The opening of the Olympic Games will take place in Paris on July 26. Not only the French authorities have been preparing for this event, but foreign terrorist groups as well. They have announced plans to carry out attacks during the sports competitions. In Northern Afghanistan, for example, there is a training center for terrorists, operators of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). According to Afghan sources of NG, more than a hundred militants have been trained at this center. Besides Afghans, they include people fr om post-Soviet states as well, primarily the Central Asian republics. Some of the center’s graduates have returned from Afghanistan to their homeland, wh ere they are likely plotting terrorist attacks using drones. In any case, this is what they were trained for by instructors from Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Back in the spring, several autonomous groups of Islamists – both suicide bombers and drone specialists – were sent to France, and it is currently unclear whether the special services were able to neutralize them.

The center for training drone jihad techniques is located in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz. According to NG sources, it consists of four separate training camps (muaskars), located in two districts of the province. It is interesting that the Kunduz center for training UAV operators was created jointly by two large terrorist jihadist organizations at once - Al-Qaeda and the Afghan branch of the Islamic State, Vilayat Khorasan (ISKP). At the same time, the center's management is under the control of Al-Qaeda, and is personally supervised by Hamza bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden, who presently continues his father's work and leads Al-Qaeda from in one of the districts of the northern Afghan province of Panjshir. 

Trainees at the Kunduz center learn to use drones in the interests of waging jihad as widely as possible - for aerial reconnaissance, patrolling the area, and for air strikes. The popularity of UAVs as effective strike weapons has increased dramatically during the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict. The experience of using drones in eastern Ukraine is now being carefully studied by operatives of foreign terrorist groups, who, by the way, discovered the combat capabilities of drones long before the Ukrainian crisis. Back in 2015-2016, ISIS militants started using toy drones to drop hand grenades from the air on enemy positions in Iraq and Syria. Since then, the technical characteristics of toy and commercial UAVs have improved significantly, and a wealth of experience has been accumulated in using household drones for military purposes.

An interesting feature of the Kunduz drone training center is that, according to some sources, currently one of their leading instructors a former senior officer of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of one of the Central Asian republics. A while ago he faked his death in an accident and illegally moved to Northern Afghanistan. Now, not only the ex-officer personally trains terrorists in the nuances of military affairs, but also oversees the training program for drone operators for Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The Taliban in power in Afghanistan are well aware of the activities of the Kunduz center for training fighters for "drone jihad". However, the Taliban commanders are not making any attempts to stop its activity. Apparently, the Taliban do not want to worsen relations with Al-Qaeda, which is leading the "drone muaskars" project in Kunduz. The fact that there are many IS supporters among the trainees and graduates of this center does not seem to bother the Taliban leaders.

However, it is possible that the Taliban's leniency is due to the fact that currently this Afghan branch of IS mainly trains drone operators for export, for subsequent transfer to other countries, in particular to the republics of the former USSR, as well as to Europe. Our sources make reasonable assumptions that the first graduates of the Kunduz UAV center could have already been legalized in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and also in some European countries this spring.

According to one source, there is reason to believe that some former Kunduz students are currently in France, preparing to commit terrorist attacks using commercial UAVs during the Summer Olympics. In recent weeks, French intelligence services have successfully detained a number of religious radicals suspected of preparing terrorist attacks in Paris. Sources in Afghanistan report that some of these detentions "were very accurate," which indicates the high professionalism of the French intelligence and security services. But it is impossible to say with certainty that absolutely all potential terrorists have been neutralized. Moreover, there is always the threat from "lone wolves" - terrorist fanatics acting autonomously, without contact with other militants, using goods from hardware stores nearby to make improvised weapons. As practice shows, such terrorists pose the greatest danger, since they are the most difficult to detect and eliminate before they start to approach the target, possibly with a drone fitted with an improvised explosive device (IED).

In Afghanistan itself, various security forces within the army, police and intelligence service of the Taliban started arming themselves with Chinese-made drones. According to sources from among the Taliban themselves, Taliban militants use regular and high-speed drones to patrol hard-to-reach areas, survey border lines, escort convoys, and to carry out sabotage (elimination of unwanted field commanders of opposition groups). The Taliban units are also armed with rather expensive FPV drones (first-person view). 

Various drug mafia groups currently actively use drones in Afghanistan: with the help of UAVs, they transport, including across the border, batches of heroin and methamphetamine, a synthetic drug produced in the western Afghan provinces and very popular in neighboring countries. Our sources did not rule out that the Afghan drug mafia could also use the UAV center in Kunduz for professional training of its drone operators. The appearance in Afghanistan in the coming year of a real professional “drone fleet” of drug mafia no longer seems like fantasy.