The Afghan government formally announced the arrest of Aslam Farooqi in a special operation on 5th April. The Afghan intelligence agency, NDS, also announced the arrest of 19 other individuals along with the ISIS chief.
However, Afghan Taliban had denounced this claim of the government. They said that Aslam Farooqi was not ‘arrested’ but in fact ‘surrendered’ before the authorities in order to seek refuge.
The Taliban further claimed that the Afghan government no longer has the capacity to continue the war, hence this surrender is being termed as an arrest.
The question arises, will Aslam Farooqi’s arrest turn out to be a setback significant enough to add to the already weakening state of the terrorist organisation in the country? Will it be able to successfully threaten ISIS’s existence in Afghanistan?
Technically, IS can trace its roots back to the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian. In 2004, a year after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden and formed al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which became a major force in the insurgency.
In June 2014, the group formally declared the establishment of a 'caliphate' - a state governed in accordance with Islamic law, or Sharia, by God's deputy on Earth, or caliph.
It has demanded that Muslims across the world swear allegiance to its leader - Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri al-Samarrai, better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - and migrate to territory under its control.
Afghanistan formed allegiance with the ISIS in 2015, when the Pakistani Taliban leader, Hafiz Saeed from the Orakzai tribal areas was appointed as the first governor of the Afghanistan Khorasan chapter.
Former TTP spokesman and Jamaatul Ahrar leader Ehsanullah Ehsan admits that ISIS has suffered a significant loss in Afghanistan and that the terror group might be wiped out soon. He thinks that the successful negotiation between Afghan Taliban and the US will end up posing serious threat to the Islamic State and all banned terror groups.
This is a shorter version of an Urdu article published on Naya Daur's Urdu website. Read the original piece here.