Defence`s Feeds

Russian PKP Pecheneg General Purpose Machine Gun

Member States representatives together with cyber research experts from the European Cyber Security Organisation (ECSO), industry, research organisations and academia recently met at an EDA workshop to discuss  ‘Autonomous Cyber Responses’. This research topic refers to the challenges brought about by the automation in cyber defence and includes among others self-configured networks, automated cyber resilience, decision support systems, visual analytics, autonomous mobile cyber defence agents, man-machine modules and machine learning models to address the cyber research challenges Member States’ Armed Forces are confronted with.

The objective of the workshop was to provide EDA’s Cyber Research and Technology Ad Hoc Working Group with examples of European research efforts and solutions, to identify capability gaps that could be covered with this technology and to explore new collaboration initiatives in this challenging field.

Participants acknowledged the urgency of meaningful collaborative research activities at EU level in view of building tomorrow’s defence capabilities, and supported the continuation of similar initiatives. A so-called ‘Interested Community of Experts’ (ICE) set up within the Ad Hoc Working Group will perform an evaluation of the proposals discussed at the workshop. Outline descriptions for future collaborative research projects in this field are expected to be presented to Member States in the upcoming meetings.
 

Background

The potential benefits that European Armed Forces could draw from the use of cyber-resilient autonomous systems have also been recognised by EU Member States. One of the 11 EU Capability Development Priorities approved by Member States in June 2018 is called “Enabling capabilities for cyber responsive operations”.

The Overarching Strategic Research Agenda (OSRA) - which provides a necessary link between R&T efforts and the military tasks and long-term capability needs of the Capability Development Plan (CDP) -  identified a number of Research and Technology areas, the so-called Technology Building Blocks (TBBs), in which a cooperative approach at the European level would bring an added-value to support the development of defence capabilities. The Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) on Cyber Defence developed within the relevant EDA Ad Hoc Working Group in compliance with OSRA requirements provides informed prioritisation on cyber-related technologies necessary for the military while identifying opportunities for dual-use efforts and investments, be it in national, multinational or EU-funded contexts. Autonomous Cyber Response is one of the TBBs developed under the Cyber SRA.

In November 2018, the European Council adopted an updated version of the EU cyber defence policy framework (CDPF) which calls for considering cyber defence issues in the calls of the Preparatory Action on Defence Research and in the topics called for in the European Defence Fund.

American M1296 Dragoon Armored Personnel Carrier

Length of video : 192'
You may manually download this video in WMV (2.2Gb) format

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP

Length of video : 49'
You may manually download this video in WMV (576Mb) format

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP

Length of video : 51'
You may manually download this video in WMV (425Mb) format

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP

Length of video : 51'
You may manually download this video in WMV (567Mb) format

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP

It has been almost four years since the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) captured territory in southern Nangrahar province, where it ruled with extreme brutality, and nearly two years since the United States military and Afghan government forces began concertedly fighting the group there. (The Taleban, too, have fought ISKP sporadically.) The last commander of NATO and US forces, General John Nicholson, vowed then that he intended to defeat ISKP in 2017. It has been driven back, but still holds some territory – and the ‘battle’ goes on, with ISKP mainly now targeting civilians in large-scale, urban, terrorist attacks. In this dispatch, we get an eye-witness account of the fighting in Nangrahar from journalist Andrew Quilty* and juxtapose it with excerpts from an article that appeared in the German media. 

Journalists Andrew Quilty, from Australia, and Wolfgang Bauer, from Germany, have both spent time with pro-government forces fighting ISKP, also known as Daesh, in the Mamand valley of Achin district. Quilty was based in a small US special forces base, while Bauer was with a unit of the Afghan National Border Police (ANBP). Their reportage gives insight into the daily life of soldiers, police and local civilians. They discuss air strikes and cooperation between US and Afghan forces and the difficulty of shifting ISKP from territory and from minds. They share one conclusion, that the fight against ISKP will only succeed if the local population come to trust the government and they question the US special forces alliance with one local strongman in particular, a commander of an Afghan Local Police unit named Belal Pacha, whom locals accused of murder and kidnap. After the end of Quilty and Bauer’s reporting trips, Belal was arrested and jailed. 

Both journalists have anonymised the names of soldiers and officers.

Andrew Quilty: 2018

With their heads bowed, the 12-man Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) team gathered around the visiting army chaplain. It was July 2018 and at 7am, as the sun flooded the Mamand Valley in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangrahar Province, it was already sweltering.  “…As we impose costs on the enemy,” said the chaplain, “[we] strike fear into their hearts, and deal blows of death from which they will not recover.” The team chuckled with approval at the violence evoked by a holy man, then mounted their vehicles and departed. It was one of the final missions of their six-month deployment to rid the valley, less than ten miles from the border with Pakistan, of fighters from the Islamic State’s Afghanistan branch, the ISKP. 

The rise of ISKP

The so-called Islamic State was declared by Iraqi-born Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, in Mosul, Iraq, in June 2014. That same year, militants from Pakistan were welcomed by communities in southern Nangrahar after they had crossed the Durand Line from their redoubts in North Waziristan, one of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). They were fleeing Pakistani military operations. By April 2015, those militants were pledging allegiance to the new, self-declared caliph in Iraq. 

Prior to this, residents of the Mamand Valley had lived for several years under uncontested Taleban rule – described by some as strict but fair, and by others as merely “less cruel than Daesh.” Taleban control across southern Nangrahar at that time was characterised by a lack of cohesion that made for ineffective shadow governance. ISKP seized on the disorder and forced the Taleban out. ISKP was also able to establish itself in southern Nangrahar because of the disarray and rivalry that ran through government, security and societal networks. As then AAN researcher Borhan Osman wrote, in September 2017. “The weakness of these anti-ISKP forces [government, tribal and Taleban] was coupled with the vitality of two pro-ISKP forces: small militant groups lacking fixed loyalties and the Salafi militants fighting in the ranks of the insurgency.” He continued, “As for local communities, in essence… they have been consistently undermined in recent decades and had become too divided to stand as a bulwark against a new and extremely brutal armed group.”

Locals described the new group as initially ruling benevolently, but then descending into “darkness.” At first, ISKP offered generous salaries to new recruits, sometimes exploiting inter-tribal rivalries and local grievances to strengthen their ranks. Some Taleban groups defected and soon foreign fighters from Central Asia and the Caucasus also began to appear, joining the Pakistanis already in the valley. Within months, however, ISKP changed. Their edicts grew harsher even than those the Taleban had inflicted on Afghans during their time in power (1996 to 2001). The atrocities for which ISKP would quickly become famous – including murder, house burning, forced marriage and closing schools – gave most residents little choice but to leave. In 2015, thousands of families fled Achin, the site of ISKP’s first ‘capital’.

Joint US-Afghan operations against ISKP began across southern Nangrahar in early April 2017. After retaking several villages between Achin district centre and the foot of the Spinghar Mountains, the advance of the US special forces and their Afghan allies, foremost among them, the Afghan National Army Special Forces (ANASF), stalled at the mouth of the Mamand Valley, where ISKP fighters fought from a decades-old cave complex. On April 13 2017, President Trump authorised the use of the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat – the so-called Mother Of All Bombs, shortened to ‘MOAB’. It obliterated the ISKP frontline and allowed special forces into the valley (see AAN reporting here). The US established Observation Post (OP) Bravo, just over a kilometre from the site of the MOAB. 

The following month, in May 2017, General John Nicholson, then commander of US forces in Afghanistan, declaredhis intent “to defeat ISIS-K [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in Khorasan, aka ISKP] in 2017.”

Visiting Blackfish

Captain J – mild-mannered with a scruffy, ginger beard – arrived in the Mamand Valley ten months after Nicholson’s declaration, in March 2018. He was on his first combat tour at the age of 31. His Army Green Beret team, from 2nd Battalion, First Special Forces Group, based out of Tacoma, Washington state, was the third team to occupy OP Bravo. They renamed the base ‘Combat Outpost (COP) Blackfish’, after their team logo, which combines the team’s home-base on America’s Pacific Ocean coast and a marine ‘animal of war’, the killer whale, also known in Washington state as ‘blackfish’. 

Blackfish was established in an abandoned Afghan farm compound. A colourfully-painted concrete structure contained the ‘team room’ of the ODA (short for Operational Detachment Alpha, the 12-person team made up of Army Green Berets, and an Airforce Combat Controller and ‘parajumper’). The room was filled with combat equipment and shelves stocked with junk food and energy drinks. There were three small bedrooms and, separated by a flat-pack timber wall, an operations room. This was the only part of the base I was forbidden to enter. A black Islamic State flag was still painted on the wall from the time the militants had occupied it.

Despite being in one of the most hostile districts in the country, at the time, the ODA’s physical defences were meagre. While the corners of Blackfish were manned by conventional soldiers with heavy machine guns, some of the base’s boundaries were secured by nothing more than knee-high concertina-wire. Part of the reason could be heard, almost constantly, in the sky above. SOF’s place, high in the US military hierarchy, means they have almost unparalleled access to air support, including F16 jets, Apache attack helicopters, surveillance and weaponised drones and B1 bombers. On at least one occasion during the two embeds I was invited on, there were no less than five ‘air assets’ circling above Blackfish.

After two previous ODAs and their Afghan National Army Special Forces (ANASF) counterparts had fought their way into Mamand, Captain J’s mission was to continue pushing ISKP back, extending the Afghan government’s reach into Achin’s remote valleys. Two months before the team arrived, a member of the previous ODA, Sergeant 1st Class Mihail Golin had been killed and four others wounded in a firefight. Captain J’s team had six months to extend the ‘government’s reach’ by clearing more territory of ISKP fighters and building checkpoints for the ANSF to man as they progressed. He had never been to Afghanistan before.  Yet, in some ways, his mission was less fraught than it might seem at first sight. ISKP has been roundly rejected by Afghans, so the ODA was joining a popular fight. In Achin, the US military presence appeared even to be tolerated by local Taleban, for one good reason, as Captain J explained, “We think people associate us with the absence of ISIS-K.” Furthermore, almost all residents had long since fled Mamand when Captain J arrived in early 2018, so the risk of incurring civilian casualties in their area of operations – another cause of hostility towards US forces – was almost nil. Tolerance, however, was no guarantee of the soldiers’ safety. As he told me another time, Captain J aimed never to travel by road from COP Blackfish—through Achin, Shinwar and Bati Kot Districts—to the nearest major US base at Jalalabad airfield: an ambush, he believed, would be almost inevitable. 

In terms of its specific mission, continuing to push ISKP back, Captain J’s ODA was wholly successful. But he liked to look at their mission in far broader terms. “It’s not one or two fighters… hiding up in the mountains, it’s the organisation and ideology as a whole,” he told me. “I kind of took it seriously that 12 of us were asked to hold the line between ISIS and the greater population of Afghanistan.” 

Going into the Takhto Valley and discussions about the ANSF

Operational Detachment Alpha members during a mission into the Takhto Valley, to the east of Mamand Valley, Achin, on July 26, 2018. Photo: Author

For Achin and Mamand Valley, the success of the anti-ISKP mission will partly depend – along with seeing functioning governance established – on building up the Afghan National Army Special Forces [ANASF], who have been close allies of the US special forces mission. Mentoring the Afghan special forces has been central to US’ Freedom’s Sentinel counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan, as a whole. Not everyone in the team is convinced of the efficacy of this, however.

The ODA’s Master Sergeant, ‘D’, a four-tour Afghanistan veteran who commands respect beyond his rank, does not hide his frustration when the ‘subtleties’ of the mission appear to him to come before killing. During a mission into the Takhto Valley, east of Mamand, in July 2018, Master Sergeant D voiced his suspicions to the author that the Afghan mine clearance team were, as he put it “slow-rolling” their sweep because they did not want to go into the valley. “It was different back in the day, before the whole ‘Afghan-face’ thing,” he said, referring to the strategy of having the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) ostensibly leading missions. “Now, it’s a constant struggle just to push the Afghans forward.” Captain J was more sanguine. He also thinks there are deep-rooted problems within the ANSF that lead to a lack of motivation in places like Mamand. “Some of the guys [understand] that it [is] their country and they [need] to fight, other guys [don’t] seem to care.” 

The reality may be very different. One de-miner attached to the team, who wore a “FUCK ISIS” patch on his shoulder, told me how hard their job was. “In these narrow valleys and against IS as an enemy, I’m very cautious.” Just a couple of months previously, one of his National Mine Reduction Group (NMRG) team mates had found an IED during a foot patrol with the same ODA. “He was preparing to ‘bip’ it with C4 [an explosive], stepped back a few metres and stepped on another mine. He died instantly. It takes only one mistake to lose the lives of friends.” Moreover, for the de-miners and the Afghan special forces soldiers working alongside the ODA, fighting and de-mining is a daily reality, not a one-off, six-month deployment.

Later, on the mission into Takhto, after hiking six kilometres into the valley, the ODA stopped under a tree. Last time they had come this far they had taken fire and lost an Afghan commando. They rested with two Afghan special forces officers and the mine clearance team as Afghan special forces teams pushed forward, high up on the ridges either side of the valley. There had been the occasional round coming from a ‘hook’ in the valley ahead, so the men were alert, but with two Apache helicopters cruising overhead in slow circuits, I sensed that most of the team considered missions like this one boring, unless they were getting shot at.

Then, without warning, a shot rang out. For seconds, no one could work out where it had come from, but it sounded close. Everyone but an Afghan captain, W, jumped to their feet. He had a trickle of blood running from where a bullet fragment, part of a single round accidentally fired by a de-miner, had ricocheted off a rock and lodged in his temple. The wound was minor, but for Captain W, who had been wounded in combat twice before, it signified more. By the time the ODA’s medic was cleaning the wound back at Blackfish, Captain W had fallen into a gloom emblematic of the low morale that plagues the ANSF. “It’s been eight years. I’m tired,” he said. “I will try to go to Europe.”

Airstrikes

For Captain J, his greatest asset in his Mamand mission is AB, a US air force combat controller attached to the team. AB coordinates all US (the author saw no Afghan air assets and it seems unlikely they would be needed with so much America airpower available), as well as remotely-fired artillery and rockets. At 25, the power he wields with a radio and ATAK – a smartphone-like device used for mapping fighting positions – is in contrast to his surfer image. He typifies the American special forces ‘off-the-leash’ reputation. Unkempt brown hair escaped from the sides of his baseball cap, blending into a beard cultivated with deliberate neglect. He wore cheap knock-off Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and, on-base, ‘combat Crocs’, plastic sandals.

Combat Controllers like AB, and ‘Joint Terminal Air Controllers’ (JTAC) as their army equivalents are known, are responsible for the targeting and requesting of almost every airstrike that the US military conducts in combat. In 2018, in Afghanistan, the US dropped more munitions (7,362 according to US Air Force Central Command) than in any other year since the war began. The report, published on February 8 2019, states that the strikes were “[i]n support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for ISIS-K, al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations…” and that “The missions assisted Afghan National Defense and Security Forces operations in applying military pressure in coordination with the international community’s effort to set conditions for a political solution in Afghanistan.”

However, a day spent at Blackfish shows why such figures might be misleading. AB’s JTAC counterpart, Sergeant 1st Class ‘D’, said he had called in more than 100 airstrikes just four months into his deployment, including several during my second embed with the team. None, however, targeted fighters. Instead, the two used their seemingly limitless firepower to keep ISKP fighters off high ground from where they might mount an attack, for “softening up an area before going out there,” as he put it, and even to allow new pilots target-practice in a combat zone. 

Even for strikes against non-human targets, however, a request had to make its way through several links in the chain of command for approval. More than once during my time with the ODA, team members expressed frustration at the reluctance of their superiors to hit what they believed were legitimate targets. One Green Beret had spent time in the NATO Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan Joint Operations Centre, where ground and air missions are overseen at Bagram Airfield, and, without elaborating, said he could understand why airstrikes took so long to approve. Since he was now “back on a team,” though, he could not hide his frustration with delays and denials. “Now,” he said, “I’m like, ‘come on.’”

One evening, the team’s attached mortar platoon fired over 200 rounds into a fold of the valley from where friendly forces had once been shot at, for ‘terrain denial’. On other occasions 500lb bombs were dropped on what I was told were ISKP ‘defensive fighting positions’. Captain J explained it as defence by offence. “We are not,” he said, “directly dropping bombs on bad guys, [but it’s] an effective tool for increasing force protection at a remote site [like COP Blackfish].” After a suspected ISKP fighting position overlooking Blackfish was destroyed in an F16 strike in April 2018, the team’s communications expert picked up radio chatter from near the site: “They’ve destroyed everything, even my clothes.” 

Airstrikes do not always go to plan. The first three days of my visit to Blackfish in April 2018 were spent mostly indoors, sheltering from rain, with some killing time playing X-Box. AB, who was planning an escape from the military into venture capitalism, studied a book by Warren Buffet. Everyone took their turn manoeuvring ammunition cans beneath leaks in the roof, emptying them as they filled. They shunned the formalities of military hierarchy, calling one another by nicknames rather than by rank.

The low, heavy clouds had mostly cleared by late afternoon on my third day. The air was electric blue, and unseasonably frigid. In the ODA’s operation’s room, the team’s communications expert picked up a radio conversation and triangulated the source to a mountain the team had dubbed ‘Pandora’, about two miles away. Pilots in Apaches soon spotted footprints in the snow, then three figures lying prone beneath the canopy. 

On the roof of Blackfish, AB, the Combat Controller, spoke with the pilots via radio. “I don’t think they’re sun-baking,” he said, scanning the ridge through a spotting scope. In the operations room, Captain J began negotiations with his superiors via radio for authority to strike. The helicopter pilots needed to refuel and turned back for Jalalabad Airfield. AB turned to Captain J, who had climbed the stairs to the roof. “We’ve got a B1, 45 minutes out,” he said, referring to a supersonic, heavy-bombing aircraft. As the colour faded from the landscape, a thick, fuzzy cloud began floating down the mountains toward where the three figures lay. Within 15 minutes it had enveloped the ridge. AB, now alone on the roof, his face illuminated by the screen of his ATAK, radioed to call the B1 crew off. The Apaches returned, but were blind above the cloud. To the night falling around him, and me, AB thought out loud: “All the might of the US military; brought down by a cloud.”

Relations with local powerbrokers

Credit: Roger Helms for AAN.

Equally vital to the ODA’s mission were its relationships with local power-brokers. The secretary of the Achin District Council, Mohammad Ayaz, explained how fraught these can be. “The problems occur,” he told this author, “when [Afghan] Local Police commanders take control of villages to which they don’t belong.” One such commander, Belal Pacha, originally from Kunar, defected from the Taleban to the government in 2015 but, the author was told, retains strong connections with Taleban in the area. His reputation for extortion and murder provoked hundreds of men to protest against his allegedabuses in September 2018, in Momand Dara district. A suicide bomber infiltrated the protesters, killing 70 and wounding as many as 200. Pacha’s reputation was well-known to the ODA, but they relied on his cooperation to secure a nearby area. This pattern, of the US military relying on abusive figures for capturing or holding territory, is a familiar one; from 2001 onwards, it has been a symptom of the short US deployment cycle, where expediency is prioritised over long-term consequences. Captain J told me, “We knew [Pacha] was a bad dude, so we always kept our distance, but he had a lot of contacts in the area and we needed his influence.”

Belal Pacha and two of his brothers were arrested, tried in court in Jalalabad and sentenced to six years in prison soon after the demonstration, but it remains to be seen whether the problems surrounding rogue ALP units and local militias, will be dealt with by the time the Americans hand over to local forces. 

Belal Pacha was the sort of person who helped ferment the discord that enabled ISKP to roll into Achin in the first place, in 2015. That he and others like him have been recent US special forces allies does not bode well. Most people from Achin I spoke to believe that once the Americans leave the Mamand Valley, unless the government has the support of the local population – and that means genuine and widespread support, not just the support of a few strongmen –  it will not be able to hold the area against the Taleban or ISKP for long.

Looking ahead

By July 2018, General Nicholson had wound back his early optimism but vowed to continue the mission until it was complete. “ISIS has proven to have a degree of resilience in southern Nangrahar,” he told me. “They’re tough fighters and they’ll be steadily reduced and we’re going to continue the fight until it’s complete.” 

In Achin the following week, residents were slowly trickling back into the Mamand and Takhto Valleys. “The highlight mission at the end… was seeing [Takhto] one last time,” Captain J told me via email from Blackfish shortly before he finished his deployment in September. “About 40 to 50 civilians were roaming around [in an area they had only recently cleared], collecting wheat up and going through abandoned houses. It is nice to see that after [six] months of work, a small valley like that could be given back to the Afghan population.” 

At the start of their mission, aside from the fighters still lurking among the homes, Mamand Valley appeared lifeless. By its end, from Blackfish at night, five faint lights could be seen twinkling against the dark.

Outside Captain J’s area of operations, however, the fight against ISKP is less convincing. After pushing fighters back in Achin, US special forces teams did the same in neighbouring Kot District. With ISKP on the run, US Army Green Berets handed their base there over to the Afghan National Army and pursued the fighters further west into Deh Bala, where the militants had established a new de-facto capital, five kilometres southwest of the district centre, in Gargari. The Green Berets built another base, Camp Blackbeard (named after a coffee company run by special forces veterans), on a flat, dusty hilltop near the district centre in June 2018. From there, according to a spokesperson for the US military in Afghanistan, US and Afghan special forces killed 167 ISKP fighters and destroyed caves and weapons caches in a five-day-operation to retake Gargari in June 2018. Surviving ISKP fighters then re-grouped in the caves of Tora Bora, in Pachieragam District, where Osama bin Laden once hid out. There, they remain.

As of January 2019, according to the latest quarterly report from the US Special Inspector General for SIGAR Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), published on 30 January 2019, Achin is now ‘under government influence’. (2) Here, it remains ISKP, not the Taleban, which is still the second most important player (after the government). Interviewees for a forthcoming AAN dispatch on Achin (part of a series on service deliveries in insurgency-influenced areas – the introduction can be read here), also confirmed that ISKP is still not yet gone from the district. It continues to operate in mountainous areas of the Spinghhar range, including at least some parts of the Mamand, Pekha and Bandar valleys. Interviewees told AAN ISKP is still running its own prison and court systems in parts of the Mamand valley

We asked Resolute Support for an update on where they thought the fight with ISKP now was. In a statement, they said, “In terms of Mohmand, Takhto and Baghdara Valley, we’re not providing detailed operational updates to the media.” The statement said that Resolute Support is continuously build[ing] understanding” of the threat posed by ISKP embodied and “move to and operate from locations where we can achieve effects to disrupt and destroy their capabilities… using targeted operations and enabling capable local security partners.” 

ISKP has proved a difficult enemy to dislodge, mainly for reasons of geography, as Borhan Osman, now the International Crisis Group’s head researcher for Afghanistan, said to this author, “With a vast recruitment pool on both sides of the border, it’s hard to defeat [them] militarily without addressing the reasons for the emergence of ISKP in the first place… You can’t just kill them to death.”

ISKP’s territorial control in eastern Afghanistan, has shrunk markedly since the Afghan/US campaign against it began in 2017. Yet, the group’s ability to hit its enemies hard has not abated. The vast majority of those enemies are now Afghan civilians and the toll ISKP has wreaked on them has been devastating. When anti-ISKP operations began in April 2017, the militants began attacking ‘soft’ targets; schools and health clinics in Nangrahar, and Afghan Shia Muslims, mainly ethnic Hazaras, in Kabul and elsewhere (see some of AAN reporting here, here and here). In less than two years, ISKP has claimed responsibility for more than 50 separate bombings or complex attacks that have claimed nearly 900, mainly civilian, lives.

***

Wolfgang Bauer, November 2017 and February 2018

Wolfgang Bauer, a German journalist with the Hamburg weekly, Die Zeit, provides another perspective on the US and Afghan special forces’ fight against ISKP in Achin district. He was embedded with a 14-strong Afghan National Border Police (ANBP) unit posted on a hill overlooking the village of Abdulkhel. All the policemen were from outside Nangrahar. Bauer also had a view of the US special forces’ base Andrew Quilty visited, which is located on a mountain ridge. Bauer’s original German text can be read here. What follows is a summary made by AAN senior analyst, Thomas Ruttig. 

Abdulkhel village, which was under Taleban control between 2012 and 2015, then ISKP after they pushed the Taleban out. Pro-government forces (unspecified in original text) took back half of the village between 2015 and February 2018. Abdulkhel is divided by a river that is dry for part of the year and today, Abdulkhel’s river divides the government and the ISKP-controlled sectors of the village. Since pro-government forces took half of Abdulkhel, ISKP fighters have twice overran the government post, each time killing almost all the policemen present, 22 in all. Their severed heads were displayed for weeks dangling from a mobile phone antenna on a neighbouring hill.

Yet it was Taleban brutalities, a local malek (village chief) told Bauer, had paved the way for the ISKP’s 2015 takeover. Quickly-rotating Taleban commanders had villagers killed who worked for the government, kidnapped businessmen and killed those who did not pay ransom. They killed mullahs who criticised their behaviour. As a result, the villagers were initially happy when the ISKP fighters arrived. But then, they discovered, ISKP did not “respect local traditions.” They banned women from shopping in the bazaar, told men to grow their hair long and suppressed poppy growing. Both Taleban and ISKP exploited family feuds to get local support.

The Taleban, when in control, had also initially stopped the construction of a madrasa that had been privately initiated by a local religious scholar and financed with World Bank money through the government (scheme not specified in original text). The provincial head of education department, however, sent a delegation to meet Taleban leaders in Pakistan who finally agreed to it. The madrasa began teaching, not only religious, but also ‘modern’ subjects. When ISKP took over, it closed the madrasa again. As the madrasa is on the government-controlled side of the river, it had re-opened, and even children from the ISKP side attend. However, the madrasa’s head teacher told Bauer, they have adapted IS ways of live and thinking, and speak even against the mullahs on the government side.

The Afghan Local Police unit Bauer visited was tasked with intercepting ISKP fighters driven out of the nearby Mamand valley. It was a 70-strong unit and lead by the notorious commander, Belal Pacha. It cooperated with, and was supported by the newly-deployed US special forces. Belal, Bauer mentions, had been part of a ‘Taleban splinter group’ linked with the Pakistani Taleban umbrella, the TTP (which also includes Afghans), until 2015 when he changed sides and was now paid by the Americans. 

The US forces, Bauer wrote, “monitor phone traffic in the day and hunt the ISKP at night.” He also described their plentiful air support. On a daily basis, B-52s, other jets and helicopters circled over the village. He described how one afternoon, a B-52 fired on the houses on the other side of the river. “Children run around in panic between the mud houses. Then, dust starts to cover the village. Once more it fires higher into the hillside, where the pastures are where the children graze their village’s goats.”

“We do not consider them civilians,” the Afghan border police commander told Bauer about those families.

Bauer is told the story of two boys killed in a similar incident the day after he left, in November 2017. He contacted the US military, he said, but did not receive any reply by the time of publication.

Belal’s fighters, who had pushed out ISKP from one half of the village, were ‘taxing’ local traffic and businesses at their checkpost at the road leading into Abdulkhel, according to the ABP unit commander and a local firewood trader. Altogether, the trader said, there are six checkposts on the way to the next bigger bazaar where he was being forced to pay ‘tax’. Some of the checkpoints were controlled by the Afghan National Police (in the district centre) and others by other ALP commanders, among them some loyal to Nangrahar strongman and MP, Haji Zaher. Belal sometimes accused traders of working for ISKP and confiscated all their wood. He would then take it to the bazaar on a lorry he had also stolen. Belal, the trader said, “is the worst” and that, because of him, he now hated “the government and the IS.”

Belal was also playing the role of the local judge, Bauer observed, as there was no other judicial authority. He publicly took money from the parties. The local maleks and mullahs accused him of killing villagers without trial, of kidnapping businessmen and maintaining a private jail and of torture. They complained to the provincial police chief and asked for Belal’s arrest – by then, without result. They also accused provincial officials of being paid by Belal. Belal was finally arrested in October and, with two brothers, jailed.

Belal was also said to have shot people when he was high on drugs. He kept a disabled boy, whom Bauer thought was then 12 years old as a ‘dancing boy’ (ie an underage youth kept for sex). The ABP commander told Bauer, Belal was the “scourge of this valley, worse than the Taleban and IS put together.”

Bauer returned to Abdulkhel once more in February 2018, after a cold, but almost snowless winter. 60 people, he was told, had died from the cold, whooping cough and from ‘poverty’. People did not dare to go to the mountains where they used to collect firewood, anymore as these areas were controlled by ISKP. The local clinic had no medication anymore. And as the local opium factories had been closed, people were deprived of cash income. Hundreds, Bauer is told, had been living from the drug economy.

Bauer concluded, that the Americans have established the countrywide system of the [Afghan] Local Police. The US military believes that they cannot stop the IS and Taleban’s advance without men like Belal. In Abdulkhel they have created a monster, though, he said, and: For most people in the village, this monster is the government in Kabul, that put Belal in place.

Edited by Kate Clark

* Andrew Quilty is an Australian freelance photojournalist. He has been based in Kabul since 2013. His work in Afghanistan has garnered several accolades including the Polk Award for Photojournalism, a Pictures of the Year International Award and the Gold Walkley, the highest prize in Australian journalism. His website is: www.andrewquilty.com.

Material in this dispatch originally appeared in a New York Times article: Andrew Quilty “The Last Americans Fighting in Afghanistan”, 5 October 2018.

(1) After an initial Taleban attempt to regain territory in Mamand in July 2015 which called on local men to join in the fight, ISKP retook the territory and detained 80 men and executed 11, in brutal fashion. Residents fled and ISKP confiscated their lands and property, settling new fighters, arriving from Orakzai and Bajaur agencies, along with their families, there. In subsequent fighting, both Taleban and ISKP targeted civilians they believed were linked to the other party, as they sought to gain the upper hand; that included burning homes, public executions and forced exile. ISKP also closed schools and government-run clinics and banned opium cultivation. For detail on all this, how ISKP managed to establish a base in Nangrahar and the repercussions for local civilians, see:

Borhan Osman, “The Islamic State in ‘Khorasan’: How it began and where it stands now in Nangarhar”, AAN, 27 July 2016. 

David Mansfield, “The Devil is in the Details: Nangarhar’s continued decline into insurgency, violence and widespread drug production”, AREU, February 2016. 

See UNAMA’s “Afghanistan Annual Report 2015 Protection Of Civilians In Armed Conflict” for detail on civilian displacement and ISKP closures of schools and threats against health facilities and workers.

(2) SIGAR categorizes each area into five categories: under insurgent control, under insurgent influence, neutral/at risk, under government influence and under government control. The SIGAR map of control is based on NATO RS assessments, which consider such issues as who governs, who gets taxes, who controls infrastructure and who controls ‘messaging’ in a district (for further explanation, see page 5 of this report).

ABSTRACT
The European Union faces an increasingly challenging security environment, with a climate of international instability and a level of tension not seen since the end of the Cold War. Repeated chemical attacks by both State and non-state actors in the context of the Syrian conflict, the Novichok attack in Salisbury and the disruption of two ricine terror plots in Germany and in France in 2018 came all as stark reminders that the threat remains real and that Member States could be affected. In this context, the European Union (EU) continues to strengthen its capacities in the field of CBRN preparedness and response. The use of EU mechanisms and Member States' military assets is one of the possibilities for strengthening prevention capacities that must be explored more thoroughly.
Further information
EU preparedness against CBRN weapons
Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP

SEDE organized a public hearing on 'Russian influence in South-East Europe' on Monday 3r December, from 17.00 to 18.30, with external experts
Location : Altiero Spinelli Room 1G-2
Further information
Draft programme
Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP

Red Flag 19-1 has just come to an end and, based on official reports, once again the F-35 held its own against the Aggressors. You may probably remember what happened in 2017, when the first [...]

Polish Fulcrums are having a rough time lately. One of the Polish MiG-29 Fulcrums made an emergency landing at the 22nd AB in Malbork around noon on Feb. 15, 2019, Onet.pl reports. The incident has [...]

An amazing shot of an amazing aircraft. Three B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and more than 200 Airmen belonging to the 509th Bomb Wing, Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, deployed to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam (JBPH-H), Hawaii, [...]

Russian ZiL-4327 General Utility Truck

Blue Angel Incident Follows Suspension of USAF F-16 Demo Pilot and Tragic Golden Knights Accident. The U.S. Navy has confirmed that a member of the Blue Angels flight demonstration team has been suspended pending the [...]

Late Billionaire Paul Allen’s Expedition Ship Makes Remarkable Discovery. In a sensational story that seems torn from a Clive Cussler fiction novel, the private research vessel funded by late billionaire Paul Allen has located the [...]

With Sebghatullah Mujaddedi, another of the historic leaders of the mujahedin parties, which fought the Soviet occupation (1979-89), has died. Mujaddedi belonged to a famous family of Sufi leaders and for this spiritual position, he was widely known simply as with the honorific ‘Hazrat Saheb’ in Afghanistan. Having been severely ill for some time, Mujaddedi died in Kabul on 11 February 2019. It was four days before the 30th anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal, an event which paved the way for his return home – but only another three years later. AAN’s co-director and senior analyst Thomas Ruttig looks back at his life (with input from AAN’s team in Kabul).

His greatest hour

28 April 1992 was possibly Hazrat Saheb (1) Sebghatullah Mujaddedi’s day of fame. On that day, he entered the Afghan capital Kabul with his 20-strong cabinet in a large convoy of vehicles. They had driven from Peshawar and he was taking over as Afghanistan’s interim head of state. Mujaddedi himself, as The New York Times reported, rode in an “an ivory white Mercedes” and was greeted “by restrained public jubilation [and] celebratory gunfire from the guerrillas controlling the capital.”

Describing the handover ceremony, the Times went on to report that Mujaddedi disembarked from his German-made cabriolet 

… at a large house that had once belonged to the Committee for Solidarity and Friendship under the old Communist Government. Around his car, hundreds of battle-dressed fighters struggled to control rapidly mushrooming crowds of Kabul residents screaming “Allahu Akbar!” – “God is Great!”

Several members of the old government escorted the President into the house, including the Foreign Minister, Abdul Wakil, and the commanding general of the Kabul garrison, Nabi Az[e]mi. Mr. Mojadedi walked briskly into the house followed by a black-bearded military aide, his uniform lathered in gold braid and campaign ribbons. Outside the gates, guerrillas shattered the silence firing thousands of rounds into the sky from their assault rifles. [… M]embers of the old Government, including the former Prime Minister, the leaders of the old Senate and House of Representatives, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, handed power to Mr. Mojadedi [sic] in a formal ceremony at the Foreign Ministry. (…)

The Times reported him as “[b]athed in the glare of television lights and surrounded by guerrilla bodyguards and crowds of aides who had worked with him in his exile in Pakistan” as he addressed the small diplomatic corps, telling them that he and ‘his brothers’  had “received power from the Kabul regime and removed the Kabul regime from power and established an Islamic Government.” He went on: “One of the main things we can do is try to bring peace in Kabul and Afghanistan so that the people no longer have war.”

For Mujaddedi, scion of a powerful religious family, who as we will see suffered terribly in the regime which took power in the 1978 coup, this was his greatest hour. Peace, however, did not come then, and ever after to this very day.

Sufi and religious reformer family background 

Sebghatullah Mujaddedi came from a famous family of Naqshbandi Sufi leaders. They trace their origins back to Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, known as mujadded-e alf-e thani (Renewer of the Second Millenium), a religious reformer (2) born in Kabul province in 1564 who established a religious centre, Fathgarh, in Sirhind, in today’s Indian part of Punjab. Further back, they trace their roots to Omar Ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph of Islam.

The family came back to Afghanistan in the early nineteenth century. They established a madrasa and khanaqa (Sufi lodge) in Shor Bazar, a part of Kabul’s old city on the southern bank of Kabul River (‘shor’ meaning crowded or noisy), which was largely destroyed during the war. Therefore, their respective leaders were each known as the Hazrat of Shor Bazar. The family later branched out, most importantly to Herat city and to Ghazni province – where it established the Nur al-Madares madrassa in Andar district, still one of the most prestigious in the country. 

During the reign of Amanullah (1919-29), the family took an openly political role. After initially supporting Amanullah’s anti-British and pro-independence course, with one of its members, Muhammad Ibrahim, serving as justice minister between 1919 and 1924, the family went into opposition when the amir-turned-king started his modernisation programme. It was during this time of upheaval that Sebghatullah Mujaddedi was born, in Kabul (in 1926, according to the official biography published by his party although most other sources in recent obituaries – for example here – have given 1925). 

Three years later, in 1928, during Amanullah’s second Loya Jirga the Mujaddedis collected 400 signatures that called the King’s reforms ‘anti-Islamic’, an act which led to a tribal uprising andrevolts in the Tajik northand, finally, to Amanullah’s fall from power a year later, in 1929.

After that, the family’s influence in the court soared further; Fazl Omar Mujaddedi – known as Nur ul-Mashayekh (The Light of the Sheikhs) and Sebghatullah Mujaddedi’s grandfather – and Fazl Ahmad Mujaddedi – son-in-law of the Nur ul-Mashayekh – were both appointed justice ministers (1929-32 and 1932-36, respectively). The clergy, including the Mujaddedis, also regained their influence over the education system; it had been curbed by Amanullah. This meant the young Mujaddedi grew up as a member of Kabul’s elite. He graduated from Habibia High School in Kabul, and also gaining private religious education and then travelled to Egypt to study sharia law from al-Azhar in Cairo, graduating in 1952 and returning home that year. 

From religious to political leader

Sebghatullah Mujaddedi entered the political stage in Afghanistan in his early thirties. A short period of more political openness under Prime Minister Shah Mahmud had just ended. According to his official biography, he refused to take a government position but started to teach at Kabul University’s sharia faculty, the Institutes of Teacher Training and Arabic Studies, and at various Kabul high schools. As the same biography underlined, his position was that

… [f]rom the start of the second half of the twentieth century, the political, religious and ideological leadership of the Afghan society demanded a rather new approach [namely] against [the] infiltration of the atheistic communism [which] was strongly geared against Islam and the Muslim lands, following the Second World War.

In 1959, Mujaddedi was imprisoned for five years by the government of Prime Minister Muhammad Daud (under King Muhammad Zaher Shah), according to most sources (including Ludwig Adamec’s famous Who’s Who in Afghanistan) for campaigning against a planned visit of Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchov in 1959 to Kabul or even for allegedly plotting to assassinate him. Some detail in this narrative, however, does not make sense. Khrushchov, accompanying Soviet head of state Nikolai Bulganin, had actually visited Kabul four years earlier, in December 1955. (3) The only high-ranking Soviet visitor in this period was Soviet then head of state Kliment Voroshilov, the previous year, on 1 October 1958. In May 1959, Daud did visit Moscow where he signed an agreement on the expansion of Soviet-Afghan economic and technical cooperation. As a result of this agreement, more Soviet technicians came to Afghanistan, helping in the construction of the Kushka-Herat-Kandahar highway and the reconstruction of the Kabul airport. More significantly, earlier that year, Daud had ordered the ban of the face veil for women. All this enraged Afghanistan’s religious establishment and a wave of protests followed. It surely was Mujaddedi’s involvement in these protests – which, in Kabul, were brutally beaten back by a police force trained and equipped by West Germany, using, among other means, electrically-charged batons – that landed Mujaddedi in jail. There, he said, he was mistreated, resulting in chronic illness.

Mujaddedi was released in 1964, after King Zaher – so far more or less a token ruler while real power rested with the dominant Musaheban family (4) – to which Mahmud and Daud belonged. The king initiated a new, more liberal constitution that gave more political freedoms and led to the establishment of semi-official political groups and to the freeing of political prisoners. Mujaddedi left the country for a year. He went to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Upon his return to Afghanistan, he found himself banned from teaching for five years. Members of the illegal Islamist movement of the Jawanan-e Musalman (Muslim Youth), established in 1969, inspired by and possibly a branch of the Egypt-centred Muslim Brotherhood and including students such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, offered him the leadership of the organisation. (5) But he declined, and instead founded his own one, Jamiat-e Ulema-ye Muhammadi (Association of the Muhammedan Clergy) in 1972. Its dual religious-political character made it difficult for the government to suppress. Mujaddedi was also the first Afghan to translate Egyptian Islamist ideologue Sayyed Qutb’s book Milestones into Dari which became a major source of insipation for the Afghan Islamist movement.

In July 1973, Daud ousted his cousin from power, toppling the monarchy in a coup d’état in a coalition with leftist military officers linked to the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and bringing about a republican order. Mujaddedi happened to be at a conference in Saudi Arabia. From there, he did not go home but went to Denmark, where he founded and headed a large Islamic centre and mosque in Copenhagen, with branches including in Oslo, Norway. He stayed in Denmark from 1974 to 1978. 

In that year, the PDPA took over in another coup d’état and Mujaddedi fled to Pakistan, where he founded the Jabha-ye Melli bara-ye Nejat-e Afghanistan (National Front for Afghanistan’s Liberation, usually called the ANLF in English). (6). It was originally intended to be umbrella organisation for the then five main Sunni factions – or ‘tanzims’ in Dari and Pashto – under Mujaddedi’s lead, but – as on many later occasions – disunity prevailed and the ANLF became just a sixth faction (with Sayyaf’s Ettehad-e Islami created in 1982 making a seventh).

In January 1979, the Khalqi regime rounded up almost a hundred of Mujaddedi’s male relations who had remained in Afghanistan and likely had them executed – what happened to them exactly has never come to light. Among the disappeared was Sebghatullah’s uncle, Muhammad Ibrahim Mujaddedi, then the head of the family and known as Zia ul-Mashayekh. (His father, Muhammad Massum Mujaddedi, also known as Rasul Agha Jan and later as Mian Jan, had died earlier, in 1971 in Lahore.) In March that year, Sebghatullah Mujaddedi called for a jihad against the Kabul regime. 

It was during this period that the Ghazni branch of the Mujaddedi family, which retained control over Nur ul-Madares, parted ways with Sebghatullah. They mainly joined the Mansur faction of Harakat-e Inqelab-e Islami which later, under the name of Khuddam ul-Forqan, remained an organisationally separate subgroup of the Taleban (see this AAN paper for more background). (Member of the current Taleban negotiating delegation, Suhail Shahin, belonged to this group, as well as several so-called reconciled Taleban residing in Kabul. Its leader Muhammad Amin Mujaddedi lives in Pakistan.

Mujaddedi’s was the smallest of the mujahedin factions. Jebha-ye Melli, which drew on the Naqshbandi Sufi order for recruits, advocated what Adamec called “the establishment of a traditional Islamic state with a parliamentary democracy.” It was seen at the time as ideologically ‘moderate’, compared to the Islamist factions of Jamiat, Ettehad and both Hezb-e Islamis, of Hekmatyar and of Yunes Khales. Among its more famous members (or at least future famous members) was a young Hamed Karzai. He ran ‘foreign affairs’ for the faction and often acted as English translator for various mujahedin leaders during the jihad (see this AAN dispatch).

[Amended 13 Feb, 10pm Kabul time: It is also remarkable that the Jabha’s fighters seemed to have behaved relatively positively during the jihad. Although the fact that it was the smallest group among the big ones might have contributed to this, in any case, there are no reports in files we know that accused them of any atrocities.]

It was only after the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1988 which led to the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan between May 1988 and February 1989, that the mujahedin tanzims started to establish a joint government-in-exile. In the first such administration, established on 9 February 1988 with Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai (from Sayyaf’s Ettehad) as Prime Minister, the ANLF held two posts (as did each tanzim): Mujaddedi’s son Zabihullah (7) was deputy prime minister and the party also held the ministry of planning. In the next one, formed on 28 February 1989 in Rawalpindi after the Soviet withdrawal had been finalised – the so-called Afghan Islamic Interim Government (AIG), Mujaddedi was elected its head by 450 delegates from most mujahedin parties. At least ten tanzim leaders, including all the well-known ones, stood, and Mujaddedi just came ahead of Sayyaf by one vote. (Sayyaf then became prime minister.) 

Despite all elaborate procedures, also this government-in-exile came to nothing, as the Najibullah government unexpectedly survived the Soviet withdrawal – but not the cut of financial and military aid by Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1992. This triggered a bloodless internal coup of mid-April 1992 on 15 April against  President Dr Najibullah. His First Vice President, Abdul Rahim Hatef, a Kandahari non-party member, took over as head of state. But the real power – if one could still called it that – were with dissidents from his own party, led by Foreign Minister Abdul Wakil, and the commander of the Kabul garrison, General Muhammad Nabi Azemi. The PDPA/Watan dissidents rushed to embrace the mujahedin, and many of the military leaders were absorbed by their factions. The civilians mostly ended up in exile.

The mujahedin take power

Four days before Mujaddedi’s convoy triumphantly entered Kabul, on 24 April 1992, the leaders of the mujahedin parties, while still in Pakistan, had agreed upon a new plan for the transfer of power from the Kabul government. This was the so-called Peshawar Accord. They envisioned three stages. In a first one, a 50-member Islamic Jihad Council (IJC) for a two-month interim period. Mujaddedi was the leader of the smallest of the seven main Sunni mujahedin factions known as the Peshawar Seven (after the place where they had their headquarters). He was elected chairman of the ICJ by the other members. 

The council consisted of representatives of the Peshawar Seven. However, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hezb-e Islami did not agree to the accord, and his people – including Abdul Sabur Farid who had been nominated prime minister – refused to take their seats in the council. The main Shia factions, Hezb-e Wahdat-e Islami and Harakat-e Islami were never invited to join the council in the first place.

The plan was for the Mujaddedi-headed Islamic Jihad Council two-month interim administration would be followed by a four-months’ interim government as stage two. It was to be headed by Professor Borhanuddin Rabbani of Jamiat-e Islami, and, four months after that, by an interim government chosen by a shura. In stage three, the interim government was to rule for eighteen more months after which elections would be held. The country was also officially renamed the Islamic State of Afghanistan (Daulat-e Islami-ye Afghanistan) or the ISA.

One day after Mujaddedi’s arrival in Kabul, he declared an amnesty for all members of the former Afghan government, with the exception of Najibullah. About him, Mujaddedi announced, “the Afghan people” would take a decision. Najibullah, meanwhile, was sheltering in a United Nations compound in Kabul after a UN-sponsored handover of power earlier in April 1992 had failed. He unsuccessfully tried to leave the country, but was held up by fighters of his erstwhile ally General Abdul Rashid Dostum who had taken over Kabul airport and switched sides. Grateful for this ‘service’, Mujaddedi confirmed the general’s rank awarded to Dostum by the Najib government and even compared him to Khaled ben Waled, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad who had initially severely opposed the prophet, a kind of Saul-turned-Paul story of early Islam (see a chronology of events here). 

Mujaddedi also fended off a Pakistani demand to sign a bilateral Strategic Partnership Agreement with Islamabad, according to a former mujahedin leader present during those events (earlier AAN reporting here). The agreement had been presented to Mujaddedi by then Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif, in order to secure a special relationship after the takeover of the mujahedin. However, as it would have been rather unpopular among Afghans, Mujaddedi evaded giving a clear answer as a refusal would have burned bridges with the neighbouring country. (Such an agreement still does not exist.)

Between war and peace

While Mujaddedi later repeatedly claimed, including in a meeting with then European Union Special Representative Envoy Francesc Vendrell (the author was present and recalls this was in 2003) in his residence in Kabul’s Kargha suburb, that he had presided over the only peaceful period in the recent history of Afghanistan, the reality was much more blurred. Already, after the anti-Najibullah coup, mujahedin forces, mainly of Hezb-e Islami, Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf’s Ettehad-e Islami and Jamiat-e Islami, under the command of Ahmad Shah Massud, had advanced to positions just outside the capital and were fighting each other in Kabul’s streets. Indeed, rockets were fired into Kabul on the very day of Mujaddedi’s inauguration. Facing this danger, and a still largely-functioning Kabul army – the loyalty of which was not assured – Mujaddedi had to be heavily persuaded to move into Kabul by co-mujahedin and their Pakistani supporters, as several Afghan interlocutors who were part of those events have told the author.

Fighting continued throughout Mujaddedi’s short tenure. In late May 1992, a peace agreement between Jamiat’s Massud and Hezb-e Islami’s Hekmatyar which named the latter as prime minister (Massud was already the defence minister) collapsed in less than a week, according to a report by Human Rights Watch that reconstructed the events of those days. On 29 May, Mujaddedi’s plane was hit as he was coming back from talks in Islamabad. Hekmatyar’s forces were blamed. Still, at this point, Human Rights Watch said, there was only “minimal damage to the city” from the fighting.

Mujaddedi was also not fully content with only serving for two months. Contemporary sources say he threatened not to hand over power to Rabbani, arguing in a famous sentence that two months was not enough time to demonstrate any success:“Pe dwo miashto ki cherga chechan ne shi istelai” or A hen cannot produce chicks in two months. (Hens’ eggs actually hatch after 21 days, but poultry keeping was not Hazrat Saheb’s strong point). Finally, he was persuaded to do so. (Also his party, Jabha-ye Melli did not have the firepower to match that of Jamiat.) On 28 June 1992, Rabbani took over the presidency of the interim government. 

Down the slope

The Islamic State of Afghanistan government disintegrated in the inter-factional wars between 1992 and 1996. Mujaddedi found himself on the side of the so-called Coordination Council (Shura-ye Hamahangi). He was the nominal head of this coalition, but its strongest forces were Hekmatyar’s Hezb, Dostum’s Jombesh and Abdul Ali Mazari’s Shia Hezb-e Wahdat (which had meanwhile been allowed to joint the government). Over the European new year of 1994, the Shura-ye Hamahangi tried and failed to oust the Islamic State of Afghanistan’s Rabbani/Massud leadership that had increasingly monopolised power and pushed out other factions one by one. The shura’s attempted coup included one of the worst barrages of rocket attacks of the war. 

When the Taleban took over Kabul in 1996, Mujaddedi initially welcomed their ascent, apparently hoping – as many other Afghan leaders – that he would be able to influence them. Also Adamec wrote that the ANLF recognised the Taleban government. However, Mujaddedi’s official biography comments that the Taleban “failed to benefit from the wise advices [sic] of Sheikh Al-Mojaddedi towards moderation.“ He later went into strict opposition to them, joining the National United Front for the Salvation on Afghanistan (more commonly know as the ‘Northern Alliance’). For his criticism of the Islamabad-backed Taleban, Mujaddedi was forced out of Pakistan in 1999 and went to Denmark another time.

Mujadeddi also joined political forces with the late Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani’s National Islamic Front (Mahaz) of Afghanistan, in a new coalition, Jabha-ye Melli Islami-ye Afghanistan (as Mahaz, Jabha also means ‘front’, so this also translates into English as the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan). It morphed into the Association for Peace and National Unity of Afghanistan, in January 1999, and further into the looser Cyprus Group, which sent a delegation to the Afghanistan Conference in Bonn in 2001, led by Hekmatyar’s son-in-law Humayun Jarir.

A late political life in post-Taleban Afghanistan

With Hamed Karzai, a member of Mujaddedi’s ANLF became the new leader of post-Taleban Afghanistan in 2001. Mujaddedi expected that he would be consulted and play a central role in the new government, or, as his official biography put it, he would keep “a close eye on the President and his government’s performance and handling of affairs.” Although Karzai regularly consulted a council of the former top mujahedin leaders, Mujaddedi’s expectations obviously not fully materialised. In meetings with foreign dignities during this time, he would often not mention Karzai by name, but refer to him as “my assistant.” Later, publicly, he patronised him by calling him “my son and my student” and described how Karzai kissed his hand and greatly respected him (see earlier AAN reporting).

Relations improved after Karzai made Mujaddedi chair of the Constitutional Loya Jirga in late 2003. There, Mujaddedi vehemently rejected a petition signed by the required number of delegates to be voted upon that suggested naming the country the Republic of Afghanistan, again, without the adjective ‘Islamic’. He twice called the signatories ‘unbelievers’ and ‘apostates’ who, after the jirga, “will be punished.” Later on during the sessions, when female delegate Malalai Joya spoke of the “presence of those felons who brought our country to this state” in the jirga, without naming names but with a message clear to all Afghans, friends and foes, Mujaddedi reacted strongly again, calling her a ‘communist’ and an ‘infidel’ from the plenum. Although Mojaddedi apologised for his language in the final session, there is a death sentence for apostasy.

At the end of the sessions which took 22 days and spilled over into the new year 2004, Mujaddedi urged the 102 female and 400 male delegates to rise from their chairs “for two minutes” as a sign that they agreed to the new constitution late on 4 January 2004. All stood up without protest, although some had initially hesitated. The delegates received a medal as a memento of the occasion. Mujaddedi wept out of emotion. But there was no formal vote about the constitution (more AAN background here).

After the first post-Taleban parliamentary election in 2005, Karzai appointed Hazrat Saheb as a member of its upper house, the Meshrano Jirga or Senate. (The president had the right to appoint 34 of its 102 members.) Mujaddedi ran for its chair in December that year, but failed to win a 50 per cent majority of votes in the first round against the other two candidates, the former ‘Northern Alliance’ (Jamiat) intelligence chief and first post-Taleban director of NDS, Engineer Muhammad Aref, and Bakhtar Aminzai, a businessman from Paktia less than half his age. This led to a fit of anger, during which Mujaddedi referred to his merits in liberating Kabul and stormed out of the room. It took the efforts of a number of his co-senators to persuade him to return, after which Aminzai (who would have pitted against Mujaddedi in the second round of the vote) withdrew his candidacy with a rhetoric bow to the ‘jihadi leader’ Mujaddedi and the latter was proclaimed chairman without any further procedure.

Mujadeddi was reappointed as a member of the Senate in 2011. He did nor run for its chair, and soon fell out with Karzai, for whom he had done estekhara (a religious practice to find answers to pressing issues) (8) before his first election. In April 2012, he resigned from all his official positions, including in the Senate and his membership in the High Peace Council (HPC). The original statement by Mujaddedi’s office, reported by media in Kabul, cited the failure of the president “to consider the sincere views and demands of renowned jihadi leaders and public figures on issues of national importance” as his reason for quitting. It hinted at Mujaddedi’s disappointment that he had been passed over as head of the HPC when its chairman, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was assassinated in September 2011. (Rabbani’s son, Salahuddin, was appointed his successor.) Hazrat Saheb had been one of the two original leading contenders for its chair when the HPC was established in September 2010 (AAN analysis here), although Karzai had, finally, opted for Rabbani. Mujaddedi had previously headed the failing predecessor to the High Peace Council, the Independent National Commission for Peace and Reconciliation with its Program-e Tahkim-e Solh (PTS, Programme for Strengthening Peace). It was supposed to reintegrate insurgent fighters, but all but officially closed down on the insistence of donor governments for being “morally and financially bankrupt,” as an internal UN document put it (see AAN analysis here).

Another clash with Karzai happened during the November 2013 Consultative Loya Jirga convened to advise Karzai on whether or not to sign a bilateral security agreement, officially called the Security and Defence Agreement, with the United States. Mujaddedi chaired both the preparatory committee and the jirga itself. The majority of delegates, including himself, spoke in favour of the agreement. However, Karzai rejected the advice and Mujaddedi told him he would “resign and leave the country.” He used the religiously charged word “hejrat” for this threat, in an attempt to drive his point home, but in vain. Karzai never signed the agreement. Mujaddedi did leave, going to Denmark once more, but returned for the 2014 elections when he supported Ashraf Ghani in the second round of the 2014 presidential election. According to ToloNews, he said: “Days and nights I was thinking who to support, at the end and after istekharas (…) and the information I receive from people I reached the decision to support Ashraf Ghani.”

[Next two paragraphs amended 13 Feb, 10.45pm Kabul time] The tradition of trying to get Hazrat Saheb’s support has continued; the 2019 presidential candidate and former director of the National Security Council, Hanif Atmar, said on 18 January – a few weeks before Mujadeddi’s death – in his speech at an official ceremony in Kabul Star Hotel before going to the IEC for registration:

Last night, I went for dast-busi (kissing the hand) of honourable Hazrat Mujaddedi. He was [lying] in sickbed. He accepted to receive me in that condition and said, I performed prayers [blessings] to you for the sake of Afghanistan. I ask the Almighty God for his full health and recovery.

Despite suffering worsening health, Mujaddedi remained politically active, although he was sidelined more and more. In August 2015, he set up a High Council of Jihadi and National Parties (CJNP), bringing together jihadi figures that had supported Ashraf Ghani during his election campaign but had then become frustrated by the president (AAN analysis here). It was founded to reassert their political influence on the new government, with Mujadeddi claiming the lead again as the elder statesman, with a stated mission to “fight corruption, bring peace and to support the good work of the government and oppose any wrongdoings of the government.” Members included Muhammad Karim Khalili, former second vice-president and leader of the largely Hazara Hezb-e Wahdat-e Islami, Ahmad Zia Massud, the president’s special representative for good governance and reform, and two other presidential advisors, Qutbuddin Helal from Hezb-e Islami and Sayyed Hussain Anwari, head of the Shia mujahedin tanzim, Hezb-e Harakat-e Islami (until his death on 5 July 2016). However, this lose group did not take off, and key members went different ways.

… and then there were three

As a Sufi leader, as the leader of one of the more moderate mujahedin tanzims (but not a royalist as often purported) and as a mediator, Hazrat Saheb Sebghatullah Mujaddedi was well respected by large parts of the Afghan population. He has become the sixth of the eight historical top mujahedin leaders who are now dead, following Abdul Ali Mazari (the only Shia among them, murdered by the Taleban on 12 March 1995); Mawlawi Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi of Harakat-e Enqelab-e Islami (died 21 April 2002); Mawlawi Yunes Khales, leader of one of two historical Hezb-e Islami (died 19 July 2006); Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani of Jamiat-e Islami who was assassinated by a Taleban ‘envoy’ 20 September 2011; and Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani of Mahaz-e Melli-ye Islami who died on 21 January 2017 (media report here). This only leaves Abdul Rabb Rassul Sayaf of Ettehad-e Islami, Muhammad Karim Khalili, Mazari’s successor as leader of Hezb-e Wahdat, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of Hezb-e Islami alive, the latter having returned from the insurgency to political life in Kabul in May 2017 (AAN reporting here) after a controversial peace deal a year earlier. (9)

The government has declared 13 February 2019 a public day of morning, and announced that government institutions will remain closed. On that day, a public fateha (mourning ceremony), will be held in Kabul’s Ghazi (or Olympic) stadium. Mujaddedi will then be buried at the famous Asheqan o Arefan cemetery where a last resting place for members of his family already exists.

Other literature used for this dispatch and not directly quoted in the text:

• Abuzar Purzada Ghaznawi, Tarikh-e siasi-ye Afghanistan-e mu’aser 5: Ahzab-e jihadi-ye Afghanistan [Political History of Modern Afghanistan 5: Jihadi political parties], Kabul: Hamid Resalat, 1395 [2016]
• Sayyed Muhammad Baqer Mosbahzada, Aghaz wa farjam-e jombeshha-ye siasi dar Afghanistan, 1284-1381 [The beginning and evolution of political movements in Afghanistan, 1905-2002], Kabul: Shah Books, 1384 [2005].

Edited by Kate Clark

(1) Hazrat is an honorific Arabic title used in Islamic societies to honour a person which literally denotes and translates to “presence, appearance” in a religious sense, with denotations of the charismatic. Saheb is the equivalent of “Sir.”

(2) This is based on the belief that after every one thousand years, God choses someone for the renovation of religion.

(3) This visit started a period of closer Afghan-Soviet cooperation, after the US had shunned Afghanistan (including its requests for arms deliveries), following Kabul’s insistence on its internationally non-aligned position and refusal to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact (later CENTO). (More background in this AAN paper.)

(4) The Musaheban brothers or ‘companions’ of late Amir Habibullah (1901–19) were rivals of Habibullah’s son and successor, Amanullah. After the assassination King Muhammad Nader (ruled 1929–33), who was one of them, they were the effective rulers of Afghanistan, while Zaher Shah was still very young. (He once related in the presence of the author that he was made one year older when ascending to the throne, to reach the required age of 18 years.) The other Musaheban were: Muhammad Hashem (Prime Minister 1929–46), Shah Mahmud (Prime Minister 1946–53), Marshal Shah Wali (commander of the Central Army Corps in Kabul) and Muhammad Aziz, Daud’s father who had been assassinated in 1933 by a supporter of Amanullah while serving as an Ambassador in Berlin.

(5) The first Islamist circles started to gather around Ghulam Muhammad Niazi, the dean of the Sharia Faculty at Kabul University, in 1957, according to Afghan historian Muhammad Hassan Kakar.In 1969, the student wing of this movement, led by Abdulrahim Niazi evolved into the Jawanan-e Musalman (Muslim Youth) which, in turn, morphed into Jamiat-e Islami around 1973. 

(6) Mujaddedi’s party, interestingly, was the only one of the eight largest tanzimsthat did not have the word ‘Islamic’ in its name, reflecting the idea widespread in Afghanistan that this does not need even to be mentioned in a country where more than 99 per cent of the population is Muslim.

(7) Later he also served as his father’s ‘chief executive’ at the Program-e Tahkim-e Solh.

(8) [Amended 13 Feb, 10pm Kabul time: In the Hanafi’s school of thought and according to the Prophet’s instruction, in this case one does his/her prayers (نماز – namaz) and (دعا – du’a) then goes straight to bed and the advice whether to do something or not appears in the dream.]

(9) [Amended 13 Feb, 10pm Kabul time: While technically, Khalili is not one of the historical leaders (the founders and number ones in their particular tanzims; that was Mazari), he stands long enough at the top of Hezb-e Wahdat that we count him here. There is also Sheikh Asef Mohseni, the founder of Harakat-e Islami, who is still alive, but his tanzim was (it has split meanwhile), so to say, the largest among the many small mujahedin factions (others would be the Shia groups that, in 1989, joined Hezb-e Wahdat, or Muhammad Mohaqqeq’s Hezb-e Wahdat-e Mardom, but that split from the original Wahdat later; or the Mansur faction of Harakat-e Enqelab-e Islami), so we did not count him here.]

Capt. Zoe Kotnik, the Air Force’s First Female Single-ship Tactical Demonstration Pilot, Relieved for “Loss of Confidence”. USAF Capt. Zoe Kotnik has been relieved of her command position as the Air Force’s F-16 Demonstration Team [...]

A “Legacy Hornet” with the NAWDC (Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center) sports a paint job clearly inspired by the Russian Su-30SM multirole Flanker-derivative. As already explained, although the U.S. Navy has retired its last operational [...]

Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP