Suicide bombers given key role in new Taliban army
The Taliban are establishing a battalion of suicide attackers to serve in a new national army in Afghanistan.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the group’s spokesman, announced plans for a special forces unit of suicide bombers hours after the defence ministry said it would set up a national army of 100,000 fighters. “Our mujahidin who are martyrdom brigades will also be part of the army but they will be special forces,” Mujahid told Radio Free Europe. “These forces will be under the control the Ministry of Defence and will be used for special operations.”
A photograph from inside the ministry showed a sign above a desk reading “Office of the Martyrdom Brigade.”
Suicide bombings were shunned as un-Islamic under the previous Taliban administration, which ended in 2001, but the practice was adopted during the group’s insurgency, becoming a devastating weapon in its fight against western forces and the Afghan government. Muhammad Yaqoob, the Taliban minister of defence, is the son of the movement’s founding spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, who approved the use of suicide attacks in 2003.
The deputy leader and interior minister is Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the notorious Haqqani network, which pioneered the use of complex suicide bombings and was responsible for some of the most devastating mass-casualty attacks. Those included the 2018 suicide bombing of the interior ministry that killed 95 and wounded 185, and the 2019 bombing of a Shia wedding party in Kabul, killing 63 and wounding 183.
In October Haqqani, a globally proscribed terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head, hosted a lavish reception for male relatives of dead Taliban suicide bombers, saying that their blood was the foundation on which the “Islamic Emirate” had been rebuilt. His face was blacked out in official photographs of him giving cash and promises of land to the bombers’ families.
News of the new unit was greeted with horror by those who lost relatives to suicide attacks during the two-decade insurgency. “What fresh hell is this?” wrote Shaharzad Akbar, chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, who fled into exile when the Taliban took Kabul in August. “I keep thinking about students, teachers, journalists, labourers, children and others who lost their lives to suicide attacks.”
She added: “Afghans are starving, there is no justice — and the Taliban are investing in suicide attack units. Horrific and appalling.”
The projections for the size of the national army took observers by surprise: when the Taliban took Kabul they had no more than 75,000 fighters, it is believed. Only weeks ago, the Taliban’s army chief spoke of a future army numbering just 5,000; recognition that most rank-and-file fighters would serve as internal security enforcers.
The Afghan National Army vanquished so swiftly by the Taliban had, on paper, 300,000 troops, but perhaps only a third of that number ever existed. The rest are thought to have been “ghost soldiers” whose salaries were collected by corrupt superiors.
It disbanded with the Taliban takeover and many officials and soldiers went into hiding to escape reprisals. Air force pilots escaped en masse by flying their aircraft into Tajikistan.
The Taliban’s only serious remaining rival inside Afghanistan is Islamic State-Khorasan Province (Isis-K), which the US has also vowed to target from airbases outside the country.
Isis-K was responsible for the suicide attack on Kabul airport during the chaotic evacuation in August which killed 13 US Marines and 170 Afghan men, women and children. The bomber had been released from prison by the Taliban days earlier.
In October, Taliban officials in the northern province of Badakhshan said the group’s existing battalion of suicide bombers, the Mansoor Army, would be deployed to the country’s borders, but it is unclear if the deployment took place or if it was ever sanctioned by the divided leadership in Kabul.
