Russian Embassy Murders in Kabul May Signal New Isolation For Taliban
Russians, Pakistanis, Chinese all back away from Afghan regime
By: Salman Rafi Sheikh
On September 5, two Russian embassy staff were killed and others were injured in a suicide attack carried out by the Islamic State – Khorasan (IS-K) in Kabul, the first major assault on Russia inside Afghanistan since the US withdrawal a year ago.
While the attack itself indicates how tenuous the security situation is on the ground in Afghanistan, it also signifies that Afghanistan is far from a country squarely placed in the Russian regional axis, or any other.
When the US withdrew in August 2021, an overwhelming majority of analysts in the West and elsewhere predicted Afghanistan’s inevitable fall to Russia and China. But this has not happened at all. On the contrary, the inability and unwillingness of the Taliban to control various militant groups has led these countries to review the extent of engagement they were previously willing to offer to the Taliban.
While Moscow officially dubbed the attack on embassy staff an ‘instance’ of global terrorism and said it reinforced its resolve to fight, even jointly with the Taliban, the assault in fact led to the Taliban’s exclusion from the recently held Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit held in Samarkand…