ISIS-K weaponizes ignorance as a tool of control

For close to a decade, the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" Khorasan branch (ISIS-K) has targeted Afghanistan's schools, universities and educational facilities with a series of violent attacks.

Experts say the group's assaults on the education system are part of a deliberate strategy to establish control over the population through enforced ignorance.

"The dark and inhumane ideology of ISIS grows where there is no knowledge or education," Herat-based university professor Abdul Karim Sekandari told Salaam Times, noting that "no educated and informed person supports ISIS's actions."

"The more educated and enlightened a society becomes, the more ISIS's influence and presence in that society will collapse and face defeat," he said.

Attacks on the education system violate Islamic principles, per a 2022 study by Geneva Call and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

"Classic and modern Islamic scholars assert the impermissibility of targeting children, deeming the targeting of schools prohibited," it said, citing Islamic scholar Mohammad Hashim Kamali.

"Moreover, pursuit of knowledge is treated as an obligation in Qur'anic and Sunna traditions."

Yet ISIS-K has carried out repeated attacks on educational institutions and educators, Sekandari said.

In September, an ISIS-K suicide bombing killed six people, including a university professor, and wounded 13 others in Kabul's Qala-e-Bakhtiar neighborhood.

In September 2022, ISIS-K killed more than 50 students at the Kaaj Education Center in Kabul, and in November 2020 killed at least 35 people in an assault on Kabul University.

A 2020 attack on Kabul's Kawsar-e-Danesh Education Center killed 30 and injured more than 70, mostly children and young adults.

And in August 2018, ISIS-K targeted the Mawoud Education Center in Kabul, killing nearly 50 people, most of them teenagers.

Even for survivors, these attacks create "long-term economic hardship, lasting physical and mental health damage, and new barriers to education," per Human Rights Watch.

Targeting women's education

"Terrorist groups like ISIS-K aim to promote extremism and illiteracy in society by eliminating women from the path of education," Herat-based teacher Ruqia Haidari told Salaam Times.

ISIS-K's survival depends on maintaining an uneducated support base, Haidari said. "The higher the number of uneducated youths in a society, the easier it is for ISIS to recruit them as soldiers and carry out its objectives through them."

"The attacks on educational centers are intended to instill fear and terror in society to discourage young people from pursuing education," Herat-based civil society activist Parwiz Sediq told Salaam Times.

"ISIS fears a society of educated individuals," he added. "When the level of literacy and knowledge in society rises, there will no longer be any room for the extremist ideologies of ISIS-K."