Taliban Presence in Northern Afghanistan Reduces Daesh Threat to Central Asia, Russian Diplomat Says

The presence of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan’s north will suppress the growth of threat from the Daesh (ISIS) terrorist group to Central Asian countries, Russia’s special presidential representative for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said on Tuesday.

“Many other international terrorist organizations have been based on these territories for a long time, I would put ISIS in the first place but there are still about 20 smaller but no less harmful terrorist groups that cooperate with each other for tactical reasons … So they could take advantage of the chaotic situation in northern Afghanistan and try to use it to undermine stability in Afghanistan’s neighbouring states … The Taliban have very bad relations with ISIS, and the Taliban have been actively fighting Daesh all these years, which cannot be said about the Americans and NATO or about the current Afghan government. And, oddly enough, the very presence of the Taliban in these territories will restrain the growth of threats from the ISIS and other international terrorists against Central Asian states,” Kabulov said at a round table discussion, hosted by the Gorchakov Fund.

The diplomat also qualified Kabul’s claims about the Taliban’s links to the Al-Qaeda* terrorist group as the authorities’ attempt to justify their own failures.

Violence in Afghanistan has been on the rise as foreign troops withdraw from the country. The Taliban have captured large rural territories and launched an offensive upon cities