Early last year Donald Trump tweeted that ISIS had been defeated, the US had won the war and the caliphate was no more. At the time it seemed premature, to say the least, and so it has proved. At least three separate developments show ISIS is reforming and diversifying.
Over the past year one of these has been its entrenchment in Afghanistan, where it is establishing a permanent base in mountainous areas in the east of the country. As an earlier column pointed out, this has even served as a sufficiently secure base for the group to start planning attacks overseas.
Its local leadership has made a point of staging some of the worst bombing atrocities in supposedly secure parts of Kabul. The most recent example is last weekend’s bombing of a wedding party in the west of the city, in a district that is home to members of Shi’a Hazara minority, who ISIS regards as apostates. The location was close to the Darul Aman palace where President Ashraf Ghani was due to celebrate a national holiday two days afterwards and not far from where a bomb had exploded earlier in the month: then, fourteen people were killed and 145 injured as a police base was attacked.
