KABUL: A senior Taliban official has said the group will “suppress” Daesh fighters operating in Afghanistan, as experts warned the militants were likely to increase their activity and attacks.
After toppling the Western-backed government in Kabul mid-August, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have faced a deadly attack on the capital’s airport and bomb blasts in the eastern city of Jalalabad, all claimed by Daesh-Khorasan, or Daesh-K, the local affiliate of the group that originated in Syria.
Daesh emerged in Afghanistan in late 2014 but its strength has declined from its 2018 peak after a series of heavy losses inflicted by both the Taliban and US forces. The group denounced the Taliban’s takeover of the country, criticizing their version of Islamic rule as insufficiently hardline.
As Daesh-K’s strength is now estimated by the UN to be fewer than 2,000 militants, compared with at least 100,000 Taliban fighters, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid downplayed the threat earlier this week by saying the group had no “effective presence” in Afghanistan.
“Soon they would be suppressed,” another spokesman Bilal Karimi, who is a member of the Taliban cultural commission, told Arab News on Thursday. “We assure the people that any group which wants to confront us would be grounded.”
But experts forecast that Daesh would soon become a major threat to the stability of Taliban rule, especially if the new government remained shunned by the rest of the world.
“The Taliban will see a sharp (increase in) activity of ISIS-K (Daesh-K) shortly,” Ahmad Saeedi, a political expert based in Kabul, said. “The Taliban regime has not been recognized by the world so far, and this is a potential threat.”
The Taliban were facing a “series of movements by anti-Taliban forces that had a special place in the previous regime, such as the remnants of the former army,” Saeedi added. “With this situation, it is likely that the Taliban will not be able to continue their rule for more than a year.”
Other anti-Taliban groups, including the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan supported by some members of the previous administration, may join forces with Daesh, he said, and the combined challenges could lead to a “premature collapse” of the Taliban government.
Col. Hekmatullah Hakimi, a former officer of the Afghan army, also listed opposition groups as the possible future ranks of Daesh.
“It is possible that several resistance affiliates will join the ranks of ISIS-K and line up against the Taliban,” he said.
The threat may increase further if the Taliban continued sowing fear among those rejecting them.
“Their enemies would increase daily,” Kabul-based international relations expert Wais Naseri told Arab News. “Military confrontation against the Taliban is 100 percent possible, and that military resistance will form in the not-too-distant future.”
Taliban vow to ‘suppress’ Daesh presence in Afghanistan
https://arab.news/yg6r4
Taliban vow to ‘suppress’ Daesh presence in Afghanistan
- Daesh will become major threat if world shuns Taliban rule, say experts
Italian suspect questioned over Bosnia ‘weekend sniper’ killings
- The octogenarian former truck driver from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeast Italy, is suspected by Milan prosecutors of “voluntary homicide aggravated by abject motives,” according to Italian news agency ANSA
ROME: An 80-year-old man suspected of being a “weekend sniper” who paid the Bosnian Serb army to shoot civilians during the 1990s siege of Sarajevo was questioned Monday in Milan, media reported.
The octogenarian former truck driver from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeast Italy, is suspected by Milan prosecutors of “voluntary homicide aggravated by abject motives,” according to Italian news agency ANSA.
Lawyer Giovanni Menegon told journalists that his client had answered questions from prosecutors and police and “reaffirmed his complete innocence.”
In October, prosecutors opened an investigation into what Italian media dubbed “weekend snipers” or “war tourists“: mostly wealthy, gun-loving, far-right sympathizers who allegedly gathered in Trieste and were taken to the hills surrounding Sarajevo where they fired on civilians for sport.
During the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo that began in April 1992 some 11,541 men, women and children were killed and more than 50,000 people wounded by Bosnian Serb forces, according to official figures.
Il Giornale newspaper reported last year that the would-be snipers paid Bosnian Serb forces up to the equivalent of €100,000 ($115,000) per day to shoot at civilians below them.
The suspect — described by the Italian press as a hunting enthusiast who is nostalgic for Fascism — is said to have boasted publicly about having gone “man hunting.”
Witness statements, particularly from residents of his village, helped investigators to track the suspect, freelance journalist Marianna Maiorino said.
“According to the testimonies, he would tell his friends at the village bar about what he did during the war in the Balkans,” said Maiorino, who researched the allegations and was herself questioned as part of the investigation.
The suspect is “described as a sniper, someone
who enjoyed going to Sarajevo to kill people,” she added.
The suspect told local newspaper Messaggero Veneto Sunday he had been to Bosnia during the war, but “for work, not for hunting.” He added that his public statements had been exaggerated and he was “not worried.”
The investigation opened last year followed a complaint filed by Italian journalist and writer Ezio Gavanezzi, based on allegations revealed in the documentary “Sarajevo Safari” by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic in 2022.
Gavanezzi was contacted in August 2025 by the former mayor of Sarajevo, Benjamina Karic, who filed a complaint in Bosnia in 2022 after the same documentary was broadcast.
The Bosnia and Herzegovina prosecutor’s office confirmed on Friday that a special war crimes department was investigating alleged foreign snipers during the siege of Sarajevo.
Bosnian prosecutors requested information from Italian counterparts at the end of last year, while also contacting the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, it said. That body performs some of the functions previously carried out by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Sarajevo City Council adopted a decision last month authorizing the current mayor, Samir Avdic, to “join the criminal proceedings” before the Italian
courts, in order to support Italian prosecutors.
