Daesh is the deadly new front in terrorism war
TERROR GROUP CHANGES STRATEGY WITH MORE FOCUS ON LESS VISIBLE NETWORKS OF INDIVIDUALS, AND CELLS WITH A DEGREE OF AUTONOMY
Hafeez Nawaz was 20 years old when he left his religious school in Karachi to join Daesh, in Afghanistan. Three years later he was back in Pakistan to carry out a deadly mission: With explosives strapped to his body, he blew himself up in the middle of an election rally last month, killing 149 people and wounding 300 others.
The attack in southwestern Balochistan province near the Afghan border just days before Pakistan’s July 25 parliamentary elections has cast an unwelcome spotlight on Nawaz’s tiny village of Dhabeji, where the presence of an Daesh cell in their midst has brought the full weight of Pakistan’s security apparatus down on its residents.
“Now we are all under suspicion,” said Nawaz’s neighbour, who gave only his first name, Nadeem, for fear of the local police. “The security agencies now consider Dhabeji a security threat area.”
Nawaz’s trajectory from religiously devout student to terrorist and suicide bomber is an all too familiar one in Pakistan.
Since battlefield successes routed Daesh from its strongholds in Syria and Iraq, hundreds of Pakistanis who travelled to join the extremists’ so-called “caliphate” are unaccounted for and Pakistan’s security personnel worry that they, like Nawaz, have gone underground waiting to strike.
Sitting in his office in a compound surrounded by high walls and heavily armed guards, Karachi’s counterterrorism department chief, Pervez Ahmad Chandio, said Daesh is the newest and deadliest front in Pakistan’s decadesold war on terror.
“It is one of the most dangerous threats facing Pakistan and we are ready to fight this war,” he said.
It’s the amorphous nature of Daesh that has counterterrorism officials like Chandio most worried. When one cell is disrupted another emerges, sometimes within weeks and often in an unrelated part of the country.
“It’s what they don’t know that is the most worrying for counterterrorism departments around the country,” said Mohammad Amir Rana, executive director of the Islamabadbased Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, which tracks militant movements in the region.
“Its hideouts, its structure, its strategy are all unknown. They are an invisible enemy who is defeated in one area, only to resurface in another.”
Changing face
A UN Security Council report earlier this year warned of the changing face of Daesh, saying the extremist group was “entering a new phase, with more focus on less visible networks of individuals and cells acting with a degree of autonomy.”
Hafeez Nawaz was just such a case.
Three years ago, he joined his older brother, Aziz, to study at Siddiquia Madrassa in Karachi’s Shah Faisal Colony neighbourhood, an area where the level of sectarian violence at the time was so brutal that even police could not enter. A crackdown by paramilitary Rangers has since led to the arrest and killing of hundreds of militants and criminals.
Today, the religious school is among 94 madrasas under surveillance in Karachi and elsewhere in southern Sindh province, Chandio said. They have been identified as breeding grounds for radicalism, schools where terrorists have emerged and that perpetrators of attacks attended.
The origin of the money is not clear but the teachings at these schools espouse a rigid interpretation of Islam.
It was at Siddiquia Mosque that Nawaz’s brother, Aziz, fell in with a crowd of would-be terrorists and was persuaded to travel to Afghanistan’s Spinboldak region on the border with Pakistan in 2014 to join the Taliban. But his allegiance was short-lived as commanders squabbled and Aziz returned to Pakistan.
Once back home, he inducted his younger brother, Hafeez, into the terrorist circle but this time, it was Daesh that held sway, said Chandio, who was part of the counterterrorism squad that, using little more than body parts and grainy cell phone pictures, identified Hafeez Nawaz as the suicide bomber behind the July 13 election rally attack.
Chandio learnt from the brothers’ father that Nawaz and Aziz packed up their three sisters and their mother and moved them to Afghanistan in 2016 to live among a Daesh affiliate there.
Two of the sisters have since married Daesh operatives. Their youngest brother, Shakoor, who was sent by their father a year later to plead with them to return, remains in Afghanistan, as does Aziz.
Chandio suspects 19-yearold Shakoor is now a Daesh operative and could be the next suicide bomber. He said Shakoor fits the criteria: a young man in his late teens or early 20s, religiously devout and susceptible to radicalisation.
Election rally
Hafeez Nawaz was just 23 when he walked into the middle of the election rally in Balochistan’s Mustang area and detonated the suicide vest that sprayed shrapnel throughout the tent packed with local tribesmen.
Nawaz’s father and his oldest brother, Haq Nawaz, are now in custody, caught trying to flee to Afghanistan, Chandio said.
Some analysts say the threat posed by Daesh in Pakistan is, at least in part, the result of the country’s bewildering attitude toward the toxic mix of militant groups that operate in the country.
Since 2004, the Pakistani military has killed or driven out thousands of militants from their mountain redoubts in the tribal regions that border Afghanistan, suffering thousands of casualties in those battles.
Since battlefield successes routed Daesh from its strongholds in Syria and Iraq, hundreds of Pakistanis who travelled to join the extremists’ so-called “caliphate” are unaccounted for.