IS, Taliban pairing up in northern Afghan: Official

Foreign fighters allied with the Islamic State group are training Taliban insurgents in a volatile Afghan province, an official said on Friday, the first such claim as the government raises the alarm over an emerging IS threat.

President Ashraf Ghani has repeatedly raised fears that IS - notorious for their brutal reign of terror in Syria and Iraq - are making steady inroads into Afghanistan, which is already in the grip of a fierce Taliban insurgency.

But the governor of Kunduz, the scene of intense fighting for two weeks that has displaced thousands, has gone further by claiming that the two groups are joining forces in the northern Afghan province.

IS fighters are “supporting the Taliban, training the Taliban, trying to build the capacity of the Taliban for a bigger fight”, provincial governor Mohammed Omar Safi told the BBC.

Local observers have viewed claims of IS’s rise in Afghanistan with caution.

The Middle Eastern group has never formally acknowledged a presence in Afghanistan and most self-styled IS insurgents in the country are thought to be Taliban turncoats rebranding themselves to appear a more lethal force.

The two groups, which espouse different ideological strains of Sunni Islam, are believed to be arrayed against each other in Afghanistan’s restive south, with clashes frequently reported.

But the governor insisted that the fight is different in the once-tranquil north, which has recently seen a huge influx of foreign fighters from countries such as Chechnya, Pakistan and Tajikistan.

“In the worst affected Imam Sahib district, (IS) fighters are training and supporting local Taliban fighters to raise their capacity... in their fight against the Afghan government,” the governor’s spokesman Abdul Wadood Wahidi told