Written by: Walid Wiyar
Every noble struggle necessitates a pristine purpose, unwavering leadership, and a well-defined strategy as its underpinning. This foundation provides the struggle with longevity, stability, and triumph. It connects the material components of the struggle with its spiritual core, instilling morale in the combatants, as morale is imperative for instigating and sustaining any movement or transformation.
In Afghanistan, the Islamic Emirate’s struggle and its triumph over technologically advanced occupiers were rooted in this pure purpose, dedicated leadership, and adherence to principles. The objective of this struggle was the establishment of Islamic Shari’ah and the independence of Afghanistan. The swift realization of this lofty objective was ascribed to the potent spiritual impetus and unswerving faith in its leadership and course.
The extremist fighters and their leaders, especially ISIS, also believe that by following this approach, they can manipulate people and can achieve their sinister goals, which were assigned to them by their American and Western patrons. However, this is the malicious thinking of khareji leaders; it is both their mistake and a deception of their hired soldiers.
The manifesto and purpose of the Islamic Emirate are not novel. Since its inception almost three decades ago, its goals have been evident to the populace. Its accomplishments are tangible, and its adherents have demonstrated their loyalty and dedication not for worldly gains but out of a sense of religious obligation, even to the extent of sacrifice.
Efforts by impure factions and the Khawarij to imitate this noble cause will not prosper, as they are impelled by the agendas of foreign policymakers seeking to tarnish sincere struggles by associating them with negative connotations.
Daesh, for instance, asserts that their aim is to resurrect the Islamic Caliphate, and they have altered their name multiple times to reflect this. Following successive defeats in Iraq and Syria, they rebranded themselves as the “Khorasan branch” to allure discarded, infamous figures from the ranks of the Islamic Emirate, mercenaries from the former republic, and major intelligence agencies from the region.
Nonetheless, even during the republic and now under the Islamic Emirate’s revived governance, their malevolent aspirations were thwarted and continue to be foiled.
A legitimate caliphate is indeed the grand aspiration of the Islamic Ummah, but the hues of this vision are made with the blood of the valiant martyrs of struggle and jihad, not with the darkness, ignorance, and vanquished ideology of the Khawarij and their mercenary assassins.
Daesh’s secondary assertion is that they are engaged in a pure struggle, or jihad, for Islamic leadership. However, their brutal deeds have illustrated to the Afghan people and Muslims globally that they are unfamiliar with the spirit of jihad and its tenets and values. Instead, they act like thieves and outlaws, plundering areas and appropriating possessions to line their own pockets while treating individuals as captives and spoils. They have repeatedly faltered in this regard, and the populace’s deep-seated abhorrence for them persists.
Moreover, they proffer vacuous assurances of paradise and rewards to their mercenaries and deceived young recruits. Nevertheless, these assurances are hollow. Their rhetoric of paradise is contradicted by their own actions, resulting in inconsistencies that even their own adherents acknowledge. In truth, locals decline to bury their deceased in cemeteries, leaving them to decay in the mountains.
Lastly, they instruct their adherents to obey their leaders as if they are devout, yet obeying corrupt, espionage-driven leaders is fundamentally erroneous. They wage their profit-motivated, intelligence-orchestrated wars under an Islamic guise while ensconced in military compounds and intelligence enclaves, even trembling when dispatching messages. They depend on disseminating terror through videos and images of brutality, deeming it a manifestation of their might.
It is imperative for people to comprehend that this is part of the 21st-century intelligence and crusader wars, where the Khawarij are exploited to defame Islamic principles. They exploit all the noble slogans to desecrate sacred paths, but the defenders of Shari’ah within the Emirate will never permit these malevolent aims and strategies to be actualized in Afghanistan.
