🇺🇸🤝🇦🇫 — 📰 The Washington Post: In Afghanistan, the Taliban has all but extinguished al-Qaeda
— "When thinking about catastrophic historical dramas such as al-Qaeda’s assault on America in 2001 from Afghanistan, we look for “the sense of an ending,” as British literary critic Frank Kermode put it. We want a victory parade, a treaty, a last chapter.

But in the case of al-Qaeda’s cadres in Afghanistan, the villains just seem to have slipped off into irrelevance, with people paying little attention to their apparent demise. The vicious successor group, Islamic State-Khorasan, is on the run, too.

The calamitous story appears to be over, but we missed the ending.

What gives this endgame a bizarre twist is that al-Qaeda’s submission has been overseen by the Taliban, the Islamist militant group that the United States fought in Afghanistan in a largely fruitless 20-year war. Having won power in Kabul, the Taliban has sheltered al-Qaeda but suppressed any foreign operations — and it has attacked ISIS-K as a mortal threat to its rule."

Link
https://archive.is/eZREe

🇦🇫🤝🏴 — 📰 The Washington Post: "The U.S. intelligence community announced what amounted to an obituary for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan this month, details of which were provided to me by a National Security Council official. Because it coincided with the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, some observers saw the release as politically motivated, and it received relatively little public attention.

But it’s worth examining because, if accurate, it suggests a moment of closure in what was a consuming American drama.

Al-Qaeda “is at its historical nadir in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and its revival is unlikely,” said Christy Abizaid, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in a Sept. 11 statement.

She cited declassified intelligence that the group “has lost target access, leadership talent, group cohesion, rank-and-file commitment, and an accommodating local environment.”

Its ability to threaten the United States from Afghanistan “is at its lowest point” since the group migrated there in 1998."

https://archive.is/eZREe

🇦🇫❌🇨🇳 — 📰 Afghanistan International Journalist, Tajuden Soroush on Twitter/X:
— "Taliban sources in Badakhshan say that the Taliban arrested seven members of the Uighur fighters from Faizabad city and transferred them to Kabul.

These fighters had fought alongside the Taliban against the previous government for the past twenty years."

🔗 Tajuden Soroush (@TajudenSoroush)