Last week, a major Taliban attack in the Afghan city of Kandahar, starting last Tuesday evening and lasting through most of the day on Wednesday, killed as many as 50 people (not counting the nine Taliban who were killed). The Taliban assault initially targeted a Kandahar military airfield where around 2000 American military personnel are stationed (they didn’t get into the base and no US personnel were among the casualties), but the gunmen then targeted a civilian shopping area near the base and reportedly began killing people “indiscriminately.” A Taliban spokesman said that the attack was meant to show that US troops, who are now staying in Afghanistan for the indefinite future, are not safe there.
On Saturday, another force of Taliban fighters set off a car bomb outside the Spanish Embassy in Kabul and then engaged in a running gun battle inside the embassy with Spanish, American, and Afghan security forces that lasted “several hours.” Two Spanish security officers are believed to have been killed in the bombing, and another 4-5 people were reportedly killed in the subsequent gun battle.
This is kind of a strange time for the Taliban, as Slate’s Josh Keating notes very well:
ESL issues aside, the Taliban has been regaining territory at an alarming rate. According to Long War Journal, it now controls 37 districts in Afghanistan, 15 of them seized in just the last two months, including one yesterday.
But this expansion is coming at a time when the group is both fractured and threatened from the outside. In the past few weeks, there have been deadly internal clashes between Taliban factions fighting over the appointment of new leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor. Mansoor officially took over in June after the death of longtime supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was announced, though it’s likely he had been running the show for a while as Omar had either been already dead or incapacitated for years. That transition disrupted ongoing peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which Mansoor had supported, supposedly with Omar’s blessing, but are opposed by many members of the group. There were rumors Mansoor had been killed in an internal gunfight earlier this month, but the Afghan government believes that’s not the case.
As Keating notes, the beneficiary of this Taliban infighting has been ISIS, which is trying to move into the Afghan jihad scene and has been able to siphon fighters away from the Taliban because the group has lost cohesion. As long as this competition between Taliban 1, Taliban 2, and ISIS is ongoing, as long as each of those groups feels it needs to push the envelope to one-up its competitors, it’s likely that there will be more attacks like the ones on the Kandahar airbase and the Spanish Embassy.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 