al-qaida chief ayman al-zawahiri the coordinator 2016 part 4-1- tb-37- haibatullah akhunzada-8

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Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 4-1- TB-37- Haibatullah Akhunzada-8

Afghan Taliban says Haibatullah Akhunzada is new leader;Emir-ul-Momineen Sheikh ul Quran, or "commander of the faithful, scholar of the Koran

The anniversary of 9/11 finds atrocities nine times more frequent than before the “War on Terror” began. The war began 15 years ago this Sunday, "9/11", when four attacks by al-Qaeda killed 2996 people, injured a further 6000 and caused US$10 billion worth of damage. President George W. Bush responded to attacks by declaring a "War on Terror". Fifteen years after this declaration was made there are nine times more people killed in terror attacks each year than there were before the war was declared.Since the year 2000, there have been more than 61,000 terrorist attacks, killing more than 140,000 people. Last year, 28,300 people were killed by terrorists. Five countries, namely Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria, accounted for 78 per cent of all of these terror killings.

With the 15th anniversary of September 11, 2001 soon to arrive, the United States is now engaged in the longest war in its history. Coined by President Bush on the day of 9/11, the term “War on Terror” describes a general conflict against all global Islamist terror groups, especially Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces, and now the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). But the terrorist threat is not confined to overseas. It also comes from domestic jihadists who are inspired by the evil of radical Islam to kill Americans here on the homeland.

Exactly two decades ago, on August 23, 1996, Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. At the time, few people paid much attention. “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” which was published in a London-based newspaper, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, and faxed to supporters around the world. But it was the start of what’s now the Twenty Years’ War between the United States and al-Qaeda.The civil war in Afghanistan is raging again. After almost 40 years of near-consecutive conflict -- from the Soviet invasion to the US-led war against the Taliban for its sheltering of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda post-9/11 -- Afghanistan is once again on the international emergency watch list. Violence is escalating across the country at an alarming rate. The Taliban, at their strongest since the start of the US invasion in 2001, are leading a renewed insurgency in Helmand, Kunduz and beyond.

In statement, last July Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada says ending 'occupation' is a prerequisite for peace in Afghanistan. - “We say to those who attribute the Jihadic valor of the Islamic Emirate to Pakistan and Iran and to others that the Mujahideen and the conscious people could not be derailed from their course of actions as a result of such distorted interpretation.,”. -- Akhundzada also called on other Muslim nations to support the group’s insurgency and ruled out that the group is waging violence in the country with the support of the neighboring countries, including Iran and Pakistan.

And so began the Twenty Years’ War between al-Qaeda and the United States, which has had five distinct eras to date. The first phase, from 1996-2001, was the phony war marked by intermittent hostilities. It took al-Qaeda two years to organize its first major attack against the United States: the

1The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. –Winston ChurchillCees de Waart: CdW Intelligence to Rent of 7

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August 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people in total, 12 of them American. The United States responded with a quasi-war against al-Qaeda and its state sponsors, which combined a legal indictment of bin Laden with limited military action, including cruise missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 that killed at least six al-Qaeda personnel. In 2000, al-Qaeda suicide bombers hit the USS Cole at a port in Yemen, killing 17. The following year, the terrorist group brought the war to the American homeland with the 9/11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.The second phase of the Twenty Years’ War, from 2001-2003, was the invasion of Afghanistan, which represented the high point of American optimism about victory. George W. Bush seized the sword, declaring a “war against terrorism,” sweeping aside the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan, and installing a new Afghan government under Hamid Karzai. And Bush also grasped the shield, constructing an entire architecture of domestic defense, including the Department of Homeland Security, which was resourced to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every year.The third phase, from 2003-2006, was the invasion of Iraq, where American hopes evaporated in the Mesopotamian sun. Bush had argued that only war could sever the purported—and it turned out largely imagined—alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and liberate an oppressed people. But the overthrow of Saddam’s regime triggered widespread disorder, and led to the rise of an al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which began a murderous campaign of violence. The quagmire in Iraq also eroded the parallel mission in Afghanistan. With American attention focused on Iraq, and only limited U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the Taliban recovered in the south of the country as well as in sanctuaries in Pakistan.The fourth phase of the Twenty Years’ War, from 2007-2011, was the surge era, a time of fragile recovery. The deployment of U.S. reinforcements in Iraq, together with the “Awakening” movement, which involved Washington allying with Sunni tribes against AQI (by now rebranded as the Islamic State of Iraq), helped to pull Iraq back from the brink of catastrophe. In Afghanistan, Barack Obama ordered a surge of U.S. forces, which nearly tripled troop levels to over 100,000 from 2009-2010. In 2011, U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in Pakistan. At the end of the year, American troops left Iraq. There was, finally, a sense of closure.The fifth phase, from 2011-2016, was the era of transformation, as once again, U.S. hopes went unrealized. AQI/ISI evolved into ISIS and moved to the center of the global jihadist movement. Misgovernment and sectarian rule in Iraq had alienated Iraqi Sunnis and breathed new life into the ISI. After Syria collapsed into civil war in 2011, ISI crossed the border; in 2013, firmly ensconced in both Iraq and Syria, ISI changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The following year, al-Qaeda repudiated its former affiliate. But far from collapsing as an organization, ISIS subsequently swept into northern Iraq and declared a global caliphate. Meanwhile, in the often-forgotten war in Afghanistan, American troops were withdrawn and the Taliban made steady gains, with the campaign left teetering between stalemate and failure.

After its initial success in Afghanistan following 9/11, victory was not decisive for the United States. Instead, American forces continued to be at war with a number of shadowy jihadist groups, most recently ISIS, and this now seems like a quasi-permanent state of affairs that could persist well beyond the next presidency. On a video that was released four weeks after 9/11, bin Laden made his first public statement since the attacks on New York and Washington, saying "neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine, and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad [Saudi Arabia]."The video was poorly timed, as it came out on October 7, 2001, the same day the United States began its air campaign against Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan.


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Two months later the Taliban was completely routed from Afghanistan and within another couple of weeks those key members of al Qaeda who had survived the intense American airstrikes were fleeing to neighboring Pakistan and Iran.

When Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force immediately after the 9/11 attacks, no one could have imagined this authorization would continue to be the basis for American wars that persist a decade and a half later.

June 2016. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has said that al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan are plotting to reunite with the Taliban for a comeback.A NATO official asserted that the al-Qaeda affiliates by seeking partnership with the Taliban are trying to remain safe from U.S air strikes.

8 Sep 6,637 ANDSF personnel were killed and 12,471 wounded in 2015. The number killed is about 20 percent higher in 2016 in comparison to the previous year, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, announced in late July without providing specific numbers. Over 1,600 Afghan civilians were killed and 3,565 injured in the first half of 2016, which marks “an overall increase of four per cent in total civilian casualties compared to the same period last year,” according to a United Nations report published in July. Over the past 14 years, more than $68 billion have been appropriated by the United States Congress to train, equip, and pay the salaries of up to 352,000 soldiers and police in in the ANSDF, as well as 30,000 members of the Afghan Local Police (ALP).

8 Sep The Taliban has pushed into the capital of Afghanistan's southern Uruzgan province, touching off fierce clashes and sending all government officials fleeing from the city, according to an Afghan government official. Afghanistan's defence ministry says its security forces are currently waging operations in 15 provinces. Tarinkot is the third Afghan provincial capital to come under Taliban threat in recent months, along with the city of Kunduz in the north and Lashkar Gah in Helmand province.


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The Pentagon announced on September 6 that it will dispatch about 1,400 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to Afghanistan in the fall in support of counterterrorism operations in the country. The deployment is part of a regular troop rotation and will not increase overall U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan. “From hunting al-Qaeda and Taliban forces during Operation Anaconda in 2002, to performing the advise-assist mission in 2014-15, the soldiers of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team have been nothing short of exceptional while supporting operations in Afghanistan over the years,” said Brigadier General Scott E. Brower, the acting senior commander of the 101st Airborne Division. “The Rakkasans [the brigades nickname] are trained, well-led, and prepared to accomplish any mission given to them while supporting Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.”

Taliban threatens second provincial capital in Afghan southBY BILL ROGGIO | September 8, 2016 | [email protected] | @billroggioThe Taliban has launched an offensive to take control of Tarin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province. Its forces have entered the city and are engaged in heavy fighting with Afghan forces there. Tarin Kot is the second provincial capital in the south that is under direct threat of a Taliban takeover. Lashkar Gah in neighboring Helmand province is also contested by the Taliban.The Taliban claims to have seized all security installations outside of the city and said it controls several government building inside the city as well.In a series of three separate statements on its official website, Voice of Jihad, the Taliban touted its initial success in the city and claims it took control of “4 strategic enemy bases and 32 check posts” outside of Tarin Kot. The Taliban said it overran “commander Akbar Khan’s base in Marabad area” and that Khan and 40 of his troops surrendered. Additionally, the Taliban said it stormed the city’s prison but the guards had already evacuated the prisoners.Afghan officials have confirmed that Taliban forces have entered the city, taken control of the prison, and are currently battling Afghan forces.“The security forces are engaged with the Taliban inside the city, and fighting is ongoing,” Dost Mohammad Nayab, a spokesman for Uruzgan’s governor, told The New York Times.Nayab also confirmed the Taliban’s claim that it controls security outposts outside of Tarin Kot. The Afghan Interior and Defense ministries are said to be scrambling troops to prevent the fall of Tarin Kot.Uruzgan has been hotly contested for more than a year. Of the province’s five districts, one, Char Chino, is under Taliban control, and the remaining four are heavily contested. The Taliban seized Char Chino in June 2016 after Afghan forces conducted a tactical retreat.The Taliban considers Uruzgan to be a strategic district, and has previously said that it controls all areas of the province except for the district centers.In a Voice of Jihad interview in April 2016 with Mullah Aminullah Yousuf, the Taliban’s shadow governor for Uruzgan, he described the province as “the linking point for many provinces” and a traditional “strong fortress of mujahideen.” [See LWJ report, Taliban seizes a district in Uruzgan.]“The enemy thinks that if the province fell into the mujahideen’s hands, recapturing it back would be very hard,” Yousef said.Yousef explained that US, Dutch, and Australian forces committed significant resources to secure Uruzgan and stand up to the police and Arbakis, or local militias. But the Taliban continued to fight in the province and gained grounds after Coalition forces withdrew.“[I]n the course of last year, with the exception of district headquarters, all villages, suburbs, and valleys slipped away from enemy hands,” Yousef claimed in April.Yousef said the Taliban would continue to pursue gaining control of the district centers, and predicted that the loss of all five districts would be a serious problem for the Afghan government.“If … the mujahideen capture the headquarters of districts as we expect and have plans for, then


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provincial headquarters will not be able to resist. It would be a big blow to the enemy, and the enemy would leave the area,” he stated.Three of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals are now under direct Taliban threat. In neighboring Helmand province, the Taliban has surrounded Lashkar Gah and control five and contest eight of the province’s 14 districts. The US military has sent more than 100 special forces troops to Helmand to prevent the fall of the provincial capital. In the north, the Taliban is again threatening Kunduz, which fell under Taliban control for two weeks in the fall of 2015.Security in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate as the Taliban presses offensives in all areas of the country. The Afghan military is struggling to contain the group, despite limited US military support. In eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban recently overran two districts in Paktika province.Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of The Long War Journal.

The Taliban commander believed responsible for at least two ferocious attacks in Kabul over the last few weeks knows the Afghan capital very well. Five years ago, Mullah Sheerin Akhond, as he is called, spent long months walking the streets incognito, and as he learned the lay of the land, he also honed his hatred for the people there.“He is a very nasty character,” one knowledgeable Afghan Taliban source tells The Daily Beast. “His Islamic scholarship is nil, but he has a harsh, fanatical attitude about anyone who lives in areas controlled by the Afghan government. In his view, it is permissible to kill anyone who lives in Kabul because they are supporting the Afghan government.”And members of that government agree: Mullah Sheerin is a very nasty character indeed. “At the moment, when it comes to atrocities targeting civilians, he is the most cruel and inhuman of the Taliban,” says a senior aide to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who asked not to be named because he doesn’t have permission to speak on the record. There had been hope that when the Pakistani military turned on the old Haqqani Network, pushing it out of the havens it had enjoyed for 40 years in North Waziristan, attacks in nearby Kabul would diminish. But Mullah Sheerin quickly stepped in—and with a vengeance. “Haqqani would use kilograms of explosives,” as one Western diplomat put it, “but Mullah Sheerin uses tons.”The recent attacks bear that out, although they hardly appear to have been random and they are not always claimed. On Aug. 25, gunmen attacked the American University of Afghanistan, leaving more than a dozen people dead, and dozens more wounded.Then, on Monday of this week a massive car bomb blew up on a bustling street near the Ministry of Defense. As rescue workers arrived at the scene, another huge suicide bomb detonated. At least 24 people reportedly were killed, some of them senior security officials, and more than 90 were wounded. Gunmen followed up the attack, barricading themselves inside a building and skirmishing with authorities throughout the night.To make matters worse, there appears to be competition between the Taliban and the partisans of the so-called Islamic State to see who can inflict the worst carnage. In July, ISIS targeted a street demonstration and slaughtered more than 80 people.One Taliban officials says privately that he’s very uncomfortable with Mullah Sheerin and his tactics, which are likely to inspire hatred not support. “Some Taliban do not like him,” says this official, “but he is too strong to be disputed.”Mullah Sheerin Akhond, at age 45, is now head of the Taliban military council for northeast Afghanistan and Kabul, and some diplomats say they believe he is also the head of the Taliban intelligence committee. His core strategy appears to be to undermine confidence in the government’s ability to protect the people, and with some success.He is no stranger to the Western and Afghan intelligence services that have been watching him for


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years.Although Mullah Sheerin kept a low profile in the past, he was known to be very close to the late founder and leader of the Taliban, the one-eyed Mullah Omar.Another Afghan Taliban commander contacted by The Daily Beast, Mullah Salih Khan in Helmand province, tells us, “I knew Mullah Sheerin from day one. He is a very devoted Taliban commander, and has a very sharp mind, with a genius for security,” whether providing it, or thwarting it.The role he played for Mullah Omar was head of security. “Sheerin used to wake up early in the morning and go to sleep only after Mullah Omar slept,” says Mullah Salih Khan. “He was one of Mullah Omar’s most trusted men.”According to Mullah Salih, Sheerin “was giving military instructions to top Taliban commanders from Mullah Omar’s office, conveyed as if they were Mullah Omar’s directions. In fact they were Mullah Sheerin’s ideas.”Afghan intelligence officials believe that, like the Haqqani network before him, Mullah Sheerin has close ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.

The Taliban's Latest Battlefield: Social MediaThe Taliban has drastically ramped up its presence on services like Twitter and WhatsApp in the past few years. More than a few observers have noted the Taliban’s hypocrisy toward technology. During the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s heyday in the late 1990s, when the militants controlled 90 percent of the country and implemented a fundamentalist, totalitarian vision of religious law, they shunned the advances of the 20th century. The Taliban’s religious police beat taxi drivers for playing music on cassettes while its one-eyed leader refused to appear in photographs. Radios became a rarity.Only an abrupt but brutal defeat by Western militaries in 2001 caused the Taliban to embrace technology without a hint of irony. Much like al-Qaeda in Iraq (which would later fracture to become the Islamic State or ISIS), Taliban militants filmed their attacks and posted them to the Internet, hoping to convince local audiences of the group’s impending return to power and foreign ones of the war in Afghanistan’s ultimate futility.Though the Taliban has relied on technology for over a decade in the name of propaganda and public relations, its relationship with social media has only taken root in the last few years, in parallel with the rise of ISIS. Just as terrorist organizations in the Middle East have made Facebook pages, Telegram channels, and Twitter accounts, the Taliban has expanded the breadth and depth of its outreach to the international community in general and the news media in particular. The complexity of the Taliban’s presence on social media is startling in its scope. The militants inform their international audience of battles and other events in six languages—Arabic, English, Pashto, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu—through Telegram, Twitter, and WhatsApp. Their Pashto WhatsApp chatroom, updated throughout the day, includes cellphone numbers from Afghanistan, the Emirates, Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. When social networking services ban terrorist-linked accounts, channels, and pages, the Taliban will tell its supporters through available means of communication where to find the latest outlets of its news agency, rebuilt through fresh numbers and usernames.The militants have named their news agency al-Emarah, meaning “the emirate” in Arabic, in reference to the sovereign state that they once ruled. According to their English Telegram channel, al-Emarah is the “official channel of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” providing “updates on news, articles and official statements.” The signature of Zabihullah Mujahid, the better known of the Taliban’s two spokesmen, appears at the end of many statements. Other updates refer to the Cultural Commission, an apparent government agency within the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s defunct state. Asad Afghan, chief of the Multimedia Branch within the Cultural Commission, manages the Taliban’s presence on Telegram, Twitter, and WhatsApp. He also goes by Asad Mujahid and Muhammad


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Darwish.“Given the realities on the ground, social media allows us to contact foreign and local journalists easily,” Qari Muhammad Yousuf Ahmadi, the other Taliban spokesman, told The Diplomat over Viber. “This way, we both benefit from the publication of your article.”The militants have a mixed relationship with journalists, often kidnapping them but more often using them to speak to wider audiences. The Taliban will email or text war correspondents with relevant information after battles and suicide attacks. On rarer occasions, the two spokesmen will sit with journalists for lengthy interviews. In an interview with Asharq al-Awsat, a London-based Arabic newspaper, Ahmadi even explained the importance of social media to the Taliban. “I use computers and have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube,” he said, describing the the militants’ goal of “winning over the minds and hearts of the masses” in one of the world’s longest-running civil wars.The benefits of the Taliban’s presence on social media are neither immediate nor obvious. The militants’ Pashto and Persian Telegram channels, though written in Afghanistan’s two official languages, have 4,336 follows as of this article’s writing. The Turkish channel, with the least followers, has 349. For reference, estimates placed the number of Taliban fighters at 60,000 in 2014. ISIS has used social media to recruit thousands of non-Arab foreigners and strengthen the legitimacy of its global caliphate in the Muslim world. The Taliban, meanwhile, only has ambitions to rule Afghanistan, a country with 31 percent literacy where the computers and smartphones needed to access social media are few. Public relations have been a separate disaster, with the the Taliban’s popularity declining from 56 percent in 2009 to 29 percent in 2011. Its tiny audience therefore has little reach and less hope of growing.Renowned for its patience and resilience, the Taliban is using social media not for the instant gains on which ISIS thrives but as an example of soft power to achieve two long-term goals. First, the Taliban sees itself as a government in exile or state within a state whose legitimacy is visible through al-Emarah: the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan still exists on social media, and, as the militants expand their territory, they can turn their Internet emirate into a reality. Second, the Taliban’s limited but targeted broadcasts to audiences in the Muslim and Western worlds can help it achieve its long-held goal of expelling foreign soldiers from Afghanistan as military adventures in the country lose more popularity.Bill Roggio, managing editor of The Long War Journal, assessed that the Taliban controls a fifth of the country and influences half of it. Combined with recent Taliban victories in the vicinity of Lashkar Gah and Kunduz, the militants’ presence on social media reaffirms their legitimacy and longevity.Social media could prove a mixed blessing for the Taliban in the short term. On the one hand, smartphones give American combat drones flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan an excellent opportunity to monitor and target Taliban members, perhaps including the militants’ leader killed earlier this year. On the other, application software with end-to-end encryption such as Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp has made the CIA’s job of surveilling the militants that much more difficult.For now, the Taliban forms part of a wider trend in which local revolutionaries and terrorists, maybe inspired by ISIS, use social media to brand themselves and plot their agendas. Throughout the failed coup d’état in Turkey, the military putschists schemed over WhatsApp. In a similar fashion, Shia militias in Iraq are pushing their narratives over broadcasting satellite services.As the Taliban, like ISIS and other insurgents in Asia, entrenches itself into civil society and popular culture through social media, the war on terror will become that much harder. Today, experts in counterinsurgency are debating whether killing one militant creates ten new, radical recruits. Tomorrow, they may have to have the same debate about banning militants’ accounts on social media.Austin Bodetti is a freelance journalist focusing on conflict in the Muslim world. His writing has appeared in AskMen, The Daily Beast, The Daily Dot, Vox, and Wired UK.


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al-qaida chief ayman al-zawahiri the coordinator 2016 part 4-1- tb-37- haibatullah akhunzada-8

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