America’s unlikely new ally in the battle against ISIS

ISIS is back. In fact, to borrow Gerry Adams’s remark about the IRA, they never went away. Now, they are regaining some of their previous strength in Syria and Iraq, and moving into fresh territory in Africa. Of most importance to the West, the Afghan branch of ISIS — ISIS Khorasan — is said to be plotting more direct attacks on the “far enemy,” as well as pumping out propaganda to create so-called “lone wolves.” But with the stakes rising, it seems the United States may have found a new ally in the battle against ISIS: the Taliban. The enemy of my enemy…

We’re talking about ISIS again because last month a convert drove his pick up truck into a dense crowd out partying on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing fourteen people. Shamsud-Din Jabbar acted alone, according to the FBI, and was also clearly a troubled man. He was in turmoil after getting divorced and recorded a video message for his family saying he’d like to kill them too. “I don’t want you to think I spared you willingly.” As so often with lone wolves, the question is whether he became violent because he was radicalized or became radicalized because he was violent.

Lone wolf or lone nut, there was plenty of ISIS material online to inspire him. One ISIS media campaign has the slogan “Run them over without mercy,” along with a cartoon of a 4×4 crushing the skulls of unbelievers. This is a variation on a regular ISIS meme, “Kill them wherever you find them,” a phrase from the Qur’an. This poison is injected into social media from many places, by ISIS fanboys as much as by some central authority, but much of it seems to come from ISIS Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in Afghanistan. The Austrian authorities say they arrested three teenagers planning an attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna last summer after joining an ISIS-K group on Telegram.

The teenagers allegedly wanted to “kill as many people as possible” using knives, machetes and homemade explosives and, once again, by mowing down people with a car or truck. Luckily, their preparations were amateurish, and perhaps only possible at all because the parents of one of the boys were away. It was lucky, too, that though the attacker in New Orleans had once served in the US army, it was as a specialist in HR and IT. Better trained and better armed attackers could spill a great deal more blood — as when 130 people were murdered by ISIS gunmen and suicide bombers at the Bataclan theater and elsewhere in Paris ten years ago.

ISIS-K carried out an attack in Krasnogorsk last March that might have been modeled on Bataclan. Four gunmen wearing military fatigues and masks opened fire with assault rifles on a crowd at the Crocus City Hall. The popular Russian band Picnic was about to go on stage, having sold out the venue, and many in the audience at first thought the gunshots were part of the act. The gunmen stepped over their bodies, finishing off the wounded by slitting their throats, telling each other “Kill them and have no mercy” and intoning “God is greatest.” One hundred and forty people died. The following day, the senior American general in the Middle East, Erik Kurilla, warned that ISIS-K also had “the capability and the will” to attack Western targets “with little to no warning.”

Having left Afghanistan, the US military finds it difficult to keep a close eye on what ISIS-K is up to there. Washington is virtually blind inside Afghanistan — but it is listening. I have been told by two people who regularly speak to senior Taliban officials that the US is passing them intelligence on ISIS-K. An American general and his team are said to meet the Taliban in Qatar to hand over any material, presumably electronic intercepts, that might help in targeting the group.

The Taliban have long been waging their own war against ISIS in Afghanistan. They compete with one another for terri- tory and recruits — ISIS-K was formed by disaffected Pakistani Talibs — and they follow different schools of Sunni Islam. ISIS thinks the Taliban are apostates, mak- ing their killing lawful under the ISIS interpretation of Islamic law.

Officially, the Taliban denies they are working with the Americans. Suhail Shaheen, who heads the Taliban’s office in Qatar, told me: “We are carrying out operations against ISIS-K independently, without any cooperation with any side.” That wasn’t surprising. It would be extremely embarrassing for the Taliban to admit they are in a military alliance with the country’s former invaders and occupiers.

I was also told that intelligence is flowing the other way, with the Taliban giving Western intelligence agencies what they learn from phones and laptops seized in raids on ISIS-K compounds. The two people I spoke to who are in regular contact with the Taliban said that an attack on the Paris Olympics had been stopped with intelligence obtained in this way.

Again, that has not been confirmed, but the stories are plausible. Back in July, NBC reported that the Biden administration was considering how it could cooperate with the Taliban against ISIS. Officials at the White House were said to be “weighing” whether to share more information about ISIS-K. Such a secret arrangement would suit both the Americans and the Taliban.

In Syria and Iraq, meanwhile, there were some 700 attacks by ISIS last year, according to one count. Those attacks were small: ISIS is not about to sweep over large parts of Syria and Iraq to re-establish the Caliphate that attracted wide-eyed young Muslims dissatisfied with life in the corrupt West. There may be relatively few hardcore, active ISIS loyalists in Iraq and Syria — one estimate put it at little more than a thousand — but there is vast potential for growth.

For the time being, it is the electronic jihad that matters most, the voice of ISIS multiplied and spread across social media by the powerful new technology of AI. It was the electronic jihad that recruited Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans attacker. In one of his messages, he said that the phenomenon of Muslims listen- ing to rap music — “the voice of Satan” — was a sign of the End Times. There would now be a “war between the believers and the disbelievers.”

ISIS can never win such a war, but the lone wolves who think that they are fighting it will always be with us.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2025 World edition.