Trump keeps referring to ISIS-X instead of ISIS-K in interview

Former President Donald Trump kept referring to ISIS-X instead of ISIS-K during a Fox News interview and issued a video message insisting he would have stopped the suicide bomber who killed 13 US servicemembers and 100 Afghans on Thursday in Kabul.

Mr Trump spoke to host Sean Hannity after the group ISIS-K conducted a deadly attack in Kabul. ISIS-K refers to the Islamic State Khorasan, a region that includes parts of Afghanistan. The group was founded in 2015 and is an Afghan splinter group from ISIS that considers both the Taliban and the US to be among their enemies.

“[The Taliban] are good fighters,” Mr Trump told Mr Hannity. “But now they can be much better because they have the best equipment in the world, and so much of it, they don’t know what to do. They will be selling it on the open market. But we gave that to these people, and ISIS-X, as you know, I knocked out 100 per cent of the ISIS caliphate.”

“ISIS is not dead,” Robert Richer, who served as deputy director of operations at the CIA during the presidency of George W Bush, told The Seattle Times in October 2020. “We destroyed the caliphate, but they’re now popping up in numerous places. Meanwhile, the worldwide coalition to fight ISIS doesn’t really exist anymore.”

“I knocked it out in Syria, Iraq, we knocked it out, so now they have a new ISIS called ISIS-X, and that’s members of the Taliban that are far more vicious because they don’t like the way the Taliban is behaving because they’re not vicious enough,” Mr Trump added.

He corrected his mistake to once again call the group ISIS-K but then claimed that ISIS-X would soon be a reality.

“They have people, as I said, that broke away … because the Taliban wasn’t mean enough and vicious enough. And that’s the new ISIS-X, where they broke away, or ISIS-K. They’ll have an ISIS-X pretty soon, which is going to be worse than ISIS-K.”

A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies states that ISIS-K “disregards international borders” and “envisions its territory transcending nation-states like Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

Khorasan translates to “The Land of The Sun” and refers to a region that includes parts of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Mr Trump released a video message on Thursday, claiming that the attacks “would not have happened if I were your president”.

“This tragedy should never have taken place. It should never have happened, and it would not have happened if I were your president,” Mr Trump said.

In the interview with Mr Hannity on Thursday, Mr Trump blamed the crisis in Afghanistan on political correctness.

“Biden and the woke generals are just woke. I was saying even at the end of my time, I was seeing letters being sent out about equality and all of these different things – the soldiers, they want to fight, they want to be prepared to fight, they want to be soldiers, but the woke generals, it has got into a level that nobody can even believe,” he said.

“It’s so sad. It’s probably from the standpoint of military tactics and just embarrassment, the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to our country; we look like fools all over the world, we are weak, we are pathetic, we are being led by people that have no idea what they are doing,” Mr Trump added.

After critical questions from controversial Florida Republican representative Matt Gaetz during a congressional hearing in June, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, defended the study of critical race theory, an academic term often criticised as woke by conservatives, within US military academies.

“I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding — having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?” Gen Milley said.

“And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, noncommissioned officers of being, quote, ‘woke’ or something else, because we’re studying some theories that are out there,” he added.