Taliban arrest the assassins of Rahimullah Haqqani. Who was the ISIS infiltrator in Taliban?

On December 8, Taliban news sources announced the arrest of five people involved in the assassination of Rahimullah Haqqani, one of the prominent Deobandi scholars in Nangarhar province and one of the most influential Taliban preachers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rahimullah Haqqani is an intellectual supporter of the Taliban and a critic of the ISIS . He was considered as one of the individuals close to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban Interior Minister. He was killed during an explosion by ISIS on August 11, 2022.

One of the arrested individuals by the Taliban intelligence department is Haji Bashirullah. He was responsible for the suicide attacks of the Haqqani Network and the Taliban in Kabul during the former government but the Qandahari network of Taliban intelligence department has arrested him on the charge of assassinating Rahimullah Haqqani.

Haji Bashirullah, the son of Mohammad Dawood, from the village of Padkhab Shani in the outskirts of the Pole Alam, the capital of Logar province, is one of the main leaders of the martyrdom groups in Taliban. On the order of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani network, he carried out dozens of suicide attacks during former government of Afghanistan, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians.

Haji Bashirullah was appointed as the ISIS leader in Pole Alam in 2019. He worked and concentrated on the villages of Dashtak, Zakhil and Padkhab Shani in Logar province to attract manpower for ISIS. He was the leader of ISIS in the city of Pole Alam and also expanded his cooperation with the Haqqani network and reached a high position in the internal organization of the Haqqani network. At the same time as the fall of the former government and the rise of Taliban in Afghanistan, he started anti-Taliban activities within the Taliban organization by forming a military group in the city of Kabul.

The suicide attack on the religious school of “Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani” in Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, located in the second district of Kabul city, is the biggest and perhaps the last operation organized by him, which led to the death of more than ten members of Taliban, including “Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani.

The arrest of Haji Bashirullah is not an honor for Taliban, but a serious defeat because Taliban has arrested an ISIS-Taliban commander. Taliban leaders are in a situation where they can neither deny their own intelligence and intellectual failure nor the presence of ISIS in their group.