Many of former Afghan forces, abandoned by US, joining Daesh: WSJ

Many of Afghanistan’s US-trained spies and military personnel have joined the Daesh terrorist group after being abandoned by the United States, a new report has revealed.

Citing Taliban leaders and former Afghan security officials, The Wall Street Journal reported that several members of the former Afghan government’s intelligence and military apparatus joined Daesh, following the hasty withdrawal of the US-led coalition troops from the country in August.

This “relatively small, but growing” number of recruits, according to the report, provides the Takfiri terrorist group with “critical expertise in intelligence-gathering and warfare techniques, potentially strengthening the extremist organization’s ability to contest Taliban supremacy.”

Some of them, however, have already been killed in violent clashes with Taliban’s forces in different parts of the war-ravaged country.

An Afghan security officer who previously commanded the military’s weapons and ammunition depot in Gardez, the capital of southeastern Paktia Province, was killed a week ago in a clash with Taliban fighters, a former Afghan official is quoted as saying in the report.

Rahmatullah Nabil, former chief of Afghanistan’s erstwhile spy agency National Directorate of Security (NDS), who left the country shortly before the Taliban takeover in August, told the journal that Daesh had “become very attractive” to former members of Afghan security and defense forces “who have been left behind” by the United States.

“If there were a resistance, they would have joined it,” Rahmatullah Nabil is quoted as saying, arguing that “for the time being” Daesh is the only armed group in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has been rocked by a series of terrorist attacks since August, claimed by the Daesh terrorist group in its new, more dangerous incarnation.