'Forgotten' Terrorist Groups Are on the Move

A new U.N. report describes how the resilient Islamic State’s Afghan branch is escalating attacks—powered by AI—beyond its home base.

ISIS demonstrated its long reach with a Jan. 29 attack on the airport in Niger’s capital. (AFP file)

While U.S. intelligence and national security officials have been laser-focused in recent weeks on Venezuela and Iran, they just got a powerful reminder that it might be time to pay some attention elsewhere.

Shortly after midnight local time Thursday, motorcycle-riding gunmen from an Islamic State branch in Africa launched a coordinated attack on the airport and adjacent military base in Niamey, Niger’s capital, shooting at soldiers and blowing holes in the fuselage of an airplane.

It was an especially bold attack, targeting a military compound in an African capital. And while casualties in this case so far appear to be minimal—initial reports suggest that four Nigerian soldiers were wounded and 11 militants killed—it was yet one more demonstration that the jihadi terror group, now largely decentralized, still has the resources and determination to deliver frightening strikes around the globe.

Over the past few years, the ranks of Islamic State branches have surged with multiple attacks throughout West Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan where, according to a recent United Nations report, the organization has recruited some 600 fresh fighters from Central Asia, many of them teenagers.

“What this shows is that the Islamic State continues to be a major challenge in sub-Sahara Africa as well as their transnational reach,” said Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, a national security research group, who closely tracks jihadi terror groups. “In some of these countries, their reach extends to the capital.” he told SpyTalk.

It’s a point that was underscored in the U.N. report, prepared by a special Security Council committee, which focused on Afghanistan. Seven years after a U.S.-backed coalition destroyed the last outpost of the Islamic State caliphate in Iraq and Syria, the group remains very much alive and dispersed into semi-autonomous branches across multiple continents.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban government claims to have cracked down and “defeated” the local Islamic State branch and suppressed other terror groups. But “that claim is not credible,” the report states. In fact, the Islamic State branch has proven “resilient” with the “capability and intent to conduct external operations.” It has actually expanded its operations in northern and western provinces of Afghanistan, setting up madrasas to indoctrinate children, including with a suicide bombing training course for teenagers as young as 14.

Most notably, the report states, the Islamic State of Khorasan (as the Afghan branch calls itself), “has been at the forefront of experimenting with artificial intelligence.” The group has used artificial intelligence programs to help manufacture improvised explosive devices from household items, print weapon components on 3D printers and create sophisticated propaganda for recruiting new militants, the report states.

Perhaps the most dramatic example came in March 2024, after gunmen affiliated with the Islamic Branch in Afghanistan opened fire inside a Moscow music hall, killing more than 140 people.

Four days later, a video started circulating showing a news anchor in a helmet and fatigues saying the attack was not a terror operation but part of a “raging war between the Islamic State and countries fighting Islam.” It was entirely fabricated by the terror group using AI.

The video was the start of a semi-regular “news” program, powered by AI and mimicking Al Jazeera newscasts, in which artificial news anchors dutifully read dispatches from their “correspondents.”

“For ISIS, AI means a game changer,” said Rita Katz, co-founder of the SITE Intelligence Group, at the time.

(As if to underscore the group’s resilience, two weeks ago, the Islamic State’s Afghan branch claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Chinese restaurant in Kabul, killing seven people and injuring more than a dozen. The attack was part of a stepped up targeting of Chinese citizens by the Islamic State in retaliation for the brutal Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in China.)

The United Nations report also finds that, more than four years after the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, multiple terrorist groups continue to operate brazenly in Afghanistan. The Pakistani Taliban or TTP, has carved out a de facto safe haven in the country to intensify attacks inside Pakistan, conducting more than 600 operations last year. Another related group, known as Ittihad-ul-Mujahideen— which includes offshoots from the TTP—has popped up over the past year “to conduct attacks while maintaining plausible deniability” from the TTP.

Even Al Qaeda remains active, weakened but still very much alive. While the Taliban government publicly claims there is no longer an Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, the U.N. report assesses that “the status, strength and location” of the terror group “remains unchanged,” with senior Al Qaeda commanders reportedly living in Kabul with apparent impunity.

But more than four years after the United States’ chaotic 2021 pullout, “it’s really hard” to assess the current strength of Al Qaeda inside the country, Clarke said on the SpyTalk podcast (taped the day before the Niger attack.) “It’s an intelligence and data black hole.”

Eavesdropping Limits

While the U.S. still has “world class” signals intelligence —which presumably was how Biden administration officials were able to give an unheeded warning to the Kremlin before the music hall attack—human intelligence-gathering on terror groups in Afghanistan was never very good.

“Now when we don’t have a presence there, what don’t we know?” Clarke wondered. “What signals are we missing and what relationships do we not understand? What assumptions are we adhering to that are wildly outdated?”

All of which raises the sobering question as to whether the Afghan-based terror groups can carry off lethal attacks inside the United States.

Clarke notes that there has been no shortage of plots by Americans inspired by Islamic State messaging, most of them, but not all, busted by the FBI. Over last year’s Halloween weekend, officials revealed that seven men had been arrested in Michigan and New Jersey on charges of plotting terror operations modeled after the November 2015 attack in the Bataclan area outside France’s national soccer stadium in Paris. In that case, Islamic State extremists, who had travelled to Syria for military training by the group, carried out simultaneous shootings and bombings, killing 130 people and traumatizing the country.

While Clarke doesn’t see another Sept. 11-style attack on New York and the Pentagon as likely, he does worry about the possibility that the Islamic State in particular could pull off something like the 2024 Moscow music hall strike, which was in turn patterned after Bataclan. Both of them involved mainly firearms.

“Let’s say you had a Bataclan-style attack here in the United States on U.S. soil a week before Christmas,” he said. “Three coordinated attackers go in with long guns into shopping malls. The devastation—I mean, we’d be talking about that for years, right?”

And yet, notes Clarke, the Trump administration has refocused its intelligence interests elsewhere, while the ranks of experienced FBI counterterrorism agents and CIA officers have dwindled.

“Look, I’m very concerned on a number of levels,” Clarke said about the current state of the country’s counter-terrorism defenses. “I worry about the politicization of intelligence. I also worry about leaving the cupboard bare.

“This is more anecdotal…” he added, “but every time I go to Washington now, there’s fewer and fewer people working counter-terrorism.

“Everything now is about great power competition,” he said. “Everything is about a rising China or revanchist Russia. And counterterrorism has become a dirty word because people really don’t want to think about it.”

The terror groups are filling the vacuum.