Following U.S. warnings over potential activity in Kabul by Taliban rival group the Islamic State, Finnish terror experts have warned of the possibility of an attack on the city’s airport as evacuations are still ongoing.
Antti Parosen, assistant military professor at Finland’s National Defence University said the threat of an Islamic State terror attack should be taken seriously saying, “ISIS, at least, certainly has aspirations to act in a situational development that is receiving very significant publicity. Their will, [like their rivals the Taliban], is to show their strength. The threat is real.”
“I would even consider it entirely possible that a group would try to act against evacuation operations. It is precisely because the news value of it is so great that it would strike a stamp on the functionality and notoriety of such a group, which is a force recruiting with the jihadist movement,” Parosen added, YLE reports.
Juha Saarinen, a Finnish terrorism researcher, said that the Kabul airport was an attractive target for groups like the Islamic State saying an attack could take many forms, from attacking civilians on the ground to attempting to down evacuation aeroplanes.
Parosen also noted that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has allowed the Islamic State members in the country to operate more freely despite the two jihadist groups being enemies.
Both experts stated that the Taliban may see preventing an ISIS attack as being in its own interest but questioned to what extent the Taliban had been able to gather information on Islamic State activities.
Over the weekend, Jake Sullivan, national security adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden spoke on the topic of Islamic State activity in Kabul saying the threat is, “real, it is acute, it is persistent, and it is something that we are focused on with every tool in our arsenal.”
“Our commanders on the ground have a wide variety of capabilities that they are using to defend the airfield against a potential terrorist attack. We are working hard with our intelligence community to try to isolate and determine where an attack might come from,” he said.
The Taliban has given a deadline of August 31st for evacuations to be completed but some aircraft have reportedly taken off from Kabul near-empty, including a German aeroplane that evacuated just seven people last week despite having room for at least 200 and a Norwegian flight that flew with just a handful aboard.
The situation on the ground has also become more volatile in recent days, with a German national shot and injured and another person dying as a result of a firefight between gunmen and German and U.S. troops on Monday morning.