A Post-Mortem Analysis of ISKP Senior Military Commander Saad Emirati
A Post-Mortem Analysis of ISKP Senior Military Commander Saad Emirati
Saad Emirati was a senior founding military commander of the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) who died in 2016 after leading the ISKP war against the Afghan Taliban, the U.S army, and Afghan armed forces in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. However, little was known about him or how he contributed to ISKP’s sudden rise before his death. ISKP only since 2021 has released his biography and other details of his life, which means now we finally have insights into how Emirati rapidly turned ISKP into a challenger to the Taliban. This previously was a very murky matter.
Emirati’s biography is based largely on Emirati’s interview in Pashto with ISKP’s Voice of Khorasan al-Bayyan radio, which was recorded in early 2016. This interview was later published in Arabic in the 123rd issue of IS’s al-Naba weekly newsletter in March 2018 with several additions (al-Naba #123, March 15, 2018). Pro-ISKP social media channels then released the original audio interview and published the Pashto text version in 2021 to debunk the Afghan Taliban’s anti-ISKP propaganda narratives that declare ISKP as a conspiracy of the U.S and regional intelligence agencies operating in Afghanistan (Youtube/Zabihullah Mujahid, October 31, 2021).
By republishing this biography, ISKP not only aimed to refute this propaganda about ISKP, but also appealed to the Taliban’s foot soldiers by reminding them that ISKP is the heir of the “pure and sincere” Afghan and Pakistani jihadists who fought to establish an independent jihadist base in the region after 9/11. However, they were marginalized by the Afghan Taliban, which waged jihad instead under Pakistani intelligence’s influence.
Moreover, Emirati’s biography, in his words, reveals ISKP’s resilience, despite severe setbacks and defeats the group has faced from the Taliban on one end and the former Afghan government and U.S forces’ onslaughts on the other end for the last five years. His biography also shows the complexities of the militant landscape in the Afghanistan and Pakistan region that became fertile soil for the establishment of the Islamic State (IS), which sought to undermine existing regional jihadist networks predominated by al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Furthermore, Emirati’s account contributes to explaining how ISKP succeeded in rapidly revamping its military operations in Afghanistan, which expanded to the northwestern Khyber Pukhtoonkhawa Province (KPK) of Pakistan after ISKP’s territorial collapse in Afghanistan in early 2020. [1] These attacks showed ISKP’s robust support and clandestine network in Afghanistan and KPK that resulted in its operational resilience.
Saad Emirati’s Background
Saad Emirati’s real name was Abdul Hadi, and he was born in 1983 in the Afghan capital, Kabul, adjacent to Logar province. His family, however, migrated with millions of Afghans to neighboring Pakistan to escape the Soviet troops’ invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. As a result, he grew up in an Afghan refugee camp on the outskirts of the KPK provincial capital in Baghwanan, Peshawar. This camp was only a few kilometers from the Afghan refugees’ largest camp in Pakistan, Shamshatoo, which hosted hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees and was the headquarters of the two prominent Afghan jihadist groups—the Khalis and Hikmatyar factions of Hizb-e-Islami (Terrorism Monitor, May 24, 2007). Emirati studied in the camp until 12th grade and acquired basic English and computer technology skills through private courses.
Emirati narrated that he started his jihadist career with the U.S-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks. He fought his first battle against U.S and Afghan forces in the Manogi district in Kunar in 2003 as part of the brigade of the notorious Afghan militant commander, Ismail (also known as Ahmad Shah). The brigade brought down a U.S forces helicopter in Manogi, resulting in several casualties to the U.S troops (CNN, June 20, 2005). However, Shah was killed in an ambush by the security forces in Peshawar in April 2008 (Dawn, April 20, 2008).
Emirati’s jihadist journey did not end after Shah’s death. Rather, he moved to the greater Paktia region, where he fought under the Afghan Taliban’s Haqqani network and became a prominent commander. Emirati narrated that he was under the mentorship of the prominent Afghan jihadist ideologue Ustad Yasir, who played an influential role in the post-9/11 Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan (Twitter/Ab. Sayed, July 9, 2020). He stated that when the Pakistani security forces arrested Yasir at his home in Peshawar in December 2008, he moved with his comrades to southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar region from Paktia (Dawn, January 4, 2009). He then fought in Kandahar, Zabul, and Helmand provinces.
The Question of Jihad Beyond Afghanistan
The years 2008-2009 represented a crucial stage for the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan when it expanded and became more lethal (VOA, September 8, 2021). The Pakistani government also categorized the Taliban into two categories at that time: the “good” and “bad” Taliban. [2] The former were those who fought in Afghanistan alone, and the latter fought against the Afghan and Pakistani governments and declared them both U.S stooges in the war against the jihadists. The Afghan Taliban’s Haqqani Network further became a prominent example of the “good” category that avoided fighting outside Afghanistan. [3] Although Yasir was a senior official of the Afghan Taliban, Usama bin Laden’s confidential letters revealed that al-Qaeda appointed Yasir to mobilize a jihadist network in Afghanistan and the Pashtun belt of Pakistan. Thus, he and his hundreds of post-9/11 recruits, like Emirati, had a jihadist agenda beyond Afghanistan and declared Pakistan the prime target for its role in the US-led Global War on Terror (al-Naba #123, March 15, 2018).
Emirati never mentioned Haqqani Network’s cordial ties with the Pakistani state and the latter’s arrest of Yasir as a reason for his separation from the Haqqani Network. However, Emirati’s shifting from Paktia to the Kandahar region and later establishing a parallel jihadist network to the Haqqani Network in his native Logar Province under the Pakistani Taliban banner supports this assumption. He also noted that the Afghan Taliban’s policy of limiting its fight to jihad in Afghanistan pushed him to establish a jihadist platform like ISKP that calls for a “borderless jihad.”
Emirati further stated that he eventually came under the mentorship of Shahidullah Shahid (also known as Shaikh Maqbool Orakzai) after Yasir was arrested. Orakzai was a Salafi-jihadist ideologue who was the TTP spokesperson and an influential leader with a close relationship to the TTP emir Hakeem Ullah Mehsud (Dawn, March 4, 2015). Orakzai later became a founding ISKP figure, who then influenced his former co-TTP senior leaders, including ISKP’s founding emir Hafiz Saeed Khan, to pledge allegiance to Abubakar al-Baghdadi (The News, January 13, 2015). As a result, Emirati became an ISKP founding commander with more than a dozen Afghan and Pakistani Taliban commanders who pledged allegiance to al-Baghdadi in a large gathering presided by Orakzai in late 2014.
A Pre-ISKP Challenge to the Taliban Monopoly
Emirati established his jihadist front in Logar under the TTP Saad Bin Abi Waqas brigade. The TTP central media arm Umar Media, published propaganda videos of Emirati and his fighters’ attacks in Logar (Umar Media, January 2012). This was an exceptional extension of the TTP in Afghanistan because the TTP fighters fought in Afghanistan under the Afghan Taliban platform and did not run parallel jihadist networks or brigades. There has always been the strict instruction to allied jihadists that the Afghan Taliban must have a monopoly over leading the Afghanistan insurgency to avoid internal strife. Orakzai’s support for Emirati and the TTP’s interest to have a powerful commander in its ranks might have forced Emirati’s group to commit this “violation.”
The Haqqani Network and TTP were headquartered in the North Waziristan tribal district of KPK, where Emirati would spend time with Orakzai and Mehsud. Some Haqqani Network commanders planned to eliminate Emirati for his rebellion, but its leader, Siraj Uddin Haqqani, disapproved of his assassination because this would result in Haqqani Network infighting with the TTP. [4] Al-Naba’s biography of Emirati nevertheless claims he escaped several assassination attempts by the Afghan Taliban after he rebelled against its policy of fighting only in Afghanistan.
ISKP founder Hafiz Saeed Khan finally appointed Emirati as emir for the Paktia region to establish ISKP’s jihadist network there and to eliminate the Haqqani Network and Taliban monopoly. Although Emirati failed to achieve this goal, Khan still appointed him as ISKP’s military chief in Nangarhar province. ISKP subsequently captured large territories in Nangarhar and was in a massive conflict with Afghan and U.S forces and the Taliban. Thus, ISKP deployed its greatest military strength there to defend its sharia implementation in its territories. Emirati was, however, killed in the Kot district of the Nangarhar province in direct fighting with the Afghan forces in July 2016 (Khama News, July 26, 2016). This abruptly ended his influential jihadist career.
Conclusion
Emirati’s biography shows that the post-9/11 militant generation in Afghanistan and Pakistan prepared the ground for ISKP’s quick rise and expansion in the region, which later took the form of fierce resistance against the Taliban. However, these militants were disaffected in the Taliban ranks due to differences over strategic, policy, and sectarian matters. They were inspired by the global jihadist agenda, whereas the Taliban limited its fighters to fight only on Afghan soil. Thus, they were soon marginalized in the Taliban, although they played an instrumental role in the post-9/11 insurgency in Afghanistan.
ISKP provided these fighters with a platform involving both global ambitions and fighting against the Afghan government, U.S forces, and the Taliban. Moreover, Taliban policies after the August 2021 capture of Kabul further limited the movement’s efforts to state-building focused on Afghanistan instead of a global jihadist agenda. This helped ISKP to resurrect its narrative against the Taliban by declaring it as a nationalist movement that deviated from the jihadist path. [5] As such, ISKP uses all propaganda efforts to recruit hardliners within the Taliban for its jihadist agenda beyond Afghanistan.
Notes:
[1] For details, on the ISKP resurgence, see, Amira Jadoon, Abdul Sayed and Andrew Mines, “The Islamic State Threat in Taliban Afghanistan: Tracing the Resurgence of Islamic State Khorasan,” CTC Sentinel 15, No. 1 [2] Mona Kanwal Sheikh, “Disaggregating the Pakistani Taliban: Does the Good, the Bad and the Ugly Taliban Distinction Represent a Failed Policy?” Danish Institute for International Studies. [3] Sheikh, “Disaggregating the Pakistani Taliban: Does the Good, the Bad and the Ugly Taliban Distinction Represent a Failed Policy?” [4] Author interview with a Haqqani network commander, Kabul, May 2022. [5] Declaring the Afghan Taliban as a nationalist movement deviated from jihadist path and remains ISKP’s main anti-Taliban propaganda. For details see, for example, “We Returned,” Khalid Media, February 2021.
