Al-Qaeda and Taliban meet Islamic State here, and knock on China’s door

As the tide turns against Islamic State (IS) forces in the battlegrounds of the Middle East, some veteran jihadis are expected to return to their former stomping grounds in areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan near China’s western borders. And when they do, they will be welcomed by an advance party of fighters from Iraq and Syria who moved to eastern Afghanistan last year to help Taliban defectors establish the “Khorasan governorate”.

Islamic State claims surprise attack on Pakistan police academy that left 59 dead

About 70 IS fighters had arrived in Afghanistan by September 2015, according to a report by the United Nations’ al-Qaeda/Taliban Monitoring Team, which found that IS Khorasan had been recruiting followers in 25 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. It controls several districts of Nangarhar province and has established pockets elsewhere in the country, despite being targeted by US and Afghan forces and, separately, by the Afghan Taliban.

“Right now, we see them very focused on trying to establish their caliphate, the Khorasan caliphate, inside Afghanistan,” General John Nicholson, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in an interview with NBC News.

The growing threat posed by IS to the war-torn region was underlined by two attacks last week. A team of three suicide bombers killed 61 people and injured 165 others in an assault on a police training school in the Pakistani city of Quetta, while some 30 villagers were abducted and executed in Afghanistan’s Ghor province.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are no strangers to veteran jihadists; both hosted militants who fought for al-Qaeda against US occupation forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. Their leader, Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, lived in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar for nine years, prior to the September 11 attacks in the United States.