Now officially, Islamic State is in Pakistan; Army foils the expansion

Islamabad, Sep 1: As Pakistan denied the growing footprint of the Islamic State (IS) on its soil, its radicalised citizens keep killing “liberals” and members of Muslim sects they don’t like.

There’s evidence that Pakistanis are going to Syria “for training”, one angry academic in Islamabad claimed on Geo TV last month that an ex-chief of the ISI, Hamid Gul, recruited for the IS before he died in 2015.

Pakistani wives are abandoning their families to join the IS’s jihad as “jihadi wives” or comfort women. According to Newsweek Pakistan, “Late last year, a group of housewives, all from Lahore, had either left or were on their way to Syria to join the Islamic State.”

Now the neighbouring country has come up with a sensible reply accepting and acknowledging the presence of ISIS.

Pakistan’s military says it’s crushed Islamic State’s attempt to expand in the country.
The comments on Thursday were a rare acknowledgement by a senior Pakistani official that Islamic State has had any active presence in a country that is home to myriad militant groups including the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network.

Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa, the military’s top spokesman, also rejected US complaints that it was not acting against the Haqqani network, suspected of carrying out suicide bomb attacks in Kabul, saying Pakistan was pursuing an “indiscriminate operation” against all militants.

Pakistani authorities have so far arrested 309 people associated with Islamic State (IS) on its territory, he said.

Most of those captured by Pakistan were established Pakistani jihadists who had switched loyalties to IS’s self-proclaimed worldwide caliphate, but about 25 were foreigners including Afghans and some Syrians, he said.

Bajwa said that of a core group of 20 organisers, “we have captured all of them, except for one who I am sure is not in Pakistan”.

He said IS fighters were still present in the Afghan provinces of Nangarhar, Khost and Kunar, which lie along the border with Pakistan.

He also released rare figures on progress in its anti-militant operation, saying more than 3500 had been killed. He added that 516 soldiers had also been killed and 2272 wounded.

“We have paid $US106.9 billion (on) this war … If anyone points a finger at Pakistan or casts an eye of suspicion on Pakistan, they need to know this cost,” said Bajwa.
International concern that IS was establishing an operational presence in Pakistan increased after the group said it carried out a suicide bombing at a hospital in the city of Quetta that killed more than 70 people.

However, a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban also claimed the hospital bombing and Bajwa said he believed the Islamic State statement was false.

How has the IS made its contact in Pakistan? From evidence, there were communities already softened by the madrasas, charismatic clerics and religious militias, that felt drawn to the pledge of the “khilafat” under “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, now killing fellow Muslims in Syria-Iraq.

The MBA graduate, Saad Aziz, who killed a woman human rights advocate, Sabeen Mahmud, in Karachi last year, had started his radical revamp with a highly popular 1990s cleric of Lahore, Israr Ahmad, who rhetorically pledged a “bloody khilafat”, without attracting the mischief of the state. Finding the post-Israr movement too tame, he reached out to al-Qaeda before joining the IS.

The latest addition of Pakistani women to the IS took place through the good offices of a former al-Huda member already posted in Syria.

Al-Huda is an Islamabad-supported elitist women’s organisation recommending a reversion to a re-enacted life of piety. It appeals to upper-crust women showing off their hijab and claiming moral superiority with big moola in the bank. Al-Huda’s founder, Farhat Hashmi, shifted to Canada just before her hero, Osama bin Laden, was killed in Pakistan in 2011. An acolyte of Hashmi in 2015 joined her American husband in California to kill 14 innocent citizens, decisively shifting American public opinion in favour of extremist politicians like Donald Trump.

Police officers in Lahore, used to their India-did-it routine, find it difficult to believe that Pakistani women are making a beeline for the IS. In smaller cities, they are even more clueless, unconsciously as chastisers of Islam-offending sects like Ahmadis.

Eight boys from the city of Sialkot were found to have reached Syria as soldiers of the IS. All of them were formerly from the Jamaat-ud-Dawa of Hafiz Saeed, who, like the chief priest of the Lal Masjid of Islamabad, possesses a clout that the state fears.
Says Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah: “There must be less than… 100, maybe 50, Pakistanis who have left for Syria.” Then the anti-terrorism department raided Sialkot and arrested Daesh-Islamabad Emir Amir Mansour, who recruited local youths for Rs 30,000 to Rs 50,000 per head to send to Syria “for training”.

Men from the Maldives have gone and joined the IS. Bangladesh and Indonesia have been hit, and an increasingly radical Malaysia is under threat of manpower “leakage” to terror.

But it’s here in Pakistan that the IS hopes to set up its sub-HQ with helpful madrasas and powerful clerics. Struggling to control its feudal hinterland in Punjab and Sindh to attain modern statehood, Pakistan finally conquered the feudal lords through jihadi madrasas.

First to go under was south Punjab, but now Sindh seems like the next pin to fall — last month, the police got hold of Umar Kathiyo, “emir” of the Islamic State of Sindh, from interior Sindh. An Arabic-speaking local, he had been representing al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and was good at raising funds through bank robberies and kidnappings. The IS got him to massacre a bus full of Ismailis in Karachi in 2015.

Will Pakistan fall to the IS, just as it did to al-Qaeda and couldn’t resist bin Laden’s decision to live in Abbottabad, close to the terrorist camps he was funding? Will Pakistan become the IS’s “Khorasan”?

There are reports that the IS will be contained in Afghanistan because the rising Taliban will take it on. Michael Kugelman of the Woodrow Wilson Centre notes: “But here is the good news: ISIS will struggle mightily to make major inroads in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, and it certainly will not be in a position to seize large expanses of territory. There is little chance that ISIS can do in Pakistan and Afghanistan what it has done in Iraq and Syria.”

It might not pan out the way predicted above. If the world doesn’t put an end to the IS’s spreading financial footprint in the Middle East — much of it remittances from a scared Sunni Gulf — Afghanistan will succumb happily enough, given the Taliban’s vulnerability to dollars.