Al-Qaeda is back in Afghanistan. It is a threat to Christians around the world

Premier Christianity 3 July 2013

9/11 was one of those moments which everyone who was around remembers where they were when they heard the terrible news. I was about to pick up my boss who had just flown into the UK. We had both worked in Afghanistan for Christian development organisations. That afternoon we walked around my garden discussing what the future meant if, as seemed likely, the awful events unfolding on our TV screen had been carried out by al-Qaeda, who were then hosted by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

What happened next is history. The western military intervention was designed to prevent any such attacks on the West ever being carried out from Afghanistan again. The central part of 2020 US deal with the Taliban agreed by President Trump and implemented by President Biden was that the US would withdraw its forces in exchange for the Taliban guaranteeing that foreign terrorist organisations, such as al-Qaeda, would never be allowed on Afghan soil.

The naivety of that deal was revealed in stark terms by a UN Security Council report which has just been published. Al-Qaeda are now back in Afghanistan. According to the UN report around 30 senior members of al-Qaeda are now based there, plus around 400 jihadists and their families totalling approximately 2,000 people. At least two Taliban provincial governors now have links to al-Qaeda as does the deputy director of the intelligence directorate, while al-Qaeda training manuals are being used in the Taliban equivalent of the Ministry of Defence. 

Even more significantly, al-Qaeda have also re-established training camps where suicide bombers are already being trained, and the ideology which is being taught in those camps is even more extreme than that of the Taliban.

So, how does this affect Christians?

Well, first of all, there are still thousands of Afghan Christians trapped in Afghanistan, living in fear of their lives, because the Taliban regard all Afghan Christians as apostates from Islam – for which the shari’a penalty is execution within three days for any Afghan man who is caught. In the first few months after the Taliban seized power in August 2021 the Taliban were trying to persuade western countries to lift sanctions on them and publicly claiming their rule this time would be very different from when they were previously in power. That’s probably why there were occasional reports then of some of those suspected of being Christians merely being arrested and held in custody. But with the ideological “advice” that, according to the UN report, al-Qaeda is now providing to the Taliban Afghan Christians are more likely to be simply killed on the spot, without even waiting for the three days prescribed by shari’a.

Secondly, there is a very specific threat to Christians in Pakistan. According to the UN report suicide bombers from the Pakistan Taliban are already being trained in the al-Qaeda camps in eastern Afghanistan. The Pakistan Taliban is a grouping of jihadist organisations inspired by the Afghan Taliban, who have repeatedly attacked Christians in Pakistan. They were responsible for the 2013 suicide bombing of the historic All Saints Church in Peshawar which killed 127 and left another 250 injured. They also carried out the bombing of the Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park in Lahore in 2016 which killed 78 and injured 350 others, many of them Christian families celebrating Easter Sunday. So, the fact, that suicide bombers from the Pakistan Taliban are already being trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan represents a new and very specific threat to Christians in Pakistan.

Thirdly, there is a threat to Christians around the world if Afghanistan is becoming al Qaeda’s new base. Last August a US drone strike on a house in central Kabul killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor as leader of al-Qaeda. The UN’s report that there are now around 30 core members of al-Qaeda living in Afghanistan, suggests that he wasn’t just visiting there, but it may be becoming a base for al-Qaeda’s global operations.

Whilst the Taliban are an essentially local jihadist organisation al-Qaeda actively aspires to be a global one. Although the success of Islamic State ten years or so ago pushed it somewhat out of the limelight, it still has affiliates around the world, such as al-Shabaab in East Africa. If anyone wants to know why the return of al-Qaeda represents a threat to Christian communities around the world, look no further than al-Shabaab. They have repeatedly targeted Christians in East African countries, not just those who are converts from Islam – but whole Christian communities in an attempt to “cleanse” the area of non-Muslims. The worst such incident was the 2015 attack on Kenya’s Garissa University where al-Shabaab jihadists went room to room identifying Christians and killing them. There are multiple examples of where it has separated out Christians from Muslims and then killed the Christians – simply because they are Christians.

So, al Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan represents a serious threat to Christian communities around the world. Whilst al Qaeda attack a range of targets, western governments need to understand that jihadist attacks on Christians in places like Pakistan, which now appear far more likely, are somewhat like the canary in the mineshaft…

Dr Martin Parsons is CEO of the Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution. He is an expert witness on the global persecution of Christians and was previously an aid worker during the time of Taliban rule in Afghanistan