ISIS-K and the Resurgence of the Taliban
WES BRYANT
Summer 2017
The final combat deployment of my career as the lead Special Tactics JTAC for the Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan. In 2014, I’d helped stand up the Baghdad Strike Cell in the onset of the war against ISIS. In 2015, I’d hunted ISIS throughout north and southeast Syria as the campaign against the caliphate expanded. I hadn’t been to Afghanistan since the summer of 2013.
Although the landscape of the battlefield had changed immensely, the fluctuating nature of our strategy remained fully intact. We lacked a clear-cut strategy then as much as we ever had. After sixteen years of warfighting and nation-building efforts by the United States, Afghanistan was still an unstable nation-state.
We had a new enemy, then called ISIS-K. The “K” stood for Khorasan—a historic name for the area that once encompassed what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia.1 Our tunneled focus on ISIS in Iraq and Syria since 2014 had enabled ISIS to take a strong hold in Afghanistan.
ISIS-K ran a heavy recruitment campaign to draw in disgruntled Taliban fighters and other Afghans disillusioned by the Taliban, as well as foreign fighters. The most dedicated of the Taliban, however, couldn’t be swayed. Instead, those Taliban forces became strengthened and emboldened by the threat of ISIS-K. What followed was a massive reinvigoration of Taliban across much of Afghanistan.
When I’d last been to Afghanistan in 2103, Taliban presence in the north was nearly entirely suppressed. By the summer of 2017, the north was a hotbed of revived Taliban activity and subsequently one of our biggest operational focuses aside from the threat of ISIS-K in the east.
The Taliban saw ISIS-K as a competitor for regional and state power. This not only intensified our fight against the Taliban, but an insurgency tribal war broke out between the Taliban and ISIS-K. Although the Taliban fought ISIS-K, they were far from our friends. Any temporary alignments between us were only in the moment, and fleeting.
In Afghanistan we were still plagued by the continual green-on-blue epidemic that had seen our soldiers killed time and again since the start of the war. During my deployment to the special operations task force in Syria back in 2015, our team in Afghanistan had lost two Combat Controllers to a green-on-blue attack. Though they fought back valiantly, Captain Matthew Roland and Staff Sergeant Forrest Sibley were shot and killed by an infiltrator at their camp in the first days of the deployment.2
Then in June of 2017, within the span of a week, our task force endured two major green-on-blue attacks when infiltrators within our partner Afghan commando units killed several of our soldiers and wounded several others. One of my best JTACs, a SOF TACP named Ivan, was among the wounded when he was shot at near point-blank range by an RPG from one of the very Afghan commandos he and his team had been training. 3
Ivan and his team survived that attack only because the first rocket-propelled grenade didn’t detonate, allowing the team to maneuver and giving time for one of the Green Berets to swiftly advance on the shooter and close-in just as he fired another round. The second RPG soared so close to the advancing Green Beret that its tail fin glanced off and slashed his forearm as he raised his weapon to return fire and kill the infiltrator.
A Microcosm of Failure
“We’re troops-in-contact! I repeat, troops-in-contact from the south!”
Jeremiah, one of my SOF TACPs, was yelling over the radio net we had bridged into our task force operations center. He was knee-deep in the fight in ongoing Operation HAMZA.
Op HAMZA was a mission to root out ISIS-K through three valleys set amongst the foothills of the harsh mountain range bordering Pakistan in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province. The operation had famously made the news a couple months earlier when, on April 13, our task force had coordinated the drop of the MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast—otherwise known as the “mother of all bombs.”4
Jeremiah spent the next couple of hours controlling airstrikes onto ISIS fighters surrounding his position using F-16 fighter jets, AC-130U gunships, Apache helicopters, and drones that we dispatched to him from the task force. Meanwhile, we coordinated GMLRS artillery (Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System) barrages onto ISIS targets within danger close of his position when he passed us targeting information in-between his communication with strike aircraft.
It was a tad bit of craziness—but really just another day in Op HAMZA. The operation saw our teams on the ground in near-constant fighting spread across three major valleys with ridgelines between. We racked up a pretty good ISIS-K kill count, and that kept leadership content that the operation was a major success. But I saw Op HAMZA as a microcosm of the fight in Afghanistan as a whole—a reflection of our failure there.
Originally slated to last ten days, the operation had been ongoing for about three months. I’d watched our teams sit on the frontlines for weeks, barely making any progress forward despite our constant air and artillery strikes against ISIS positions day and night. Every few days our teams would try to push further into ISIS territory with their Afghan partner forces—Afghan commando and police units. The Afghan forces would slowly clear ground, inevitably taking fire from multiple ISIS positions and then relying almost solely on our JTACs and long-range artillery to bail them out. Most of the time they’d fall back to their original positions.
HAMZA became a “whack-a-mole” operation—a rinse-and-repeat cycle to virtually nowhere. Our guys were literally sitting in austere valleys, holding ground for extended periods and relying on airstrikes and artillery to defend them from the ISIS forces that snaked through the hills and valleys like ghosts.
ISIS had become adept at using the huge network of long-abandoned talc mining tunnels to conceal their movements. Eventually they even patterned the timing for our airstrikes and artillery and figured out exactly how much of a window they had in order to be able to rain down fire on our positions before withdrawing or maneuvering to another firing position to avoid being targeted by our strikes.
Our teams became sitting ducks for organized attacks by ISIS fighters. HAMZA saw U.S. special operations forces using tactics wholly contrary to the very tenets of special operations, and that soon proved detrimental. By August we had several U.S. wounded and killed as a result of extremely well planned and well executed attacks by ISIS-K. I’d believed that was only a matter of time, and I had voiced that opinion often to the task force leadership—to no avail.
One of the green-on-blue events that June happened in the midst of Op HAMZA, when an Afghan soldier opened up on a squad of infantrymen in the early morning as they slept at their small forward patrol base that held the “line” in one of the valleys. The gutless attack killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded one.5
The Afghan forces on the ground had no real stake in Op HAMZA. They knew as soon as they and the American firepower that was with them withdrew from the valleys, ISIS-K would re-establish in full force.
“HAMZA is an American fight, not an Afghan one,” an Afghan commando vented to one of my JTACs as they sat at their small patrol base in the valley one afternoon.
To me, the operation was a perfect reflection of the U.S. mainstay throughout our years of war in Afghanistan: We pressured the Afghan forces into holding and maintaining ground that they had no real stake in, across enemy-saturated parts of the country that were both rugged and non-permissive. We were often entirely too predictable in our tactics and operational focus. And, we endured constant and ever-increasing green-on-blue attacks as if they were an acceptable risk.
• • •
In June 2017, U.S. military leadership publicly acknowledged failure in Afghanistan. During an address on Capitol Hill, then Secretary of Defense James Mattis somberly admitted that the U.S. was “not winning in Afghanistan.”6
Things haven’t gotten much better since. Especially now that our most recent strategy, incredulously, is to broker a “peace” deal with the Taliban—the terrorist group that was our very reason for going to Afghanistan in the first place. 7
Either way, if our last eighteen years prove one thing, it’s that we need an entirely new approach to Afghanistan, or ISIS and others like it will continue to thrive there.
1 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Khorāsān,” Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/place/Khorasan-historical-region-Asia.
2 Kelly Humphrey, “Two Special Tactics airmen killed in Afghanistan,” NWF Daily News, August 27, 2105, accessed November 4, 2018, https://www.nwfdailynews.com/article/20150827/NEWS/150829343.
3 Jay Croft, “7 US Troops wounded in insider attack in Afghanistan,” CNN, June 17, 2017, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/17/politics/us-casualties-afghanistan-attack/index.html.
4 Barbara Starr and Ryan Browne, “US Drops largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan,” CNN, April 14, 2017, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/13/politics/afghanistan-isis-moab-bomb/index.html.
5 Ahmad Sultan, “Three U.S. soldiers killed, one wounded by Afghan soldier,” Reuters, June 10, 2017, accessed September 14, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-idUSKBN1910OL.
6 Connor O’Brien et al., “Mattis: ‘We Are Not Winning in Afghanistan’,” POLITICO, June 13, 2017, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/13/jim-mattis-not-winning-afghanistan-239488.
7 Mujib Mashal, “U.S. and Taliban Agree in Principle to Peace Framework, Envoy Says,” The New York Times, January 28, 2019, accessed January 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/world/asia/taliban-peace-deal-afghanistan.html.