N°17 - octobre 2021 The suicide bombing carried out on August 26 at Kabul airport and which left dozens of dead, including thirteen US soldiers and two English, and dozens of wounded has been claimed by the local branch of IS,
the Islamic State in Khorasan, nicknamed EI-K. According to Le Journal du Dimanche, this organization: "... was created shortly after 2014 by former Pakistani Talibans from the TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan), who pledged allegiance to ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The group was later joined by Afghans who had defected being disillusioned with the Taliban. At the beginning of 2015, the Islamic State officially recognized the creation of its province of Khorasan, a region straddling several countries in Central Asia…". This attack, followed in Afghanistan by US strikes against alleged ISIS members, sparked a flood of comments that mostly remained at the stage of describing events and criticizing the conditions of US and NATO disengagement.
But almost nothing has been said about the reason for this situation.
For many observers, ISIS was defeated in Syria and Iraq, and only residual pockets with a low operational level remained. This was not at all the opinion of a report published in May 2016 by the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism which estimated that: " The imminence of the collapse of ISIS is by no means a given". Indeed, the EIK was responsible for deadly attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the period preceding the capture of Kabul by the Taliban. These suicide attacks targeted mosques and hospitals in particular. As with the Taliban and other groups operating in Syria, Iraq, Libya and the Sahel, they have all received at one time or another financial, military, logistical and political support from the imperialist powers according to their own interests in the merciless struggle that these powers waged for the control of territories, natural resources, means of communication and workforce. Thus, the Taliban were heavily armed, including with surface-to-air missiles, to fight the Afghan army supported by the USSR after the democratic revolution of 1978 that the Western powers did everything to bring down. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS and other groups have financed "their war" by exploiting oil, gas, cotton growing... under the cover of US, French, Turkish military forces and many others by behaving like normal capitalists who do business, exploit the workers and subject the peasantry to heavy taxes. News organizations like the Wall Street Journal, The Times and many others have published articles showing the complicity of many countries in funding and assisting terrorist groups. In France, senators have asked questions on this subject and the authorities’ responses have always been evasive. The President of the Russian Federation V. Putin in a recent statement to a G20 in Turkey noted that more than 40 countries have directly or indirectly helped ISIS including countries belonging to the G20.
It is therefore clear that all these organizations which aspire to take power against the peoples have great needs for money that amount to billions of dollars. Their "generous donors" who operate in the shadows are acting in the interests of the great imperialist powers.
Concerning the Kabul attacks, the question of who benefits from the crime is therefore relevant. Who in fact has an interest in the development of a chaotic situation in Afghanistan? Certainly not the large neighboring countries and especially China and Russia, which are very sensitive to the situation in Afghanistan because of the pressure of jihadist ideology in their close and / or border environment. Their approach to relations with the new Taliban power reflects this concern. The position is different for the US and its Western NATO allies. Even after their withdrawal Afghanistan can be a point of tension in the direction of Pakistan, Iran, Russia, India and China in the new deployment of forces especially against the latter. This context of competition between imperialist forces prompted Macron to make his trip to Iraq to co-organize the Baghdad conference.“France is trying to gain a foothold in the Middle East from Iraq after failing to do so in Lebanon,” summed up a political observer for the Iraqi site Al-Alam Al-Jadid. The planned withdrawal of US fighting forces on December 31 opens the possibility for French imperialism to resume a role in a region where its presence and influence are declining. Despite the presence of many heads of state and government from the region: Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran, the record is poor, to say the least and has not, far from it, resolved the internal difficulties in Iraq. Can it be otherwise when what prevails, as evidenced by the decades-long wars in this region, is the conflicting interests of the great imperialist powers. There is only one way out of this situation in Afghanistan, as in the Near and Middle East and as everywhere in the world, that is the united struggle of the peoples for their independence and their sovereignty, it is the converging anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples to put an end to capitalist exploitation and war. This is the meaning of our internationalist struggle.