Early warnings of the coming attack

Because the Belgian government considered the background information of a coming attack at the airport a serious risk of danger, they stopped their evacuation program in time, before the explosion made so many casualties.

Thursday at the Abbey Gate of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, where hundreds of Afghans and foreign citizens had been queuing up to get on the last evacuation flights out of the country, there were two bomb explosions killing at least 90 people. The warning several secret services had received became a real drama. The explosions killed 13 U.S. service members, injured 18 Americans and killed at least 60 Afghans. In a video of the carnage shared with several television stations, bloodied bomb victims lay still among water bottles and backpacks crammed with the possessions grabbed for the exodus from Kabul. A man wearing an Afghan national soccer team shirt floated in the canal that runs along the road to the gate, next to the small body of a boy, both heads submerged.

The attacks marked the most gruesome and ignominious moment of a country which is on its turning point, looking forward to a Taliban regime. But for some those Taliban militants are not religious enough and not demanding enough of the Afghan people. Several Taliban members, therefore, have chosen to connect with the regional branch of Islamic State, a sworn enemy of the Taliban, giving this bombing just as a sign for those who would not turn over to the Sharia Law.

It looks like the world shall have to face a new enemy: Islamic State-Khorasan Province, abbreviated ISIS-K or ISKP).

In Afghanistan the dreams and goals of the women seem to have all gone,

“everything is gone.”

The Taliban instantiated itself from the bombings and consider ISIS-K as a rival, not an ally — and ISIS-K is neither as large, nor as wealthy as al Qaeda was. When they took over Afghanistan it was already a huge question mark if they would keep to their promises to be more lenient than 20 years ago. The Taliban are now also looking for legitimacy. This time they also promised not to exercise their power to limit women’s rights. Their leader promised children would be able again to go to school. Until what age he did not tell.

Kabir Taneja, a fellow at New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation said that ISIS-K is:

“definitely not comparable to al Qaeda in 2001.”

“For now, they are an Afghan-based insurgency with diminished power.”

While experts say it’s difficult to estimate how ISIS-K’s presence in Afghanistan will play out in the future, the attack at Kabul airport indicates that it is a growing threat.

“The fact that they could impact Western forces and the Taliban in one attack is a big win for them,”

says Saurav Sarkar, a security specialist and former visiting fellow at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C. think-tank.