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All the monsters of Afghanistan: those who came and those who will come

2021-09-04T09:23:23.661Z


An unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe threatens the Asian country, fueling fanaticism of all kinds and the usual grotesque and false Islamism


09/03/2021 6:00 AM

  • Clarín.com

  • World

Updated 09/04/2021 6:13 AM

In October 2014, current US President Joe Biden, then vice president of the Barack Obama administration, created a

peculiar stir

at a conference on terrorism he gave at Harvard University.   

There he suggested, without ambiguity, that Saudi Arabia and Turkey, among other powers in the region, bent on overthrowing the Syrian autocracy in any way, had

financed and backed the bloody ISIS gang.

That group, which experienced in 2011, eight years after his birth, a sudden development with enormous economic potential and ammunition, appeared as a parallel army, fighting a specific side in the war between Iran not so cold and crown Saudi for control of the region.

The inclusion by Biden of Turkey in that message alluded to support for that organization in exchange for the

fierce combat

that ISIS carried out in Syria against the Kurdish militias, a stateless people that is divided between the Turkish territory, the Syrian and the north. from Iraq.

Joe Biden, on August 31.

The explanations of a difficult moment.

Photo Xinhua

The comments of the then vice president, an expert in international affairs for his work in the specialized commission of the Senate, aroused a

significant repudiation among those affected.

Turkey even threatened to break off relations with the US.

But the newspaper

Zaman

(el Tiempo), an award-winning

newspaper

and one of the most widely circulated in that country, had already published photographs of Turkish military vehicles on the other side of the border that would indicate the existence of such support for the insurgents.

The newspaper was later intervened,

in 2016, by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, so that it could not continue the investigation.

The anecdote about Biden's speech is interesting because it is this political leader, now in charge of his country's government, who will go down in history for

having contributed to reviving that monster

with the disorderly military departure from Afghanistan, the return of the Taliban. and the irruption of this new extremist group, ISIS-K.

The letter K

The letter is for Khorasan, that huge region of Central Asia that includes Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of Iran among other countries in which these individuals are excited to

form a caliphate in the future

.

Similar to the one that, in an ephemeral way, the other ISIS led in Iraq and Syria.

There are, of course, important differences between this present and that recent past.

The original terrorist organization was born in Iraq in 2003 as part of the Al Qaeda gang.

It was then called the Organization of the Oneness of God and Jihad.

It was led by a Jordanian, Abu Musa al Zarqawi, who was

killed in a confrontation with US troops.

His relief was

the Iraqi cleric Ibrahim al Samarrai,

a former convict, soccer lover and baptized Maradona in the Iraqi-American prison of Camp Buka.

Ibrahim would later take the name of the father-in-law and first successor of the Prophet Muhammad, no less, Abu Bakr to which Al Baghdadi added for Baghdad, where he was born.

His criminal group was one of the many acronyms that were formed between opportunists, fundamentalists, nationalists and a long caravan of delusions in that hell that produced

the inexplicable US invasion of that country.

They were noted, however, for

their method of cutting off the heads of their occasional enemies

.

This gruesome procedure generated a growing reproach from his allies and finally, Baghdadi broke with Al Qaeda and renamed the Organization as the Islamic State of Iraq or the Levant, ISIL and finally ISIS, after the initial of Syria.

The group developed in the Iraqi crisis but its largest leap came after the Syrian chapter of the

Arab Spring

in March 2011, where it emerged with

remarkable financial potential and military resources.

Beyond its ultra-Islamic and world-conquering rhetoric, ISIS, which worked with squads of well-paid mercenaries, focused on attacking Iranian targets and fighting the regime in Damascus, demonizing, incidentally, the word democracy that that civil revolution in North Africa had strengthened and given meaning.


If Biden's comments in the Harvard speech were grounded, sponsorship of ISIS began to wane within a few years with

Russia's entry into the Syrian war in 2015.

This novelty radically modified the picture of the conflict, in support of the dictatorship and consolidating the influence of Iran.

Partners

Turkey, which had insistently demanded the fall of the autocrat of Damascus Bashar al Assad, ended up mutating its strategy and

associated itself with Tehran and Moscow

and, with those endorsements and the wink of then US President Donald Trump, occupied a large strip of the border territory to freely lashing out at the Kurds, the great allies of the US. Soon ISIS began to dismantle itself.

The original ISIS leader, who was eliminated by the United States in 2019. Photo DPA

There were serious attempts at revenge, but the outcome was inevitable.

It lost its main capital in Mosul, Iraq, and the second city of its "caliphate" in Raqqa, in Syria.

Everything fell apart.

A tip from the Kurdish intelligence system finally indicated the Baghdadi hideout and the US removed it in 2019.

There were, of course, lost patrols of fanatical groups bearing the same initials, among them the one that now rages in Afghanistan which, until very recently, was not considered relevant by specialists.

That changed with the tumultuous exit of the US that resulted in a

victory for the fanatical Taliban nationalist militia

, a fact that stimulated the self-confidence of these fundamentalist formations.

It is important to note that

Islam has nothing to do with these subjects

.

This is beyond the fact that one and the other identify with that faith, even exaggerating rigorous versions of the religion such as the Sunni Wahhabism that has dominated Saudi Arabia for three centuries.

In many cases religion armed in these violent ways is a product of opportunism or despair.

AFP photo

The Koran prohibits self-immolation, no matter the circumstance, there is no room for suicide terrorism, it also qualifies the murder of innocents as a sin, vindicates Christians, the place of women and salutes Jesus.

What's coming

It says nothing about suffocating burkas and other repressions.

This book, which was put together as best he could by the third caliph of the so-called "well-guided" or Salafists, who succeeded the prophet,

is written in the 6th century

in an Arabic difficult to understand, which allows both confusion and some traps of interpretation.

There is another issue that should be noted.

Fundamentalisms, of any color, are born and

grow vigorously where social contradictions run deep.

The realization of a canceled future, the impossibility of breaking through, which contaminates a great majority of the youth of those borders, gives nourishment to the magical way out and fanaticism.

Afghanistan today has much more than before all the conditions for this dangerous obscurantist process to consolidate.

In this sense it is central, amid the noise of the US military departure, the complaint made by the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, regarding

the "humanitarian catastrophe"

that threatens the Asian country, located already last year among the poorest countries on the planet, according to the UN Human Development Program.

Guterres warned that one in three Afghans

“does not know where they will get their next meal.

More than half of the boys under 5 years of age will suffer from malnutrition in the next year ”.

But already the

Reliefweb

, the largest humanitarian website in the world, had warned before the current crisis that just over three million Afghan children suffered from malnutrition, or directly from chronic malnutrition.

The world's reaction to that hell doesn't seem very efficient.

The UN has demanded humanitarian aid for US $ 1.3 billion, but it has only raised about 40%.

In addition to the very serious drought that affects the country and that

destroyed 50% of the crops,

winter will soon arrive which, due to the snow, closes roads complicating the movement of food and escalating the catastrophe to which Guterres alludes.

It is a sharp picture: 70% of Afghans earn their bread in a field with enormous limitations, only slightly more than 20% are suitable for agriculture.

To make matters worse, as this column has already pointed out,

the financial situation continues to get complicated

.

There is unemployment close to 50%.

Money is scarce.

The Taliban, who are too big for this crisis, have imposed a trap that limits the withdrawal of funds due to shortages.

The World Bank and the IMF canceled their operations with the troubled Asian country,

suspending lines of credit that had been agreed last year

.

The lack of such support, the ensuing crisis and the breakdown of international assistance, which until recently accounted for more than 40% of national income, is driving a rise in the prices of basic necessities.

Food especially. 

The list of horrors is endless.

Afghanistan is a summary of bad news in a country where two-thirds of the population are young.

No one should be surprised that

terrorist fanaticism finds a new sanctuary in this miserable wasteland.

Whose fault will it be?


Ⓒ Copyright Clarín 2021


Look also

The weapons left by the United States, the "toys" of the Taliban in Afghanistan

"It looked like a zombie apocalypse": US military describe chaotic departure from Kabul

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2021-09-04

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