ISLAMABAD: As investigators probe connections between the Orlando killer and the militant Islamic State (IS) group, analysts say the militants are struggling to gain a foothold in one country repeatedly linked to their high profile attacks.
This week in New Hampshire, US President hopeful Donald Trump mentioned Pakistan in a speech as he doubled down on anti-immigration threats in the wake of the bloody rampage in Orlando. He cited an attack in California last November in which a Pakistani woman and her US born husband killed 14 people and were then praised by IS as “soldiers” of the caliphate. Other murky links between Pakistan and IS attacks have also emerged. On Monday two people were killed in France by a man claiming allegiance to IS and according to French intelligence he also had a role with a Pakistan linked militant group. Austrian prosecutors said in April that they were investigating a Pakistani held in connection with last November’s deadly assault in Paris, also claimed by IS. Washington earlier this year designated an IS affiliate the “Khorasan Province” as Afghanistan and Pakistan based terrorist organisation. But Islamabad officially denied that IS had any formal presence in the country.
Recruitment
Analysts said that while the group’s ultra-violent ideology had seen some success as a recruitment tool, IS was still scrabbling for purchase in Pakistan largely due to competition from well-established extremist groups already there. “My sense is that it has had limited success mainly because it has to compete for recruits with indigenous militant organisations,” Director of the Pakistan Center at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC Marvin G. Weinbaum said. A research fellow at the US based Middle East Forum Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi said, “I don’t see it as having the potential to make large scale territorial gains and existentially threatening Pakistan as a nation”. He added in an email to AF, “I am also somewhat sceptical of the potential to supplant Al-Qaeda and the Taliban”.
Attacks claimed by IS in Pakistan are rare, the most significant being a 2015 gun assault on a bus in Karachi that killed 44 people. However, Pakistani officials told AFP that hundreds of suspects have been rounded up as authorities try to break a domestic IS recruitment network. “Educated, motivated and unemployed youth are an IS recruitment base in Pakistan. We have busted several recruitment cells here,” a senior security official told AFP on condition of anonymity. “Their focus is on the middle class youth, many affluent and able to run operations of the IS state said analyst Muhammad Amir Rana said. “That means not only foot soldiers, but people who can “run cyber operations, hospitals, and administrative operations”, he said, estimating that some 700 young Pakistanis have already left to join IS. Islamic organisations and security sources say at least two dozen people suspected of IS connections have been detained in Karachi. Authorities also found evidence of IS recruitment efforts in Pakistan’s wealthiest province Punjab, and made arrests in 2014. Last year authorities traced a mother of four who went missing from the provincial capital Lahore with her children over fears she had left the country to join IS. Her family said that now she is in an IS controlled area of Syria along with another Pakistani family. Authorities have also arrested multiple people accused of being sympathetic to IS and with links to the religious political party Markazi Jamiat Ahle Hadith, Pakistan (MJAP). A senior party member told AFP that his son had become a militant and is now missing. “Some people say he has gone to Damascus, others say to Afghanistan or Turkey,” Talib ur Rehman Zaidi said.
Barbarism
In Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt that borders Afghanistan, analysts said that IS is targeting militants already operating there. “My impression is that IS mainly attracts and tries to recruit disillusioned members of the Taliban movements as well as the likes of Lashkar-i-Taiba,” analyst Al-Tamimi said. However, they are not succeeding, analyst Rana said, because of sectarian differences between the militants.
The jostling of Pakistan’s array of other extremist groups means IS will not become a threat to Islamabad any time soon, said Weinbaum. But the groups seeming inability to establish itself on Pakistani soil may not deter “lone wolf” attacks, as US investigators believe happened in Orlando. “Individuals just associate themselves with them (IS)”, president of MJAP Sajid Mir told AFP, as he denied any links between his party and the militants. “We have no connection what IS is doing, that is not jihad but barbarism.“
