Making sense of Daesh in Afghanistan: a social movement perspective

Abstract

So-called Islamic State (IS or Daesh) in Iraq and Syria is widely interpreted as a terrorist phenomenon. The proclamation in late January 2015 of a Wilayat Khorasan, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan, as an IS branch is commonly interpreted as a manifestation of Daesh's global ambition to erect an Islamic caliphate. Its expansion implies hierarchical order, command structures and financial flows as well as a transnational mobility of fighters, arms and recruits between Syria and Iraq, on the one hand, and Afghanistan-Pakistan, on the other. In this Working Paper, we take a (new) social movement perspective to investigate the processes and underlying dynamics of Daesh’s emergence in different parts of the country. By employing social movement concepts, such as opportunity structures, coalition-building, resource mobilization and framing, we disentangle the different types of resource mobilization and long-term conflicts that have merged into the phenomenon of Daesh in Afghanistan. In dialogue with other approaches to terrorism studies as well as peace, civil war and security studies, our analysis focuses on relations and interactions among various actors in the Afghan-Pakistan region and their translocal networks. The insight builds on a ten-month fieldwork-based research project conducted in four regions - east, west, north-east and north Afghanistan - during 2016. We find that Daesh in Afghanistan is a context-specific phenomenon that manifests differently in the various regions across the country and is embedded in a longterm transformation of the religious, cultural and political landscape in the cross-border region of Afghanistan-Pakistan. The direct links between Daesh in Syria and Iraq and its branch in Afghanistan are relatively weak, mostly indirect and largely symbolic, being performed through public displays of allegiance. Daesh appears to mobilize resources mainly through translocal social networks established in the past and connect the Afghan-Pakistan border region with Gulf Arab countries, not Daesh’s headquarters in Raqqa. The ideology of Jihadi Salafism derives from longer-term processes and provides a new framework for actors in Afghanistan that is there to stay. Jihadi Salafism is a small but ultra- violent part of the large-scale spread of Salafism manifest in the mushrooming of Salafi mosques and madrassas, particularly in the east, north-east and north of Afghanistan. The Paper suggests that, while Daesh in Afghanistan is not the extended arm of Raqqa, it certainly has to be taken seriously. For it is precisely this relative autonomy that makes it likely to survive the fall of Mosul and Raqqa.