Hunting the enemy within
A deadly suicide attack has raised questions about Pakistan’s ability to rein in militant groups allied to Islamic State.
A brutal attack on a beloved Sufi Muslim shrine that killed 88 people has raised fears that Islamic State has become emboldened in Pakistan, aided by an army of homegrown militants benefiting from hideouts in neighbouring Afghanistan, analysts and officials say.
Pakistani security forces have carried out sweeping country-wide raids following Friday’s bombing of the shrine in the southern province of Sindh, which also wounded 343 people. The military’s public relations wing reported on its official Twitter account that more than 100 suspected ‘‘terrorists’’ were killed in the raids.
Government officials lashed out at Kabul, accusing the Afghan government of ignoring earlier pleas to crackdown on militant hideouts.
Zahid Hussain, an expert on militants in the region, said a toxic mix of violent Sunni militant groups, many belonging to banned groups that were flourishing under new names, had wrapped themselves in the banner of the Islamic State group.
‘‘The Islamic State might not have a strong organisational structure in Pakistan, but we have thousands of members of banned groups sympathetic to [their] ideology,’’ Hussain said.
The shrine attack – Pakistan’s deadliest in years – stunned the nation and has raised questions about the authorities’ ability to rein in militant groups, despite several military offensives targeting militant hideouts.
It also threatens to drive a deeper wedge between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Islamabad said the bombing was masterminded in militant sanctuaries across the border in Afghanistan, whose own security forces have been assaulted by Isis fighters.
Pakistan’s army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa spoke by phone with General John Nicholson, the top United States commander in Afghanistan, to protest militant sanctuaries on Afghan soil, according to a statement on the military’s Twitter account.
Bajwa said the Afghan government was not taking action against the hideouts, and warned that its ‘‘inaction’’ was testing ‘‘our current policy of cross-border restraint’’.
Underscoring tensions between the two neighbours, Pakistan fired artillery shells into Afghan territory yesterday and shut down the Torkham border crossing, a key commercial artery. Pakistan said the barrage was in response to a militant attack on one of its border posts in its Khyber tribal region.
Pakistan TV, quoting unnamed military sources, said Pakistan targeted camps belonging to Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan blames Jammat-ul-Ahrar for the shrine attack, although Isis claimed responsibility.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar has claimed to have carried out a number of attacks, including the February 13 suicide assault in Lahore that killed 13 people, including three senior police officials.
According to local TV reports, the Pakistani shelling destroyed a militant camp in Afghanistan. Afghan officials said scores of families The government has no clear strategy . . . to deal with it. They have to strike the source of the militancy. Zahid Hussain, expert on Islamist militants had been displaced by the shelling.
Attaullah Khogyani, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar provincial governor, said he welcomed any operation, including the one carried out by Pakistan, against terrorist camps, but that ‘‘on a provincial level there wasn’t any kind of coordination with us’’.
In a phone call yesterday to Afghanistan’s national security adviser, Pakistan’s senior foreign ministry official, Sartj Aziz, accused Afghan President Ashraf Ghani of ignoring Islamabad’s earlier request to put an end to the militant sanctuaries in its territory.
Pakistan also handed over a list of 76 militants it says are hiding in Afghanistan, demanding that they be arrested and extradited to Pakistan.
Pakistan’s military did not specify who was on the list, but it has long claimed that the head of the Pakistani Taliban, Mullah Fazlullah, and other militants are hiding on Afghan soil with the purpose of fomenting violence inside Pakistan.
Ghani condemned the shrine attack. ‘‘Terrorists once again proved that they have no respect for Islamic values,’’ he said.
Isis, claiming responsibility for the attack in a statement circulated by its Aamaq news agency, said it targeted a ‘‘Shi’ite gathering’’. The Sunni extremist group views Shi’ites as apostates and has targeted Pakistan’s Shi’ite minority in the past. It also views Sufi shrines as a form of idolatry.
Hussain, who has written two books on Pakistan’s militant groups, said the government’s counterterrorism strategy had been inept, allowing groups that had been banned to remerge, individuals on international terrorist lists to operate freely, and ignoring funding of these groups from radical Sunni Muslim charities in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states.
‘‘The government has no clear strategy. They don’t have a clear policy to deal with it,’’ he said. ‘‘They have to strike the source of the militancy, the institutions where they are brainwashed,’’ a reference to those madrassahs or religious schools that teach a radical version of Islam which reviles Shi’ites as well as adherents of all other beliefs.
Isis has been expanding its presence in Pakistan and has claimed responsibility for a number of deadly attacks, including a suicide bombing at another Sufi shrine in November 2016 that killed more than 50 people.
The government has downplayed Isis’s presence, insisting that only a small number of militants have pledged allegiance to the group.
‘‘Either the entire government is in a state of denial, or they know it well but don’t want to do anything about it,’’ Hussain said.