In the high-stakes world of counterterrorism, sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Other times, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
The rapidly growing threat posed by the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, the jihadist terror group’s Afghanistan affiliate better known as ISIS-K, has linked the U.S. together with some of its most bitter enemies, including Russia, Iran, and even Afghanistan‘s ruling Taliban regime. Each of those actors has been targeted by either direct, deadly attacks from ISIS-K, or in Moscow’s case, seems to have narrowly avoided disaster on multiple occasions.
Even Turkey, a traditional U.S. ally that has repeatedly been a thorn in the side of America and NATO in recent years, has also experienced bloodshed on its soil as a result of ISIS-K attacks.
Analysts say that ISIS-K’s capabilities are growing quickly, as is its desire to strike U.S. interests abroad. Army Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate panel earlier this month that the Islamic State’s affiliate groups, including ISIS-K, “retain the capability and the will” to attack and could strike “in as little as six months and with little to no warning.”
Despite the target they provide for Iran and allied militia groups in the region, the Pentagon says it is keeping some 3,000-plus U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria precisely to prevent Islamic State from rebuilding its once-formidable “caliphate.”
Gen. Kurilla said such ISIS attacks would likely be against U.S. and allied interests in Europe, rather than the U.S. itself, which is a target the group likely can’t reach — though that could change without direct action against ISIS-K soon, specialists warn.
Faced with an enemy on the rise, the U.S. has found itself in some ways allied with its key adversaries in a broad, intercontinental effort to contain ISIS-K. But some analysts warn that the hostility and distrust between the major power involved is so intense that the opportunities for direct counterterrorism cooperation are limited at best.
What’s more, the U.S. needs to carefully weigh how much intelligence about ISIS-K to share with adversaries such as Iran or Russia, which could seize on such information to advance their own interests in Europe or the Middle East.
“This is one of those situations where the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend,” said Nathan Sales, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator under former President Trump.
“What I would expect to see is inch-deep cooperation, such as military-to-military deconfliction and duty-to-warn information sharing,” said Mr. Sales, now a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. “But I wouldn’t expect cooperation to go much deeper than that, because our adversaries will often use counterterrorism as a pretext for doing things to advance their own interests and to undermine America’s interests.”
Warning an enemy
Indeed, part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for dispatching troops to Syria and elsewhere was to help the regime of its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in the fight against ISIS. Iran, too, has claimed to be fighting against terrorist groups in the Middle East even as the U.S. charges that its own military explicitly backs militant groups such as Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria, Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Gaza-based Hamas and others.
Mr. Sales said those dynamics must be weighed carefully when deciding what information to share.
That’s not to say there are no instances of cooperation, mostly based on the U.S. government’s “duty-to-warn” information-sharing policy. That policy was employed in January, when U.S. officials reportedly tried to warn Tehran of a looming ISIS-K attack.
The attack materialized on Jan. 3, with nearly 100 people killed during suicide bombings in the Iranian city of Kerman, during a ceremony marking the death of the late Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Although Iranian hard-liners first suspected Israel or perhaps the U.S. of the strike, ISIS-K spokesmen soon claimed credit for the attack.
Although U.S.-Iranian relations have been in a deep freeze, the Biden administration tried to give Iran a heads-up.
“The U.S. government followed a longstanding ‘duty to warn’ policy that has been implemented across administrations to warn governments against potential lethal threats,” an unnamed U.S. official told Reuters after those attacks. “We provide these warnings in part because we do not want to see innocent lives lost in terror attacks.”
In 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly thanked then-President Donald Trump “for information transmitted through the special services that helped prevent the completion of terrorist acts in Russia.” The American warning is believed to have helped the Russians foil a potential terrorist attack in Saint Petersburg.
More recently, both the U.S. and Russia took action to head off potential ISIS-K attacks on Russian soil. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow on March 8 warned of an “imminent” extremist attack in Russia and said that American citizens that they may be in danger.
That warning came just one day after Russian authorities said they killed Islamic State militants who were plotting a terrorist attack on a Moscow synagogue.
‘ISIS-K is in growth mode’
The group’s would-be attack in Russia may have been foiled, but in other instances, ISIS-K has proven just how deadly it can be. The group’s Jan. 3 attack in Iran was one of its most high-profile strikes since August 2021, when an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. Marines and some 170 Afghan civilians at the Kabul airport during America’s tumultuous military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Since then, the group has carried out numerous, often horrific terrorist attacks across Afghanistan and elsewhere across the tumultuous region.
ISIS-K’s targeting of numerous governments across the Middle East, Central Asia and even into Europe is part of what looks to be a very carefully planned and deliberate strategy.
“Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, … ISIS-K, has sought to internationalize its operational and recruitment campaign,” Clemson University scholar Amira Jadoon and United States Military Academy at West Point professor Nakissa Jahanbani wrote in a recent analysis. “Utillizing a sweeping propaganda campaign to appeal to audiences across South and Central Asia, the group has tried to position itself as the dominant regional challenger to what it perceives to be repressive regimes.”
ISIS also claimed responsibility for a January shooting at a church in Turkey that killed at least one person, an assault that analysts say is evidence of how the group is expanding its reach outside of Afghanistan amid the Taliban‘s attempt to crack down on the group.
America’s ability to directly strike ISIS-K has been greatly limited since the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. Efforts to secure counter-terrorism cooperation from central Asian nations and other potential partners in the region have seen mixed results, at best. But analysts say the Biden administration needs to address the problem now before it grows even larger.
“The threat from ISIS-K is significant and it’s growing. And the United States is not really in a great position to apply pressure to the group. We don’t have the capabilities we had in Afghanistan before the withdrawal,” Mr. Sales said.
“We’re starting to see ISIS-K plot and conduct attacks that people have been warning about for a long time. It’s only a matter of time before they get lucky and are able to carry out another attack in the region, or even in Europe,” he said. “The time to take action is now, while their capabilities are still nascent and before they develop into something more ominous. ISIS-K is in growth mode right now and we’re not doing enough about it.”
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.