Expert in the war on terror: "Cultivating the ethos of victory over the foreign power will still accompany us" | Israel today

The Afghanistan model will serve as an inspiration to Islamic organizations around the world, which will try to cultivate the ethos of victory over a foreign power.

This is what Yoram Schweizer, head of the Terrorism and War on Low Intensity Research Program at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), tells Israel Today.

"The Taliban is engaged in a smash attack," said Schweizer, a former intelligence official who warns: "We need to pay attention to what is happening in the country towns - we hear that the Taliban is behaving there as it has in the past."

He said, "Right now the Taliban is looking for international legitimacy that it has not had in 20 years. They are courting, talking to it - the United States, Iran, Turkey, Russia, Russia, China, everyone is chasing it because they want to 'calm the beast', and he is taking advantage It".

Yoram Schweitzer, INSS

Schweizer mentions that the Taliban "needs to run a country" and that "only now has it begun to take over some of it and it is expected to have a lot of problems. It is a country with shaky infrastructure, not to mention ruined, no sources of income, - But the DNA, I suppose, remains the same DNA.

But could the U.S. withdrawal serve as a source of inspiration for other organizations?

Schweizer is adamant in his answer and claims so.

"Both the Taliban and al-Qaeda have already begun celebrating the victory and cultivating the ethos of victory over the Christian-Crusader foreign power that will accompany us."

He said, "On the Shiite side, too, we see Nasrallah, who spoke 58 minutes yesterday and devoted more than half the time to exploiting the victory of the Sunni Taliban, hostile to the Shiites, for his own needs. We see the Iraqi militias talking about it, the Houthi militias are encouraging, "Hezbollah, of course. It radiates to anyone who sees itself as an Islamic, Sunni or Shiite organization. It radiates to them a sense that a determined Islamic organization can win both power and superpower, and that of course encourages them towards their systems in the future and also serves as propaganda tools."

But it turns out that the Taliban also has competitors, Schweizer explains.

"The Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISISK) is an organization that has been active in Afghanistan since 2015, and is of course one of the organizations that joined the Islamic State after its declaration in 2014 and is based mainly on people from the Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban."

He said, "They are a bitter and stubborn adversary of the Taliban. They see the Taliban as a ransom organization, an organization that cooperates with Islam's biggest rivals, with the United States, first of all, with the Russians, with the Chinese, with the Turks, with the Iranians, so they blame them. Heresy and so they act against them. Besides the Taliban is their rival in the leadership of the Muslim world. "There is organizational competition here, not just ideological competition, but also competition for control."