Since the September 11 terror attacks that caused the United States to occupy Afghanistan for two decades, the threat of terrorism is once again growing in the Middle Eastern country.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee released a 353-page report this week that detailed some of the terror activity that has ballooned in Afghanistan spurred on by the U.S. withdrawal in 2021.
“From the inception of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan, a primary goal has been to incapacitate terrorist groups seeking haven in the region, particularly with the Taliban’s assent,” the report states, adding that the “administration failed to plan for alternative methods of countering terrorism following the withdrawal. Terrorism, as a result, has flourished under the Biden-Harris administration.”
The threat of terrorism has increased from one group in particular. ISIS-K is an offshoot of ISIS in Afghanistan and is responsible for the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghans in a suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport during the U.S. withdrawal. The United Nations now assesses that ISIS-K, especially after a terror attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow in March, now represents the “greatest external terrorist threat to” Europe.
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ISIS-K and other terror organizations have been allowed to regroup and grow under Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, according to the report. The Haqqani Network, a sophisticated terror operation under the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, the terror group behind the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., have also reasserted themselves in Afghanistan
“Meanwhile, without a presence in Afghanistan, the United States is ill-positioned to counter the rise in terrorism in Afghanistan,” the report says. It goes on to call Al Qaeda “one of, if not the largest threat from Afghanistan following the Biden-Harris administration’s withdrawal.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeatedly warned about the increasing threat environment for years, especially after the Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7 of last year.
“Even before October 7, I would have told this Committee that we were at a heightened threat level from a terrorism perspective,” Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee in April. “In the sense that, it’s the first time I’ve seen in a long, long time, the threats from homegrown violent extremists — that is jihadist-inspired extremists — domestic violent extremists, foreign terrorist organizations, and state-sponsored terrorist organizations all being elevated at one time.”
The terror threats rising in the Middle East have been made more pressing by the chaos on the southern border, Wray has said.
