CSIS – Center for Strategic and International Studies Finds ISKP’s Threat in Pakistan Emanating From Afghan Side
The Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), On July 30, conducted a suicide bombing attack at an election gathering for the Pakistani religious political party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-F), that resulted in killing of least 54 people, including the regional JUI-F leader. The attack took place in Bajaur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, which borders Afghanistan. The ISKP claimed responsibility for the attack hours after it happened.
The attack shows that Pakistan’s ISKP networks remain willing and able to carry out mass attacks on civilian targets. Islamic State (IS) networks in Pakistan will continue to pose a threat to small groups of security forces in the northwest of the country, but are unable to pose a meaningful challenge to the Pakistani state and are unlikely to carry out attacks in the United States or Europe unless major changes, in Pakistan’s security and political environment.
A key concern for politicians outside Pakistan was that the Afghan Taliban and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have probably played a cardinal role in reducing the power of the ISKP in Pakistan. The role of these groups in suppressing the ISKP threat means that policymakers outside the region have few attractive options to combat the ISKP. It also means that counter-terrorist activities against the TTP pose a risk of strengthening the ISKP.
This analysis (Complete Report link given below) focuses specifically on the threat posed by IS in Pakistan itself. The group poses an immediate threat to civilians and Taliban members in Afghanistan and insists it wants to carry out attacks further afield, including in Europe and the United States. The group’s activities in Pakistan have generally received less attention than the threat it poses in Afghanistan, Central Asia or the West, but the July 30 attack shows that the group is also a highly lethal threat to civilians in Pakistan.
ISKP is a Salafi-jihadi set-up founded by similar mind sets like of TTP, al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who defected from their various segments amongst the groups towards late 2014. The group runs its operations basically in Afghanistan, from there it is involved in a brutal insurgency against the Taliban regime, and in Pakistan’s KPK, Balochistan and, to a very lesser magnitude, Punjab province. ISKP’s activities in Balochistan are difficult to distinguish from those of the Islamic State-Pakistan Province (ISPP), an independent network that formally split with ISKP in May 2019, which generally engages in smaller attacks than ISKP.
