Taliban fighters, unsettled by peace, seek new battles abroad

As a child studying in a madrassa in Afghanistan, Mohammad Khalid Tahir dreamed of waging jihad. By the time he was a teenager, he had joined the Taliban and celebrated when they seized power from the U.S.-backed government two years ago.

But the high from that victory did not last. Reassigned as a soldier in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, he frequently complained that he was bored and longed to return to his life’s purpose, according to his family.

So this spring, he did — but across the border in Pakistan.

“Our only expectation is to be martyred,” Tahir says in a video of him en route to Pakistan that was viewed by The New York Times. About a month later, he was killed by Pakistani security forces, his relatives said.

As a generation of fighters raised in war now finds itself stuck in a country at peace, hundreds of young Taliban soldiers have crossed illegally into Pakistan to battle alongside an insurgent group, according to Taliban members, local leaders and security analysts.

Like Tahir, many say they are determined to continue waging jihad — wherever in the world it takes them.

The exodus has renewed long-standing fears about violent extremism spilling out of Afghanistan under the Taliban and destabilizing neighboring countries or one day reaching Western targets. Countries from Russia and China to the United States and Iran have raised alarms about the possible resurgence in Afghanistan of terrorist groups, like al-Qaida and the Islamic State, with more global ambitions.

Taliban leadership has publicly condemned the outflow of fighters. The men, who acknowledge that they have gone to Pakistan without official permission, have joined a militant group known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, which seeks to impose strict Islamist rule.

But whether Afghanistan’s government stems the tide will signal to the rest of the world its ability and willingness to contain extremist groups within its borders.

“If you look at how the Taliban are enabling the TTP, restraining but housing various elements of al-Qaida, protecting and shielding the alphabet soup of Central Asian militant organizations — all of this challenges the idea that the Taliban are serious about not allowing Afghanistan to be a safe haven of international terrorism,” said Asfandyar Mir, a senior expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a federal government institution.

In Pakistan, the young men have already helped fuel a return of militant violence this year, worsening tensions between the two governments. Pakistani authorities have accused Afghan officials of sheltering terror groups and turning a blind eye to their soldiers joining the groups, which Taliban officials deny.

Last week, an Islamic State affiliate long based in Afghanistan carried out a suicide blast in Pakistan that killed about 60 people. The bombing added to a mounting death toll from similar attacks by the TTP that have grown more frequent since the Afghan Taliban came to power.

Over the past year, the TTP has carried out at least 123 attacks across Pakistan — about double the number it claimed in the year before the Taliban seized power, according to the Islamabad-based Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which monitors extremist violence.

It’s unclear exactly how many Afghans have crossed the border to join the TTP or other groups, but it is a small minority of the tens of thousands of former Taliban fighters.

“Young men seeking thrill and adventure is common everywhere; from Americas, to Europe to Asia, Africa and elsewhere,” said Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesperson for the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “This adventurism does not reflect common trends or public opinion, rather they are anomalies.”

Those who go are driven by yearslong religious education in Taliban-run madrassas that extol the ideals of global jihad and martyrdom, they and their relatives say. Others are bored in their new peacetime roles as soldiers or police officers charged with mundane tasks like manning checkpoints and doing routine security sweeps.

Many are also invigorated by the collapse of the Western-backed government in Afghanistan.

“Peace and security have been secured in our country, so now we need to fight in other countries and secure the rights of other Muslims,” a Taliban member named Wahdat said one recent evening while he drank tea alongside a handful of his colleagues in Kabul.

“It’s more important to go there and continue our jihad there than to stay in our country,” his friend, Malang added. Wahdat and Malang, both 22 and now police officers, preferred to go only by their last names because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Both men grew up in Wardak province, a stretch of central Afghanistan that harbored deep support for the Taliban, where decades of war transformed the young generation. Schools run by the Taliban cropped up across the province. Boys aspired to wage jihad rather than labor on their family’s farms.

“Our village had been known for producing engineers and doctors before the wars,” said Abdulbari Wasil Sardar, 38, a resident of Wardak whose 17-year-old nephew, Muhammad Idrees Suhaib, was killed in Pakistan this spring fighting for the TTP.

“Now the young generation are only interested in doing jihad,” Sardar added.

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Like many boys in their village, Wahdat and Malang joined the Taliban as teenagers and disappeared into mountainside hideouts from which they staged hit-and-run attacks on Western and Afghan government forces. They celebrated each successful operation against the so-called infidels. They lionized their friends who died as martyrs.

But when the Taliban seized power in 2021, Wahdat and Malang were reassigned to police units in Kabul, where they spent their days sitting around their outpost, restless to go to the mountains.

When five of their friends went to Pakistan this spring to return to jihad, both men brimmed with jealousy. Pulling out his phone, Malang opened a video showing a group of men walking across the border, scarfs wrapped tightly around their heads to protect them from the dust.

“We have friends there who even carried out suicide attacks,” Wahdat said, staring at his friend’s phone. Both men say they will go to Pakistan in the coming months to join the TTP.

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Pakistan officials have implored the Taliban to crack down on border crossings. On Sunday, Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Syed Asim Munir, implied that his country would use force if Afghanistan failed to act, citing concerns over “sanctuaries” militants had on Afghan soil. Pakistan, he said, “will spare no effort to dismantle terrorist networks and protect its citizens at all costs.”

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In response, Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban administration spokesperson, denied those accusations and said that “the territory of Afghanistan will not be used against the security of any country.”

In a speech, the Taliban’s acting minister of defense, Mawlawi Mohammad Yaqoub, also warned former Talib fighters against launching attacks outside of Afghanistan.

Still, it is unclear if or how the government will enforce that mandate — and whether it will deter young Talibs from leaving the country to fight.

The enlistments have already helped invigorated the TTP, an ally of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan that seeks to expel the Pakistan government from the country’s border areas.

The group was all but stamped out nearly a decade ago. But over the past two years, it has roared back to life. Hundreds of TTP fighters were freed from Afghan prisons during the Taliban takeover and armed themselves with U.S. military equipment once provided to the U.S.-backed Afghan government, according to Pakistani authorities and videos published by the TTP.

In recent months, the TTP has also begun systematically recruiting Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan, according to Taliban members and security analysts. Now, anyone interested in joining its ranks is instructed to link up with other recruits and TTP fighters in eastern Afghanistan who know how to cross the border illegally.

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In Kabul, Wahdat and Malang expressed a sense of duty unfilled after coming of combat age just as the war they trained for came to an end.

Now, they said, they were determined not to let their dreams of martyrdom pass them by. “Everywhere that Muslims are in trouble we must help them,” Malang said. “Like Palestine and Myanmar.”

Wahdat added: “Even America.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.