Taliban counters French-led Western unity demo with pledge of allegiance to ISIS chief Al Baghdadi

High Taliban officers in Pakistan and Afghanistan made a vow of allegiance Sunday, Jan. 12 to the Islamic State’s leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi – initiating concord among key groups of the Islamist terror movement in defiance of the values that brought millions out in a mammoth rally of Western unity against terror that day.

The Taliban cemented this unity pact by demonstratively beheading a Pakistani soldier they held prisoner.

This gesture came in rapid sequence after Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who on Jan. 9, broke into a kosher supermarket in Paris and murdered four Jews, avowed his adherence to ISIS. 

Abu Bakr’s group this month therefore branched out from its Syrian-Iraqi “caliphate” not only into Europe but also into South Asia and across the Middle East.

In the week that Islamist terrorists carried out bloody atrocities in Paris, his jihad of terror was on the offensive and making strategic gains elsewhere:

1. The Islamic State was directly challenging the United States in new arenas – Europe, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

2.  Monday, Jan 5, ISIS sent a force to cross into northern Saudi Arabia from Iraq. Three Saudi border guards including Gen. Odah al-Balawi, commander of the regional guard unit, were killed in the clash which took place in the Suwayf region of the Arar district.
debkafile’s counter-terror sources draw two disturbing conclusions from these bloody incidents:

Like the Paris attack, which saw Frenchmen attacking Frenchmen, the operation against the oil kingdom was carried out by Saudi nationals who had rallied to the Islamic State’s flag.

Abu Bakr has therefore captured an additional foothold in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula.

Secondly, as was also evident in Paris, ISIS, i.e. Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant, and AQAP, i.e. Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula, are operating in harness. This was also evident from the claim by the Kouachi brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo that they acted in the name of AQAP, in contrast to their associate, Coulibaly.

This cross-alliance, now joined by Taliban, represents an ominous escalation and expansion of the global jihad terror movement and the threat it poses to the United States, the West as a whole, the rest of the Middle East and Israel.
3. Abu Bakr al Baghdad, by his multi-branched terror spectaculars, has managed to seize the primacy of world Al Qaeda, pushing its formal leader Ayman al Zuwahri to the sidelines.