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On the morning of August 8, the Islamic State (ISIS) carried out what was undoubtedly its most devastating and sophisticated attack to date in Pakistan. The operation began when Jamaat-ul-Ahrar—a faction of the Pakistani Taliban—and ISIS targeted the emergency services ward at Quetta’s Civil Hospital, where dozens of people, including many lawyers, were gathered to mourn the assassination of the president of the Balochistan Bar Association, Bilal Anwar Kasi. A suicide bomber detonated a lethal bomb, killing at least 97 people. In the space of a few hours, many practicing senior lawyers in one of Pakistan’s most important provincial capitals had been killed.
At first glance, Pakistan might seem like a natural point of expansion for ISIS. Not only is the country an avowedly Islamic republic, it has often been plagued by the kind of political instability (ranging from religious militancy to military coups) that has allowed ISIS to seize territory in other countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. However, expanding into a country already overcrowded by jihadist organizations has proved to be challenging. Ideologically, ISIS’ Salafi orientation, combined with its anti-Western and anti-Shia sentiment, not to mention its narrative of liberating Muslim lands, echoes the playbooks of longstanding actors on the Pakistani militant scene, including groups that have actively opposed ISIS itself. Moreover, the natural friction between ISIS and its rivals is evident in the recurrent fights between ISIS and the Afghan and Pakistani branches of the Taliban.
Lawyers say prayers for colleagues who were killed in the suicide bomb attack at a hospital in Quetta on Monday, after protesting against the attack, outside the Supreme Court in Islamabad, Pakistan August 9, 2016.
Caren Firouz / Reuters
As in many countries where political stability and military might forecloses ISIS’ ability to expand territorially, the organization remains first and foremost an ideological threat.With ISIS-Khorasan unable to draw manpower directly from its parent organization, the majority of militants associated with the group have instead been disaffected individuals drawn from local militant outfits. A case in point is the shocking May 2015 attack on a busload of workers in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi. Forty-five people died. Previously affiliated with Al Qaeda but frustrated with its inactivity, the attackers branded themselves as ISIS affiliates. Although Hafiz Khan claimed responsibility for this attack in a January 2016 issue of Dabiq, the magazine of ISIS, no link was revealed between the attackers and ISIS. Similarly, another cell of militants arrested in the northeastern Pakistani city of Sialkot had branded themselves ISIS affiliates, but possessed no obvious links with the parent organization. Like many of the group’s “affiliates,” the Sialkot cell was composed of individuals detached from a struggling local outfit—in this case, Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned militant organization in South Asia advocating for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, and the liberation of Kashmir from Indian control.
This is not to say, however, that ISIS exists only as a vague symbol or idea in Pakistan. Whereas groups in Karachi and Sialkot aspire to the ISIS label, other direct links between ISIS and individuals in Pakistan have been exposed more clearly. In December 2015, members of a Lahore ISIS cell exposed by a police operation allegedly came into direct contact with ISIS militants in Syria. The Pakistani individuals later departed directly for Syria in September 2015. The ISIS cell consisted of 20 people, including men, women, and children. Bushra Cheema, a Pakistani woman, was one of the cell’s principal members, and took four kids along with her to Syria. More recently, when a faction of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT), a radical Islamic group interested in re-establishing the Muslim caliphate and restoring Sharia law, pledged allegiance to ISIS, they were instructed by the organization’s Khorasan leadership to develop links between different followers of ISIS in Pakistan. At an individual level, local militants removed from existing organizations by military operations in Karachi and FATA have gone on to directly join ISIS upon fleeing from Pakistan to Afghanistan. For these fighters, the allure of ISIS is self-evident: ISIS functions as a more prestigious and powerful organization with far better funding. Reports have even emerged that Pakistani militants traveling to Afghanistan in order to join the local ISIS chapter have been paid $500 per month.
In this file image taken from a video recording, Omar Khalid Khorasani (C), a top Pakistan Taliban commander, gives an interview in Pakistan's Mohmand tribal region on June 2, 2011.
Reuters