The terrorist team behind the Kabul suicide bombing Thursday that killed U.S. Marines and dozens of many others and derailed the ongoing Afghan evacuation is a competitor of the Taliban — and even additional severe.

The Islamic Condition Khorasan, or ISIS-K, is the Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State terror team, which publicly beheaded international journalists and inflicted brutalities on captured Kurds and others in Iraq and Syria.

“They have a better proclivity to target civilians they regard as infidels,” Seth G. Jones, a counterterrorism professional at the Middle for Strategic and Global Reports, claimed of ISIS-K.

And the ISIS-K attack wasn’t just aimed at the Us citizens, it was also meant to embarrass the Taliban, the authorities said.

“This assault will glimpse poor to the West, but it can make the Taliban glance as if they are not in control of their own ecosystem,” explained Raffaello Pantucci, senior fellow at the Worldwide Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at the S. Rajaratnam University of International Studies in Singapore. “It undermines the notion that they rule this place.”

Primarily based east of Kabul in the Kunar and the Nangarhar provinces in close proximity to the Pakistani border, ISIS-K experienced anyplace from 1,500 to 2,200 fighters just a few yrs in the past, according to a research by the Heart for Strategic and International Scientific studies from 2018.