(FiveNation.com)- The Taliban isn’t shutting down ISIS, and as a result, more terror attacks should be expected to increase as soon as this summer.
Those were the words of General Kenneth McKenzie, who serves as the U.S. Central Command, delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing earlier this week.
On Tuesday, McKenzie opined:
“The Taliban is attempting to maintain pressure on ISIS. They’re finding it difficult to do so. We’re coming out of the winter; traditionally, this would now begin the fighting season. It is my expectation that ISIS attacks will ramp up in Afghanistan as we go into the summer.”
The United States used to have a fairly solid understanding of Islamic terrorists who were part of al-Qaeda as well as other terrorist organizations that operated inside Afghanistan. That was until President Joe Biden led a disastrous and chaotic military withdrawal from the country at the end of the summer of 2021.
Now, as McKenzie said a few months ago, the U.S. doesn’t have much capability at all to track these terrorists.
The Associated Press reported recently that McKenzie says it’s clear al-Qaeda is trying to rebuild a large presence in Afghanistan. Many militants and terrorists who fled the country in recent years are now making their way back in through various porous borders, and the U.S. is having a difficult time tracking their whereabouts or their sheer numbers.
The reason for this lack of information is because the U.S. lost intelligence information that was being sent from forces on the ground in Afghanistan. In addition, there is no longer a government running the country that is friendly to America.
As a result, McKenzie said the U.S. has to rely on missile and drone strikes that originate from countries near Afghanistan rather than from within.
As he said recently:
“We’re probably at about 1% or 2% of the capabilities we once had to look into Afghanistan.”
The general added it was “very hard” to ensure terrorist groups would not be able to use Afghanistan as the launching pad for attacks against America — as al-Qaeda did in 2001.
A major development that led to ISIS being “reinvigorated,” as McKenzie described, was the fact that the Taliban released various terrorists from prisons in Afghanistan that ended up being abandoned when Biden withdrew troops and the country’s government fell.
Senior intelligence sources in India, for example, that an ISIS terrorist who murdered 13 members of the U.S. services in an attack near the Kabul airport was released from prison last August. And he’s not the only major terrorist that has found himself free under the new Taliban government.
That’s obviously a major concern, as McKenzie described:
“So, certainly, we should expect a resurgent ISIS. It would be very surprising if that weren’t the case. It remains to be seen that the Taliban are going to be able to take effective action against them.”
