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For more than a week, the eyes of the world have been on Ukraine as Russia continues its military offensive through the country.

But Ukraine isn't the only part of the world in the midst of an armed conflict. Some countries, such as Somalia and Syria, have experienced military conflicts spanning more than a decade. In other regions, worsening tensions have led some observers to fear that a war could break out at some point in the future.

Here are some other regions that are currently at war or could eventually end up there due to ongoing tensions.

For almost 11 years, Syria has been caught in a civil war between its government, the Syrian opposition and ISIS. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights places the death toll between 494,438 and 606,000.

Bashar al-Assad's government has also been supported by Vladimir Putin, who has deployed Russian airstrikes against Syrian rebels and ISIS since 2015.

The conflict in Syria has also created a refugee crisis, as 6.8 million Syrians have been forced to flee their country. But as neighbouring European countries prepare to welcome the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees fleeing, some have pointed out the double standards in how refugees from the Middle East have been treated.

While Taiwan and Mainland China have been controlled by separate governments since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Beijing has long contended that Taiwan is a breakaway province of the People's Republic of China.

In recent years, tensions between the two sides have grown with China ramping up military pressure and Taiwan asserting sovereignty. Some observers have expressed fears that Beijing could one day initiate an invasion of Taiwan, similar to Russia's attack on Ukraine.

"There is a great sense of insecurity when you talk to the folks in Taiwan about the impact of invasion of Ukraine and what this could mean for them," said Tina J. Park, executive director for the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, in an interview with CTVNews.ca on Monday.

Taiwanese authorities have called it "inappropriate" to " link Ukraine's situation with Taiwan's, disturbing people's morale." However, If Russia's invasion of Ukraine turns out to be successful, Park believes that could set "a very dangerous precedent for what other authoritarian regimes take away as lessons."

"China is always interested in exerting more influence over Taiwan," Park said. "China has been historically interested in that, and Taiwan has been very fearful of potential annexation."

The Yemen Civil War has gone on for over seven years, killing more than 377,000, according to the UN.

Since 2014, the Yemeni government led by Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi has been at war against the Houthi movement, a predominately Shia Muslim political group in Yemen. In 2015, Saudi Arabia and some of its allies started a bombing campaign in the country to support the Hadi government.

The conflict in Yemen is also part of the proxy battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, although it remains unclear to what extent Iran is supporting the Houthis.

The Saudi intervention has brought widespread condemnation over the high number of civilian casualties. Nearly 25,000 civilians have died in Yemen from the Saudi-led campaign.

The U.S. has also been providing logistical, intelligence and arms support for the Saudi-led coalition, although U.S. President Joe Biden promised in January 2021 that Washington would stop providing arms to the Saudis.

Canada has been shipping light-armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia as well, but it's unclear if these vehicles have been used in the Yemen conflict.

The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, coinciding with the withdrawal of American troops and the end of the U.S. mission in the country.

It only took the Taliban three months to take over the whole country, as the Afghan military failed to push back against the offensive without U.S. support.

Despite the Taliban's return to power, war continues to be a reality in Afghanistan. For the past seven years, the Taliban has been at war with ISIS-K, the ISIS affiliate based in Central Asia. ISIS-K was also involved in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport in August 2021, when evacuation efforts were taking place.

Some Afghans who remain loyal to the previous government have organized under the National Resistance Front and taken up arms against the Taliban. These militias, largely based in Afghanistan's Panjshir region, have regularly engaged in clashes with the Taliban ever since they came into power.

Both India and Pakistan claim the region of Kashmir in the Himalayas as part of their territory. Since 1947, the two sides have engaged in wars, skirmishes and military standoffs over control of the territory. Currently, approximately half of the territory is controlled by India while the other half is controlled by Pakistan.

Since the late 1980s, militant groups supported by Pakistan have also been engaged in conflict with Indian police and military in the parts of Kashmir administered by India. Attacks from militant groups, as well as the Indian government's counter-insurgency operations, have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths.

India has also been engaged in border disputes with China in the same region. Since 2020, Indian and Chinese troops have engaged in skirmishes near Tibet and India's Ladakh region, located next to Kashmir.

However, instead of gun battles, these skirmishes have generally been fought with fists, rocks, barbed wire and melee weapons. This is because in 1996, the two nuclear states signed a treaty agreeing to not use firearms during border disputes.

Pakistan resolved its border disputes with China in 1963 and since then, the two nations have shared close economic and military ties.

Somalia has been in a civil war between governments and rebel groups since 1991, but the most recent phase of the war began in 2006 with the rise of al-Shabaab, an affiliate of al Qaeda.

Hundreds of thousands of Somalis have died due to the fighting as well as the famine that ensued. The UN High Commission for Refugees estimates that 1.5 million Somalis have also been internally displaced.

Around 700 U.S. troops had also been actively involved in the conflict, launching airstrikes and carrying out raids against al-Shabab and other allied militant groups. But in late 2020, then-U.S. president Donald Trump announced that nearly all American troops would withdraw from the country. Despite the withdrawal, which was completed in January 2021, U.S. forces have continued to carry out occasional airstrikes against al-Shabab.

Since November 2020, the Ethiopian government has been at war with the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), an ethnonationalist paramilitary group and political party that governs the region of Tigray in northern Ethiopia.

Between 1991 and 2018, the TPLF had been a powerful part of Ethiopia's governing coalition. But in 2018, Abiy Ahmed became Ethiopia's prime minister, putting the TPLF in opposition.

One of the first things that Abiy did as prime minister was sign a peace treaty with Eritrea, which had been an adversary of the TPLF. Tensions between the Ethiopian government and the TPLF came to a head after Abiy postponed the 2020 elections, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, and the TPLF retreated back to Tigray. That's when Tigrayan forces attacked an Ethiopian military base, and fighting has continued since then.

The UN says over two million people have in northern Ethiopia have been displaced because of the conflict. UN investigators last November said that there are "reasonable grounds to believe that all parties" of the war are committing war crimes, citing widespread reports of rapes, looting of properties and ethnic-based attacks.

The United Nations and much of the international community, including Canada, consider the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to be under Israeli occupation. In the Palestinian territories, Israel imposes strict limits on the movement of Palestinians as well as the flow of goods and services.

Israel has regularly exchanged rocket fire with Hamas in the Gaza Strip since the militant group came into power in 2006. The most recent outbreak of violence came after Hamas launched rockets into Israel in May 2021, as Israel's Supreme Court was expected to deliver a ruling on whether to evict Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

While casualties in Israel have been minimal, thanks in large part to Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system, the UN reported that 256 people in Gaza were killed in the May 2021 conflict, 128 being civilians.

Human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say that Israel routinely uses "discriminatory force" to crack down on Palestinian protesters in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Palestinians have been subjected to violence and terror from Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank, violence towards which human rights groups say that Israel ignores. Canada and the international community also consider the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be a violation of international law.

In February 2021, the Myanmar military staged a coup d'tat, resulting in the ousting and arrest of Sate Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi.

That led to mass protests against the coup along with the start of an insurgency against the military junta. The pro-democracy government-in-exile as well as ethnic paramilitary groups, like the Kachin Independence Army and the Karen National Liberation Army, have engaged in increasingly violent clashes with the military.

The death toll from the armed conflict is unclear, but the UN says that number of deaths is "in the thousands." In a report published in February, the human rights group Foritfy Rights said the Myanmar military has massacred civilians, used human shields and other committed other war crimes throughout the conflict.

Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, triggering a war that left more than 100,000 people dead. Since then, the country has comprised two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Republic of Srpska. The presidency of the country is also shared by three people representing the three main ethnic groups -- Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

However, tensions within Bosnia have re-emerged as Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who serves as the Serb member of the presidency, has been pursuing an increasingly secessionist and nationalist agenda.

The U.S. imposed sanctions against Dodik in January, accusing him of "corrupt activities" that threaten to destabilize the region. The EU has vowed to avert the possible breakup of Bosnia and is also considering sanctions against Dodik.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have long been engaged in conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region comprised of mostly ethnic Armenians that is internationally recognized as a part of Azerbaijan.

The two countries had both been Soviet republics. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence and sought to join the new state of Armenia. Azerbaijan refused to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh's independence, resulting in a war that lasted from 1988 to 1994.

After a ceasefire agreement was signed, Armenia retained control of the Azerbaijani territories around Nagorno-Karabakh. But in September 2020, fighting broke out again after Azerbaijan sought to reclaim some of the territories held by Armenia.

A second ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia was reached in November 2020. Armenia agreed to withdraw its forces in the Azerbaijani territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, while Russian peacekeepers were deployed to the region.

Even after the ceasefire, Armenia and Azerbaijan have continued to engage in occasional border skirmishes.

With files from Reuters and The Associate Press.

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Other countries with brewing tensions and military conflicts - CTV News

The United Nations says it has received credible allegations that more than 100 members of the ousted Afghan government, its security forces and those who worked with international troops have been killed since the Taliban took over on 15 August.

Secretary general Antonio Guterres said in a report that more than two thirds of the deaths were alleged to have resulted from extrajudicial killings by the Taliban or its affiliates, despite the Talibans announcement of general amnesties for those affiliated with the former government and US-led coalition forces.

The UN political mission in Afghanistan also received credible allegations of extrajudicial killings of at least 50 individuals suspected of affiliation with Isil-KP, the Islamic State extremist group operating in Afghanistan, Guterres said in the report to the UN security council.

In the report, obtained by the Associated Press on Sunday, he added that despite Taliban assurances, the UN political mission had also received credible allegations of enforced disappearances and other violations impacting the right to life and physical integrity of former government and coalition members.

Guterres said human rights defenders and media workers also continue to come under attack, intimidation, harassment, arbitrary arrest, ill-treatment and killings.

Eight civil society activists were killed, including three by the Taliban and three by Islamic State extremists, and 10 were subjected to temporary arrests, beatings and threats by the Taliban, he said. Two journalists were killed one by IS and two were injured by unknown armed men.

The secretary general said the UN missions documented 44 cases of temporary arrests, beatings and threats of intimidation, 42 of them by the Taliban.

The Taliban overran most of Afghanistan as US and Nato forces were in the final stages of their chaotic withdrawal from the country after 20 years. They entered Kabul on 15 August without any resistance from the Afghan army or the countrys president, Ashraf Ghani, who fled.

The Taliban initially promised a general amnesty for those linked to the former government and international forces, and tolerance and inclusiveness towards women and ethnic minorities. However, the Taliban have renewed restrictions on women and appointed an all-male government, which have met with dismay by the international community.

Afghanistans aid-dependent economy was already stumbling when the Taliban seized power, and the international community froze Afghanistans assets abroad and halted economic support, recalling the Talibans reputation for brutality during its 1996-2001 rule and refusal to educate girls and allow women to work.

Guterres said: The situation in Afghanistan remains precarious and uncertain six months after the Taliban takeover as the multiple political, socio-economic and humanitarian shocks reverberate across the country.

He said Afghanistan today faces multiple crises: a growing humanitarian emergency, a massive economic contraction, the crippling of its banking and financial systems, the worst drought in 27 years and the Talibans failure to form an inclusive government and restore the rights of girls to education and women to work.

An estimated 22.8 million people are projected to be in crisis and emergency levels of food insecurity until March 2022, the UN chief said. Almost 9 million of these will be at emergency levels of food insecurity the highest number in the world. Half of all children under five are facing acute malnutrition.

On a positive note, Guterres reported a significant decline in the overall number of conflict-related security incidents as well as civilian casualties since the Taliban takeover. The UN recorded 985 security-related incidents between 19 August and 31 December, a 91% decrease compared with the same period in 2020, he said.

The eastern, central, southern and western regions accounted for 75% of all recorded incidents, he said, with Nangarhar, Kabul, Kunar and Kandahar ranking as the most conflict-affected provinces.

Despite the reduction in violence, Guterres said the Taliban faced several challenges, including rising attacks against their members.

Some are attributed to the National Resistance Front comprising some Afghan opposition figures, and those associated with the former government, he said. These groups have been primarily operating in Panjshir province and Baghlans Andarab district but have not made significant territorial inroads, although armed clashes are regularly documented, along with forced displacement and communication outages.

Guterres said intra-Taliban tensions along ethnic lines and competition over jobs had also resulted in violence, pointing to armed clashes on 4 November between between Taliban forces in Bamyan city.

In the report, the secretary general proposed priorities for the UN political mission in the current environment, urged international support to prevent widespread hunger and the countrys economic collapse, and urged the Taliban to guarantee womens rights and human rights.

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Afghanistan: more than 100 believed killed despite Taliban ...

Kabul, Afghanistan/Islamabad, Pakistan A week after Taliban and senior US and European officials held talks in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, the main outcome appears to be promises of an increase in humanitarian aid, contingent on demands related to human rights, with some analysts saying the talks imply a de facto recognition of the Talibans government.

No foreign government has yet formally recognised the legitimacy of the Talibans rule over Afghanistan, referred to by the group as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), although several world powers have engaged with the government at various levels.

The talks in Oslo were the first official trip by acting Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and his delegation to Europe since the Afghan Taliban captured Kabul and took control of Afghanistan in mid-August.

Following the January 24 talks, diplomats from the United States and Europe said they told Afghan Taliban officials that humanitarian aid would be tied to an improvement in the human rights situation in the country, which international rights groups and Afghan activists have said has worsened considerably since the Taliban took over.

[Participants] urged the Taliban to do more to stop the alarming increase of human rights violations, including arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, media crackdowns, extrajudicial killings, torture and prohibitions on women and girls education, employment and freedom to travel without a male escort, said a joint US-European statement issued after the talks.

The talks also recognised the urgency in addressing the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan andhighlighted necessary steps to help alleviate the suffering of Afghans across the country, the statement said.

On Wednesday, United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said Afghanistan was hanging by a thread, as the economy ground to a halt following the Taliban takeover and ensuing international sanctions, including the freezing of more than $9bn in Afghan central bank assets.

He also urged the Taliban to recognise and protect the fundamental human rights that every person shares.

A Taliban official hailed the talks as a gigantic achievement.

Without doubt, the Oslo talks were a gigantic achievement to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Shafi Azam, a foreign ministry official in the Afghan Taliban government.

It was a fruitful opportunity for the Taliban to address the majority of members of the European Union and to hear their worries and share with them [our] achievements and to talk about the challenges and also pass on [our] future plans to Europe, Azam, who took part in the Oslo talks, told Al Jazeera.

Mohsin Amin, a policy analyst and researcher, said the talks, among other actions, were signs of implicit recognition of the Talibans government.

I think it has already been recognised as a de facto government, he told Al Jazeera.

I think [the Oslo talks] can be considered an achievement for the Talibans diplomacy. The Taliban want engagement with the rest of the world, and such meetings facilitated that sort of engagement.

Sulaiman bin Shah, a former deputy minister of industry and commerce in the government of deposed President Ashraf Ghani, agreed that the Oslo talks and other forms of engagement effectively create a situation where the new rule is de-facto recognised.

Shah said the international community was attempting to walk a fine line between addressing the extreme humanitarian crisis while not legitimising the Talibans government.

The attempt to walk a fine line is indeed an illusion that the foreign governments have made to achieve political goals and objectives, Shah told Al Jazeera.

Only the events on August 15 [when the Taliban captured Kabul] were not predictable, but it does not mean that the international community is not accountable for the peace accords signed in Doha [between the US and the Taliban in 2020].

The United Nations has said more than half of the Afghan population is facing extreme hunger.

Earlier in January, UN Secretary-General Guterres launched an appeal for more than $4.4bn to keep the food, education and economic systems from collapsing.

Shah said the crisis following the Afghan Talibans takeover had hit the public sector and its ability to deliver basic services drastically.

While the fiscal and budgetary arrangements have been a daunting task for the [Afghan] ministry of finance, only marginal payments have been made to the public service officials including teachers and health professionals, he said.

International sanctions that have frozen the ability of many Afghans to transfer money or conduct transactions have also stifled the private sector, he said.

Amin, the analyst, said that the crisis could not be addressed solely by humanitarian aid, but that measures taken to isolate Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover needed to be reviewed.

Foreign governments cannot avert the humanitarian crisis solely by humanitarian aid, he said.

To alleviate poverty in Afghanistan, development projects must resume, sanctions on the banking sector of Afghanistan must lifted and central banks assets must [be] unfrozen.

Azam, the Afghan foreign ministry official, said the Taliban had, during the Oslo talks, given assurance of security to [US and European officials] for spreading out their [humanitarian] assistance all over the country.

One topic of debate during the Oslo talks appeared to be the US, European and other governments demand that the Taliban form an inclusive government.

The Talibans previous stint in power in the 1990s was marked by a largely homogenous, Taliban-dominated government that enforced a strict interpretation of Islamic law on the country, with severe restrictions imposed on women in many spheres of life.

[US and European officials] raised the importance of respect for human rights and the strong need for an inclusive and representative political system to ensure stability and a peaceful future for Afghanistan, said the joint US-European statement issued after the Oslo talks.

Since the talks, acting Foreign Minister Muttaqi and other Taliban officials have questioned the definition of an inclusive government, saying foreign governments have failed to provide metrics on the term and claiming the current acting government is diverse.

Azam said there was serious discussion in Oslo on the term, but that the Afghan delegation did not come away with clarity on what the demand meant.

I think there is no comprehensive definition related to the inclusive government, he said, adding that conversations were also held on what the form of Afghanistans government should be.

Finally, the summary is that it is the authority of Afghans to establish a government based on the nature and value of [Afghan] culture, he said.

US and European officials, however, say the term inclusive must be defined in a way that is acceptable to all Afghans.

It is not the task of the international community to define an inclusive Afghan government, said EU Special Envoy on Afghanistan Tomas Niklasson, responding to a statement by Afghan acting Foreign Minister Muttaqi.

It is for all adult Afghan men and women to do so through transparent processes on which they have also had a say and respecting their rights.

Analysts have said some of the key determinants of whether the Afghan government is diverse will include whether the Talibans political opponents, such as members of the previous government, are able to participate in it, as well as the role played by women and ethnic minorities.

The international community must establish an [Afghan government] that respects the values of humanity and will investigate the killings of women, children, minorities and all citizens of Afghanistan, said Rokhsaneh Rezaei, an Afghan rights activist.

[The world must] make a wise decision about the political destiny of Afghanistan.

Amin, the analyst, warned that while both the Afghan Taliban and world powers currently had leverage in talks the Taliban in the form of control of the country and foreign countries in the form of the need for financial and other aid that the current deadlock was harming regular Afghans.

I think both the Taliban and the US are misusing the perceived leverages and punishing the Afghan people, he said.

Stubbornness from both sides is harmful.

Mohsin Khan Momand is Al Jazeeras producer in Kabul, Afghanistan. Asad Hashim is Al Jazeeras digital correspondent in Pakistan.

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After Oslo talks, whats next for Afghanistan? | News | Al ...

Recent Developments

In April 2021, President Joe Biden announced that U.S. military forces would leave Afghanistan by September 2021. The Taliban, which had continued to capture and contest territory across the country despite ongoing peace talks with the Afghan government, ramped up attacks on Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) bases and outposts and began to rapidly seize more territory. In May 2021, the U.S. military accelerated the pace of its troop withdrawal. By the end of July 2021, the United States had completed nearly 95 percent of its withdrawal, leaving just 650 troops to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

In the summer of 2021, the Taliban continued its offensive, threatening government-controlled urban areas and seizing several border crossings. In early August, the Taliban began direct assaults on multiple urban areas, including Kandahar in the south and Herat in the west. On August 6, 2021, the Taliban captured the capital of southern Nimruz Province, the first provincial capital to fall. After that, provincial capitals began to fall in rapid succession. Within days, the Taliban captured more than ten other capitals, including Mazar-i-Sharif in the north and Jalalabad in the east, leaving Kabul the only major urban area under government control. On August 15, 2021, Taliban fighters entered the capital, leading Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to flee the country and the Afghan government to collapse. Later that day, the Taliban announced they had entered the presidential palace, taken control of the city, and were establishing checkpoints to maintain security.

The speed of the Talibans territorial gains and collapse of both the ANDSF and Afghan government surprised U.S. officials and alliesas well as, reportedly, the Taliban itselfdespite earlier intelligence assessments of the situation on the ground. The Biden administration authorized the deployment of an additional six thousand troops to assist with the evacuation of U.S. and allied personnel, as well as thousands of Afghans who worked with the United States and were attempting to flee. The speed of the Afghan governments collapse threatens a mass exodus of refugees from Afghanistan and has exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis.

Background

After the Taliban government refused to hand over terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in the wake of al-Qaedas September 11, 2001, attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban leadership quickly lost control of the country and relocated to southern Afghanistan and across the border to Pakistan. From there, they waged an insurgency against the Western-backed government in Kabul, Afghan national security forces, and international coalition troops.

When the U.S.-led coalition formally ended its combat mission in 2014, the ANDSF was put in charge of Afghanistans security. The ANDSF, however, faced significant challenges in holding territory and defending population centers, while the Taliban continued to attack rural districts and carry out suicide attacks in major cities. The war remained largely a stalemate for nearly six years, despite a small U.S. troop increase in 2017, continuing combat missions, and a shift in U.S. military strategy to target Taliban revenue sources, which involved air strikes against drug labs and opium production sites.

The Taliban continued to contest territory, including provincial capitals, across the country. The group briefly seized the capital of Farah Province in May 2018, and in August 2018 it captured the capital of Ghazni Province, holding the city for nearly a week before U.S. and Afghan troops regained control. The ANDSF suffered heavy casualties in recent years.

In February 2020, after more than a year of direct negotiations, the U.S. government and the Taliban signed a peace agreement that set a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Under the agreement, the United States pledged to draw down U.S. troops to approximately 8,500 within 135 days and complete a full withdrawal within fourteen months. In return, the Taliban pledged to prevent territory under its control from being used by terrorist groups and enter into negotiations with the Afghan government. However, no official cease-fire was put into place. After a brief reduction in violence, the Taliban quickly resumed attacks on Afghan security forces and civilians. Direct talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban began months after the agreed upon start of March 2020, faced multiple delays, and ultimately made little progress. Violence across Afghanistan continued in 2020 and 2021 as the United States increased air strikes and raids targeting the Taliban. Meanwhile, the Taliban attacked Afghan government and Afghan security forces targets and made territorial gains.

Civilian casualties across Afghanistan have remained high over the past several years. The United Nations documented a thenrecord high of 10,993 civilian casualties in 2018. Although 2019 saw a slight decline, civilian casualties exceeded 10,000 for the sixth year in a row and brought the total UN-documented civilian casualties since 2009 to more than 100,000. Despite another decline in 2020, the first half of 2021 saw a record high number of civilian casualties as the Taliban ramped up their military offensive amid the withdrawal of international troops.

In addition to the Talibans offensive, Afghanistan faces a threat from the Islamic State in Khorasan, which has also expanded its presence in several eastern provinces, attacked Kabul, and targeted civilians with suicide attacks.

Uncertainty surrounding the future of international assistance has strained the Afghan economy. Although the United States and its allies pledged in late 2020 to continue providing support to the Afghan government, they could reduce aid following the Taliban takeover. Such a move could compound Afghanistans deteriorating economic situation.

Concerns

The United States has an interest in attempting to preserve the many political, human rights, and security gains that have been achieved in Afghanistan since 2001. The Taliban takeover of the country could once again turn Afghanistan into a terrorist safe haven, as the group is believed to maintain ties with al-Qaeda. The takeover also threatens to reverse advances made in securing the rights of women and girls. Moreover, increasing internal instability, a mass exodus of refugees, and a growing humanitarian crisis could have regional ramifications as neighboring countries respond. In addition, Pakistan, India, Iran, and Russia are all likely to compete for influence in Kabul and with subnational actors.

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War in Afghanistan | Global Conflict Tracker

While Afghanistans new Taliban leadership has been preoccupied with the near-term challenges of forming a government, managing internal tensions, and pursuing foreign recognition and funding to stave off an economic collapse, nonstate armed actors in Afghanistan have begun to assess the opportunities and limitations that come with a return to Taliban rule. For them, the new environment is likely to be favorable. These groups, including designated terrorist organizations, will find themselves less vulnerable to monitoring and targeting by the United States and its coalition partners; will be able to take advantage of a huge pool of experienced armed labor drawn from former Taliban, Afghan security forces, and other militant ranks; and will have increased space to forge new collaborations and plan operations in the region and further afield.

This new environment poses numerous risks to the U.S. and its partners. This analysis reviews three of the most prominent and their implications for the United States.

The first risk is that the Islamic State Khorasan (ISK), which has had an openly adversarial relationship with the Taliban, takes advantage of the new governments weakness and preoccupations to bolster its own recruiting, fundraising, and territorial control within Afghanistan; and that its pressure on the government makes the Taliban leadership less likely to offer concessions to domestic or foreign critics.

ISK, the Afghanistan affiliate of the larger Islamic State group, emerged in 2015 and established a main base of operations in the countrys mountainous eastern regions. Salafi in outlook, it is militantly anti-Shia and rejected both the Pakistani government and the Western-backed Afghan government as apostate regimes that ought to be overthrown and replaced.

From its founding, ISK has also been fiercely critical of the Taliban, which it regards as insufficiently Islamic. Taliban and ISK fighters have clashed frequently, and the Taliban played a critical role in defeating ISK strongholds in rural Afghanistan, coordinating informally at times with U.S. forces. Following the Taliban takeover last summer, ISK continued its attacks, this time targeting the Taliban not as insurgent competitors, but as illegitimate governing authorities. Already ISK is taking advantage of the Taliban governments divided attention and its struggles to establish basic social services. Its ranks renewed by prisoner releases and prison breaks during the tumultuous collapse of the Ashraf Ghani government, ISK has stepped up the pace of urban attacks and, according to United Nations reporting, is positioning itself as the sole pure rejectionist group in Afghanistan. As the U.S. and its Afghan partners learned over many years, defending urban areas against dedicated teams of small-cell terrorists is a daunting task, even for a well-resourced government.

While ISK might seek to copy elements of the Talibans insurgent strategy, it stands little chance of replicating the Talibans success. The groups Salafi ideology and embrace of wanton violence against civilians will continue to alienate most Afghans, even religiously conservative Pashtun leaders. Even so, a revitalized ISK would be disruptive and dangerous. It could modestly expand its territorial control, giving it the opportunity to extract rents and engage in coercive recruitment, and could leverage spectacular attacks against the government to raise its profile. In theory ISK could use safe havens and expanded resources to plan attacks against Western targets, but there are no public indications that it is plotting to do so; more likely it will remain focused on contesting for control of the Afghan state.

ISKs campaign of attacks is also shaping the Taliban leaderships calculations in unhelpful ways. The Taliban has been relatively cohesive, but as it pivots to governance, its factionalization is becoming more apparent. Some of the movements leaders who negotiated with the international community clearly prefer a somewhat more accommodating posture toward foreign donor institutions and a more inclusive government, while others, most notably Sirajuddin Haqqani, interior minister and leader of the infamous Haqqani Network, have successfully pushed the government to adopt hardline positions on domestic and foreign policy. Facing a vigorous challenge from ISK, the Taliban will likely worry about defections and a loss of ideological legitimacy. These pressures will only empower hardline elements.

The second risk is that a Haqqani-dominated Taliban government in Kabul, with few reputational incentives to constrain the activities of al-Qaida or Pakistan-aligned militant organizations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), will allow these groups increased freedom to use Afghanistan for logistics, recruiting, and planning, and to reduce their dependencies on Pakistan.

It was inevitable, even under the best of circumstances, that the departure of U.S. and coalition forces from Afghanistan would lead to a more permissive environment for terrorist groups. Indeed, the U.S. government estimated in October that ISK could reconstitute its ability to conduct external operations against the United States in six to 12 months while al-Qaida could do so with a year or two. India and its global partners, meanwhile, are rightly worried that LeT and JeM, which have largely used Afghanistan as a secondary theater for recruiting and training, will have even greater room to plan attacks against Indian targets.

The prominence of Haqqani Network-associated militants in the security apparatus of the new government merely exacerbates these risks. The Haqqanis and certain other Taliban military commanders have sustained close ties with al-Qaida, and although they may advise the terror group to maintain a low profile, they do not appear to have made meaningful much less irreversible efforts to constrain its freedom of action. The Haqqanis links with Pakistan-sponsored jihadi groups are also longstanding, complex, and mutual. LeT and JeM could gain from securing with presumed Pakistani mediation sustained support by the Haqqanis to train and recruit in Afghanistan. And the Haqqanis and their allies would benefit from stitching together a broad coalition of militants that can oppose ISK and deny it legitimacy and space to recruit.

The reality is that al-Qaida, LeT, JeM, and other groups targeting Western and Indian interests do not need the Talibans active support and facilitation. They need only that the new Afghan government remain largely passive and on that count, the Taliban are likely to oblige. Even though the Taliban has obvious incentives to prevent al-Qaida in particular from planning foreign attacks from its soil, and al-Qaida itself may be hampered by organizational weaknesses, the U.S. cannot rely on the Talibans reputational anxieties to constrain al-Qaida and other (non-Islamic State) militants. Pakistan, therefore, may well continue to be a valuable, if fraught, counterterrorism partner: It is close enough to the Taliban to gain unique insights into al-Qaidas activities in Afghanistan, and sufficiently anxious about al-Qaidas historic animus toward Pakistan that it might be willing to cooperate in limited ways with Washington to degrade the group.

The third risk is that the increasingly permissive and opaque environment in Afghanistan, combined with the large pool of unemployed armed labor, will lead to novel operational partnerships among nonstate armed actors that could make it hard to identify new threats to the U.S. and its partners.

The risks, in other words, are not simply anchored in what the counterterrorism community can discern about todays Taliban-led Afghanistan, but about what it cannot see or predict. Afghanistan is a fecund environment for new militant partnerships. Even before the fall of the Ghani government, the Haqqanis were acting as the default broker among a dizzying array of groups: al-Qaida; India-focused militants; anti-Shia sectarian groups; the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), focused on challenging the Pakistani state; Uyghur militants, about whom China has pressed the Taliban to crack down; and others.

This complex organizational network of Sunni militant groups is now intersecting with a market that is flush with former Taliban, unemployed ex-Afghan National Security Forces foot soldiers, and militants arriving from nearby countries to take advantage of the permissive environment or the recruiting opportunities. Militant organizations are unlikely to be able to absorb more than a small fraction of these available fighters, but they will benefit from the unusually high-quality labor pool.

Washingtons ability to understand the militant landscape in Afghanistan has already been dramatically degraded with the loss last summer of many of its human intelligence and technical collection platforms. U.S. visibility will decrease further as militant labor flows in unpredictable ways. Unfortunately, this risk cannot easily be mitigated by diplomatic partnerships or military infrastructure. U.S. insights into the Afghan militant environment will inevitably be more heavily mediated by Pakistan which despite its narrow assistance against al-Qaida, and of course TTP, is considered by most U.S. officials to be an unreliable narrator due to its substantive support to the Taliban and anti-India militants.

A large-scale U.S. and coalition presence in Afghanistan did not prevent the United States from being startled and embarrassed in 2015 by the discovery of a massive al-Qaida training camp in southern Afghanistan. That discovery created waves in the U.S. counterterrorism community, which had grown overly confident in its assumptions about the militant environment. Afghanistans ability to surprise us is even greater today than it was seven years ago. The United States has little choice but to remain vigilant.

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Nonstate threats in the Talibans Afghanistan - Brookings Institution