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25 March 2015

Has the Caliphate Come to Kabul?

MARCH 23, 2015

Fear of the Islamic State is making for strange bedfellows in the land of warlords and the Taliban.

Shortly after 5 p.m. on Feb. 24, Ismail Keyhan arrived at Kabul’s central bus station to pick up his father, Amini, a day laborer working on construction sites in Iran. It had been nearly a year since the 20-year-old university student had last seen his dad, and as the evening sun inched toward the western mountains ringing the Afghan capital, Keyhan kept a close watch for the bus.

Amini had boarded the bus in the western Afghan city of Herat earlier that day and had called his son around noon, when the convoy of two buses he was traveling in arrived in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. From there, the Kabul-Kandahar highway passes through the badlands of rural Kandahar, Zabul, Ghazni, and Wardak provinces — areas best passed at breakneck speed.

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