Analysis | As US withdraws, Afghanistan’s lure returns for Southeast Asian extremists – women and children included

It took 25-year-old Wardini and her two young children almost two months to travel with smugglers by road from Jordan, through Iran, to western Afghanistan. By the time they were arrested by Afghan border guards, she had burned their Indonesian passports. They were not going home, she told an Indonesian consular officer who visited her in a Kabul prison in 2019. With the end of days near, she and her children, both then under three, would live in “Khorasan, the blessed land”, she said. 

Khorasan, a historical region that once spanned much of central Asia, including Afghanistan, and parts of Iran and Pakistan, is where some Muslims believe an army will rise to inflict a major defeat against their enemies; it is, according to a hadith, or religious saying, often cited by jihadis, where Armageddon begins. Osama bin Laden issued al-Qaeda’s first declaration of war against the United States in 1996 with the dateline, “Hindu Kush, Khorasan, Afghanistan”. The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis) announced its expansion to “Khorasan” in 2015, and as it started losing territory in the Levant, began relocating some of its key operatives to Afghanistan to kick-start its ambition to take over all of Central and South Asia.

Over the last three years, a question that has greatly exercised national security specialists is this: where will Isis establish its next global headquarters following its ousting from Syria and Iraq? My colleague Colin P. Clarke, commenting on this question in February 2018, wrote: “Historically, terrorist and insurgent groups tend to establish roots in weak states plagued by persistent civil conflict, sectarian tension and government inability to maintain a monopoly on the use of force.”

Along with Libya and several regions in Africa, Afghanistan is on most lists for the next Isis safe haven. Has the central Asian country moved higher up the list now that the US has announced a complete troop pull-out by September 11 this year, the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the US that were planned by al-Qaeda on Afghan soil?

IS-Khorasan is, however, only one of the several armed non-state actors in Afghanistan. When it ruled over much of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban welcomed armed groups comprising what the United Nations now calls foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). These groups never left Afghanistan through two decades of fighting.