The Daesh groups is such a serious threat for Afghanistan that the National Directorate Security (NDS) has set Special Forces to fight against them.

Spokesman of NDS, Abdul Hasib Sidiqi emphasized that Daesh’s power is severely weakened in the country.

Beside the Taliban group, now Daesh has made the war more complex in Afghanistan.

NDS has claimed that Daesh’s activities in several parts of the country is dangerous for Afghanistan.

he Islamic State (IS) group, also known by an Arabic acronym, Daesh, has gained a toehold in Afghanistan, although with the loss in a drone strike of its most prominent and recently appointed commander, Rauf Khadem, that toehold is looking precarious.

There has been much reporting about IS in Afghanistan, but not all reporting is equal. Some events cited as evidence of Daesh have nothing to do with the group, while others, cited by media and government officials as indications of IS presence, are part of a different development: the passage of foreign militants from Pakistan’s tribal areas into Afghanistan in the wake of the military operation by the Pakistani army in North Waziristan that started last summer.

However, we have also seen the first known and notable insurgent commanders ‘coming out’ as Daesh. The Islamic State (IS) also officially announced on 26 January its expansion into ‘Khorasan’, an old name for the region that is largely in what is now Afghanistan (the name allows IS to refer to Afghanistan and Pakistan without having to name them – un-Islamically, in its eyes – as nation states.

This is the first time the group has officially spread outside the Arab world. Afghan and regional leaders, as well as common Afghans, had already been concerned about the group’s potential threat. Indeed fear of Daesh has evoked a rare consensus between the Afghan government and the Taleban, both of whom have accused foreign intelligence agencies of being behind the threat.

According to the ministry of interior findings, Daesh fighters are activating in three provinces of Afghanistan and so far 35 members of the group have been killed in Nangahar.

“The presence of Daesh has been confirmed in Helmand, Farah and Nangahar so far and Afghan troops have taken serious measures regarding the issue,” Sidiq Sidiqi, spokesman of interior ministry said.

However, the ministry of defense claims that fighting against the extremist groups such as Daesh is not only the responsibility of Afghanistan but also the responsibility of the region and the world.

The presence of Daesh and new threats coming from countries which “are using terror as a policy tool” were mentioned in the same breath by the head of the Afghan intelligence service, Rahmatullah Nabil. In a speech to the Wolesi Jirga on 22 January 2015, he said: “New threats are emerging in the region, where some countries are using terror as a policy tool to reach their targets.” He said that if Afghanistan’s neighbours continued to destabilise Afghanistan, they would also burn in the fires they were stoking.

It is not only Afghan officials who have spread the fear of IS in Afghanistan based on sightings of foreign fighters. Senior Russian officials have also been warning of IS militants ‘flocking’ to northern Afghanistan with an eye to mounting attacks against the Central Asian republics.

President Vladimir Putin’s special representative for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said that thousands of fighters, mostly of Central Asian origin, have taken up positions and set up training camps near the borders of Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. According to Kabulov, these militants belong to the Islamic State; moreover, he claims IS has also deployed around a hundred fighters from its main base in Iraq and Syria to Afghanistan to supplement local fighters.

Kabulov’s comments came just after a warningby his boss Putin that: “The current situation arouses concern. Militants from the Islamic State terrorist group make a stab at including some provinces of Afghanistan into the so-called Islamic Caliphate. … Terrorist and extremist groups are trying to extend their activities in Central Asia.”

There has however been no on-the-ground reporting of foreign fighters being re-deployed from Iraq and Syria to northern Afghanistan. Instead, Kabulov’s concern probably stems from the same reports as Afghan officials have received about the movement of foreign fighters towards northern Afghanistan.

The Islamic State’s creeping presence in Afghanistan will not bode well for the Taliban dominance in the jihadi activities in Afghanistan as well.

Perhaps this is a main reason behind Taliban’s recent inclinations towards resuming peace negotiations with the government they fought in last fourteen years.

The Taliban and the Islamic State have openly opposed each other. As the IS is in finding foothold in Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership sees themselves direly vulnerable.

The Taliban would quickly lose ground in some areas to the IS if the IS manages to recruit Taliban members and fighters to its ranks.

All these have come as an alarm for the Taliban leadership which has openly expressed opposition to the Islamic State. Therefore, the group seems to be consolidating its rank and leadership against the threat of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.

Reported by Fawad Naseri