August 27, 2021
August 26th, 2021
Brent Goff, Chief Anchor and host of Deutsche Welle‘s news programme The Day, spoke with Yan St-Pierre about the Kabul airport attack. To watch the interview, please follow the link.
A second interview was conducted online, which you can watch below, and you can watch Yan St-Pierre’s input on IS-Khorasan here (scroll half way down the page).
“Islamic State Khorasan” (IS-K) represents a “high level of threat” to the security situation in Kabul, said Yan St-Pierre, a counterterrorism expert at the Modern Security Consulting Group in Berlin. “Because of the circumstances in Kabul, the chaos, the opportunity for targets and above all else the difficulties in securing the area, the group does represent a high level of threat,” he told DW. “We understand better now how they managed to pull off the attack on Thursday. It really shows that they used the vulnerabilities on site to carry out their attack.” The expert, however, added that the group remains “fairly small,” and it can’t be compared — either in size or importance — to what we saw in the Middle East, whether in Syria or Iraq. Still, he said, IS-K is an outfit that “has a growing number of followers and has a substantial regional network that allows it to grow and sustain itself. It’s a group that is really trying to establish a new state according to its terms that are very different from what we understand to be a more radical view of Islam.”