Washington considers him the mastermind of the August Kabul airport attack that killed 170 people.
After ending the caliph of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, Abu Ibrahim al Hashimi al Quraishi, in northern Syria, the United States extends its hunt against the group’s leaders to Afghanistan and offers a reward of 10 million dollars (8.75 million euros in exchange) for information that helps them find Sanaullah Ghafari. Described since November as a “global terrorist”, Washington considers him the brain of the attack on the Kabul airport in August in which 170 people died, including 13 marines who participated in the evacuation of former international troop collaborators.
This attack was the bloodiest blow suffered by US troops in Afghanistan in recent years and bloodied the chaotic withdrawal of international forces after twenty years of war. The Pentagon investigation concluded that it was the work of a single suicide bomber, who blew himself up at the airport entrance at a time when thousands of desperate Afghans were trying to escape from the Emirate.
Ghafari has been the head of the Afghan arm of the IS since June 2020 and challenges the authority of Kabul. The local IS operates under the name of the Islamic State of Khorasan province, has become a great threat to the internal stability of the Emirate and is especially strong in the province of Nangarhar (in the south of the country and right on the border with Pakistan) . The IS accuses the Taliban of having renounced its principles by accepting a negotiated solution with the United States.
In recent months, the caliph’s followers have carried out sectarian attacks against the Shia minority, such as the one that killed 36 people in October at the Bibi Fatima mosque in Kandahar. This southern city is the main Taliban stronghold in the country, so the clear message they wanted to send is that there is no longer a safe place in the Emirate.
One million Afghans to Iran
The Emirate is six months old and no country officially recognizes it. This is one of the great ambitions of the Taliban and, according to the former head of Defense of the United Kingdom, General David Richards, “The West will end up recognizing the Emirate and therefore it is better to do it as soon as possible.” These words he pronounced in an interview with the BBC network that he obtained a wide echo within Afghanistan.
The fear of Taliban reprisals and the serious economic situation make life very difficult and millions of people are looking for a way out. The newspaper The New York Times raised to more than one million the number of Afghans who have emigrated to Iran in the last four months, a country in which the authorities calculate that 3 million migrants from neighboring Afghanistan live, most of them undocumented.
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