further, and when Mullah Fazlullah replaced Hakimullah as the leader of the TTP, many refused to submit to his command. Meanwhile, TTP numbers in Afghanistan were swelled by the arrival of more militants from Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions following new Pakistani military operations in 2014 and 2015.
On Jan. 26, 2015, the Islamic State’s now-dead spokesperson Abu Muhammad al-Adnani released an audio statement accepting pledges of allegiance from defecting Taliban fighters and announced the expansion of the “caliphate” with the creation of a “Khorasan Province” (widely abbreviated as ISKP). Hafiz Saeed Khan, the former TTP leader from Pakistan’s Orakzai region, was appointed as its local governor and Mullah Khadem as his deputy. The new Islamic State franchise was also joined by local and foreign fighters.
In early 2015, tensions in Achin, a district in the south of Nangarhar province, escalated after the Afghan Taliban mobilized to prevent a spate of kidnappings by Islamic State militants in the neighboring district of Bati Kot. This resulted in violent clashes between the two groups, and some of the Taliban in Achin switched sides in the wake of the conflict. Achin eventually fell to the Islamic State later that year.
In response to this unprecedented challenge to its insurgent dominance, the Afghan Taliban stepped up plans to form a special forces unit tasked with maintaining unity of command. This “Red Unit” would stand apart because of its advanced military training and discipline, a field commander of the Red Unit told Newlines. It quickly emerged as a vital piece in the Taliban’s fight to deal with threats from the Islamic State offshoot in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2015, photos circulated on social media of the Red Unit undergoing rigorous military training, dressed in combat gear similar to Western special forces. As the Taliban began to fracture after the news of Mullah Omar’s death, the unit proved even more critical in that secondary conflict the Taliban engaged in.
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-special-units-leading-the-talibans-fight-against-the-islamic-state/
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