Radio War Nerd EP #435 — ISKP's Friends in US-Occupied Afghanistan, feat. Rob Ashlar
Guest: Rob Ashlar
Recorded: March 28, 2024
To make sense of the ISKP (Islamic State-Khorasan Province) attacks in Moscow last week, and Iran earlier this year, we dive into its murky origins during the US occupation in Afghanistan and the terrorist group's remarkably friendly relations with occupied Afghanistan's security agency, the National Directorate for Security (NDS), which was created and run by the CIA.
Key acronyms & names for this episode:
-TTP (Tehrik e Taliban Pakistan): Pakistan Taliban, remnants form early ISKP in Nangarhar Province
-ISKP (Islamic State in Khorasan Province)
-NDS (National Directorate for Security): Occupied Afghanistan's CIA-run intelligence agency
-Amrullah Saleh: Longtime head of NDS
-Mangal Bagh/ Lashkar e Islam: Large ISKP affiliate in Nangarhar with documented NDS backing
-ANA (Afghan National Army), ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces): US-occupied Afghan military
-Shahab al Muhajir (aka Sanaullah Ghafari): ISKP's emir, from Kabul, possible foreigner or Tajik
-Abdul Manan: Extremist Taliban who broke away in 2015, year ISKP formed, allied with ISKP, documented links to US-occupied Afghanistan regime
-AAN (Afghanistan Analysts Network): reliable analysis on Afghanistan
Read Rob Ashlar's articles in Cosmonaut, here and here. Follow Rob on Twitter.
Total time: 1:31:20
Direct link to this episode's mp3 here
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Comments (37)
super informative ep but this one could’ve probably been a two parter! a lot of names and moving parts
Great Episode! When is the next RWN summit in Toronto??
I don't believe the natural state is nihilism, more money more romanticism for me, and no one else. These idiots v 0.0.0.0.0.1 do.
Ha I feel like I'm going to have to listen to this one five times before it all sinks in. Great episode
"Jane Goodall's 90th birthday. My guess is that her image outlasts many of the ephemerae of this time. May she be resurrected by the best machines, when the noise lessens and the forests return." From John's twitter which is a beautiful sentiment and a poem in its own right.
Happy I found the Warnerd. When I have time I try to listen episode, worrying times but it helps my nerves to get some context.
Fantastic guest
Loved you in Moon
Great, great episode, guys. This shit is so convulsed and difficult to understand — I appreciate Mark asking so many questions for clarification, and the acronym explanation. Thanks!
There's a book about the prevalence of engineers in extremist groups called "Engineers of Jihad" by Gambetta and Hertog. Left-wing groups like the Red Army Faction are analyzed as a point of comparison - they tend to have fewer engineers and technical professionals on average compared with the population. As Rob mentioned, there are economic and psychological factors at play here, and the book discusses both.
That’s because the RAF got laid unlike engineers - “Ficken und Schießen sind ein Ding”
This episode was awesome!
I can't tell if David Andrews is doing a bit. I liked this one, but Rob had the vibe of a guy trying to cram way too many notes into an hour. I had to rewind several times to keep up with everything.
Thank you
This episode was very enlightening. Ashlar was a knowledgeable and engaging guest and equally importantly Mark does a great job of interjecting with clarifying questions which enabled me to follow the discussion. Having said this, I am highly doubtful that the CIA would ever do anything to bolster terrorist groups or undermine anyone, anywhere, ever. Perhaps the three of you should reflect.
Holy shit. I thought Rob was a horse
Oompa-loompa-ass haircut
Cannot unsee
Any key reports we can read on this
Antonia Goustozzi’s The Islamic State in Khorasan is several years old at this point but it’s quality research
Appreciate the glossary for the episode. Really good guest
The American STEMcels become the alt right to carry water for the establishment as NAFOtards, but at least none of these people will become socialists or communists, and the U.S. government has spent over a century kill8ng everything and everyone to the left of Nixon who could make that happen.
On the "Khurasan" label and the high incidence of middle-class engineers: it's worth noting that Salafi global jihad has always been, to put it crudely—nerd shit. While it's broadly true that most Muslims worldwide have a thicker understanding of the faith's early history than say, Christians (because the Sunni-Shia split relies on these finer details), you need to be geeking out pretty hard to get excited about how the provincial nomenclature of the Rashidun Caliphate disrupts the Sykes-Picot line (al-Sham) or the Iraqi/Iranian/Afghani/Pakistani borders (Khurasan). Same goes for the delicate flavors of sectarian hatred that cosmopolitan Salafi jihadis love so well. In that respect I wonder if Daesh in its halcyon days actually represents a departure from the mean. It seems like the uniquely fucked up circumstances created by the US occupation gave Salafi global jihad discourse a much larger social base than it can normally expect (because Salafi jihadis are normally off-putting soft-handed nerds who piss off the locals pretty quick). In that respect ISKP almost looks like a return to the mean, closer to Al-Qaeda (one of the purest examples of violent LARPing nerds) than to ISIL in their social base, if not their branding. But I could be reading that wrong. This is also why I think intelligence agencies like Salafi global jihad nerds so much. They're actually much easier to point in whatever direction is convenient to you at the time. Not just because they have less of a local social base, but because you can talk them into all sorts of wild ideological shit that rural hicks are too uneducated, too smart or too poor to fall for. Even better, it's easy to ship them around. It's the equivalent of having a bunch of white nationalist school shooters on tap who you can ship off to kill Turks/Russians/Albanians/WhateverIsConvenient—just so long as you tell them it's revenge for like, the Siege of Vienna or something.
“ you can talk them into all sorts of wild ideological shit that rural hicks are too uneducated, too smart or too poor to fall for” The easiest way to manipulate these idiots is to prey on their insecurities about their intelligence and agency.
Excellent episode! When Kabul fell, I wondered what had happened to the older anti-Taliban forces (particularly those aligned with Dostum and former Northern Alliance warlords.) I figured their total absence from the battlefield reflected the sheer incompetence of Afghan government that co-opted them. I see now that the real answer is even more disturbing. I am not at all surprised that domestic opposition to the Taliban exists, even among Islamists. However, the fact that this opposition has aligned with Salafi, genocidally anti-Shiite, groups craters even the lowest of my expectations. US interventionism sows dragon’s teeth and, yet again, makes a bad situation even worse.
January 26, 2024, Wall Street Journal, "US Secretly Alerted Iran Ahead of Islamic State Terror Attack" that killed 84. Same kind of warnings reported in multiple outlets with respect to the Moscow attack. Would it be more accurate if these were reported as "the U.S. threatens" instead of "U.S. warns"?
Tech issue: is the linked file for this episode broken in the RSS? I can't get it to play in PocketCasts.
works on mine, haven't heard anyone else having problems. Still having yours?
how can we find old newsletters again?
Wish he wasnt talking at 2x speed. Slow down for the mortals.
Like with IS in Syria, Nordstream the obvious answer with ISK is who benefits and that's the US
Really interesting episode guys. Mark, I shared that article with you about them bombing hotels with Chinese delegation on twitter. They also targeted the Russian embassy in Afghanistan, so I wonder if their will be a similar escalation into China itself.
The crew keeping Adrian Zenz employed just came in their pants
Looking forward to digging in on this 👌🏻
What episode is the Dune episode?
ep 9. a long long time ago, as a lesser movie would say
Fantastic, thanks for this!