MOSCOW — A Kremlin official said Wednesday that Russia was exchanging information with the Taliban, the Islamist insurgency that the United States has been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001, as a bulwark against the spread of the Islamic State militant group in that country.
Zamir Kabulov, a Foreign Ministry department head and President Vladimir Putin’s special representative for Afghanistan, told the Interfax news agency that “the Taliban interest objectively coincides with ours” in the fight against the Islamic State, which has captured broad swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq.
A limited partnership with the Taliban, which announced last week that it would send “special forces” to fight the Islamic State, is a twist in Russia’s war on terror. Although Russia plunged into its airstrike campaign against the Islamic State in Syria in September, Moscow has opposed the Taliban for more than a decade as a potential vehicle for terror and instability in the former Soviet Union.
Along with the Islamic State, the Taliban is on a Russian government list of terrorist organizations. Similar to the Islamic State, the Taliban is known for staging brutal public executions and imposing an extreme interpretation of Islamic law on the territories it has captured.
