UN Security Council: ISIL Replacing Taliban in Afghanistan

ISIL has infiltrated into Afghanistan and is attempting to step into the Taliban’s boots, acknowledged the UN Security Council. Russia’s representative to the UN warns Central Asian states could be the next stop for the extremists.

The presence of ISIL fighters in the country has been confirmed by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

The UN envoy to Afghanistan acknowledged that the ISIL could potentially unite minor extremist groups in the country under a new command.

“It is UNAMA’s assessment that the group’s presence is of concern, but that ISIL’s significance is not so much a function of its intrinsic capacities in the area but of its potential to offer an alternative flagpole to which otherwise isolated insurgent splinter groups can rally,” Nicholas Haysom announced at the UN Security Council, as cited by the Associated Press. Still, the ISIL has not established “firm roots” in the Afghanistan, he noted.

Moscow has rushed to voice concern with the ISIL broadening its geographical activities into Afghanistan and spreading radical Islam further to the north into other Central Asian states.

Russia’s representative in the UN expressed deep concern with “increasingly frequent reports of the worsening situation in the north of Afghanistan, in areas bordering countries which were once Soviet republics and remain ‘our friends and allies.’”

Vladimir Safronkov, Russia’s deputy UN ambassador, called on to the UN Security Council to react immediately to prevent the ISIL’s further expansion that could “rock the boat” and destabilize the situation in Afghanistan with its newly-elected administration.

“The states of the region have legitimate concerns about this turn of events,” he said, according to the AP. “Turning it into yet another safe haven for fighters and extremists is categorically unacceptable.”

Afghanistan’s UN Ambassador Zahir Tanin confirmed information about the IS infiltrating Afghanistan, but stressed that “the main enemy we face is the Taliban that continue to fight against us,” marking out the presence of “some splinter groups with more extreme orientations.”

In early 2015, suspicion emerged that the ISIL is trying to replace white flags of the Taliban with their own black ones in war-torn Afghanistan.