ISIS AND THE REALITY
ISIS is run by a deviant distorted strain of Sunni fanatics. They exploit raw emotions yearning for the delusional grandeur of a bygone era of Salafist Takfiri literalist ideological indoctrination. This worldview coalesces with some South Asian theocratic clerics, thirsting for the déjà vu of theocratic empire-building.
The Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Taliban Fazlullah faction, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Ahle-Sunnat-Wal-Jamaat are just some of the unsavoury terror organizations that were orchestrating deadly operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India much before the advent of ISIS.
Prior to 2014, ISISSouth Asia was a mere spectator, but thereafter has become a spoiler of significant proportion. ISIS has been expansionist in South Asia since 2014. In initial maps released by ISIS Iraqi & Syrian head-quarters, the merciless death merchants of the Levant envisaged far-reaching geographical expansion whose caliphate was to span from Spain in the West to India and China in the east.
South Asia prominently being featured in their initial map makes the region intensely susceptible to their sinister designs.
Pakistan already has an over-crowded terror operating theater which is why ISIS Khorasan (ISISdenoting the ISIS South Asian affiliate) has not found it easy to make institutionalized inroads. Vestiges of Al Qaeda remain, Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP ) – especially the Fazlullah faction – are still the fiercest extremists. They recently pursued realigning with Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Sipah-i-Sahaba who bear a soft spot for ISIS-Khorasan, per intelligence agencies. The killings of SP Chaudhry Aslam in Karachi and ANP leader Bashir Bilour in Peshawar are grim reminders of such radical alignments.
Though there is still no overwhelming explicit evidence of ISIS’s central leadership in Iraq and Syria actively, consistently and overtly directing terrorist activities in Pakistan, its poisonous ideology has spread like cancer amongst our midst, inspiring individuals or groups in South Asia (at times autonomous previously unaffiliated ones) to recruit, raise funds, logistically organize and execute attacks to demonstrate to ISIS their support. It is this potential for convergence among multiple terrorist groups that causes most consternation and cause for concern.
ISIS regional ruling ambitions, ubiquitous social media sway, radical extremist ideology, and vast recruitment pool of existing and potential militants in Pakistan, imply that ISIS cannot be ignored as a potentially pernicious threat to Pakistan`s social fabric and its subsequent fallout for the entire South and Central Asian region as a whole.
A mélange of “push” and “pull” factors contributed to these local militants’ decision to join ISIS —“push” aspects include a disillusionment with their idols in TTP or the Afghan Taliban plus TTP’s losing grip of territorial control in the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA), which obliged its top brass to worm their way into Afghanistan. “Pull” factors include a virulent apocalyptic allure toward the ideology and successes of ISIS or its ability to bankroll extremists more lucratively than other radical groups.
ISIS enjoys much more influence and traction in Afghanistan as compared to Pakistan though recently they have gained an increasing foothold in Pakistan as well, with copious evidence of their nationwide penetration. ISIS is not finding it easy to fully operationalize itself in Pakistan due to commendable law enforcement clampdowns and military operations in a more stable Pakistan as compared to a strife and war-torn Afghanistan, yet ISIS and the government of Pakistan understandably does not want to stir up an alarmist hornet’s nest over ISIS-K, but as time unfolds ISIS in South Asia has evolved from a fledgling operation to a mature terrorist organization capable of carrying out complex and diverse attacks, conducting fifth generation asymmetrical warfare, reconnaissance and retaliation missions using escape and evasion techniques. Naive or negligent deniability can no longer be used to cloak the reality that ISISin South Asia is a hazardously growing menace.
This essay explores ISIS`s presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, how its poisonous ideology will shape both existing and upcoming extremists in the region, and what a resilient response from the Pakistani government, authorities and civil society could entail networks’ have emerged in the shadows.
Such wayward nostalgic dreamers relish the renaissance of age-old caliphates. It is these very sentiments and naive impulses which remain entrenched in a tiny minority of brain-washed ideologically-conditioned South Asian militant fascists, hell-bent on super-imposing and force-feeding their narrowly distorted version of religion over all of society. It is this deadly and dreamy nostalgia that ISIS exploits to the hilt, riding on a populist, identity-based sectarian tide of insular dogma.
ISIS zealots, eerily growing in number, have snaked their way into Afghanistan, Bangladesh (witness the recent lynching of multiple secular bloggers), a radicalized minority in Pakistan and an inflammatory India where an orgy of RSS BJP induced communal violence and the lynching of Muslims has anti-climaxed to pre-partition 1947 proportions.
Such an inhumane treatment of Muslims in India, of wrongly accusing them of eating beef, gifts the ghastly ISIS India grounds to exploit legitimate Muslim grievances, and commit atrocities, take for instance the March 2017 Madhya Pradesh train blast claimed by a self-proclaimed Indian `emir` of ISIS-K.
Under Modi`s government, the so-called largest “democracy” on earth, India, is where religious, ethnic, minority and communal violence and bigotry are at an alarming high. The Dadri, Dimapur and Jharkhand mob lynches in India with flagrant human rights violations in Occupied Kashmir – a valley where tears flow from the eyes of mothers and pellets are fired into the eyes of their sons, where Burhan Wani is iconoclastically idolized as society gets radicalized – is igniting the country towards incendiary fascism. A highly toxic cocktail in a heavily nuclearized South Asia.
ISIS South Asia banks on a psychological breakdown of the Islamic society from deep within, which as witnessed above, is exactly what is occurring, leaving behind a trail of victims and an identity based insecurity vacuum swiftly filled by ISIS-K.
South Asia`s imperialist legacy and the British Raj have also left an indelible grievance and a victimhood subjugation mentality in South Asia. Scarring the egos, hearts and minds of angry insecure theocrats, whose offspring, to this day, remain intoxicated by an insatiable anger towards Western colonialists and coalition forces, makes it easier for ISISand other terror miscreants to infiltrate their minds and incite their desire for historical revenge.
Such misplaced pent up frustration and anger is a malevolent malaise channeled and vented in all the wrong ways, for all the wrong reasons, by all the wrong people, which explains (to a degree) the recent spate of mob lynching in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and India.
ISIS and other militants, frothing at the mouth, feed off such frustration not only to survive but to thrive. Exacerbating ethnic sectarian and religious bigotry and bias, most notably between Shias and Sunnis, is their most favourite fetid past time – creating generational rifts amongst fellow Muslims in already highly-strung sectarian societies such as Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.
ISIS fascists articulate the artificiality of borders carved out during the British Raj. They highlight the “manufactured” nature of nation-states in the region and artificial borders carved up amongst them only to divide, rule and conquer. Interestingly, this conceptually feeds into Benedict Anderson`s seminal theory of nations being nothing more than “imagined communities”. Just like imperialist predecessors, ISIS too by accentuating a non-realistic global Caliphate seeks to super-impose an “imagined community” over the Ummah, wilfully ignoring that there can never be a single interpretation of Islam. That Islam is a mosaic and not a monolith.
ISIS label all South Asian nation states as phony and convince malleable minds that existing governments are illegitimate sham democracies bought by the highest financial bidders. Pseudo-democracies and oligarchies for sale from rented states.
As ISIS in Iraq and Syria are suffering crushing defeat, where Syria is likely to be chopped up into multiple pieces, they have now focused their recruitment efforts in farther flung corners such as China’s Xinjiang province, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia. With incremental but incessant momentum ISIS activates their terror cells in China, the Caucuses and South Asia via network building and establishing contacts with like-minded Salafi Takfiri radicals, weaving a web of influence in South and Central Asia to offset territorial setbacks in the Middle East. In Iraq itself ISIS has lost 50% of the territory it once held and 25% of its land grab in Syria has been reclaimed by the opposition.
From the get-go ISIS Khorasan (ISIS-K) South Asia was a secondary contingency plan if they were to lose the Middle East. Such contingency planning and back-up shows their ability of foresight and also unearths their expansionist aims and claims. They eventually envisage uniting radicals in Pakistan and Afghanistan, co-opting even the Taliban (which will never happen), as a single army and, at the same time, have been asking al-Qaeda (again impossible) to join their ranks in an unholy alliance to erect and establish a single Islamic caliphate.
As the initial Arab founders of IS were busy in the raging blood drenched battlefields of Iraq and Syria, they saw an opportunity with the fracturing of TTP and immediately started courting South Asian terror misfits to embrace their global franchise as local chapters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, just as any global trans-national entity would, in what this CQ author dubbed (in a previous CQ edition) as IS being a new breed of Multi-National Terrorist Corporation (MTC) ™ in the 21st century.
From the ashes of a botched up Iraq invasion emerged ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Its preliminary territorial land grab attracted many terrorist outfits and recruits to its fold. In an already over-saturated South Asian terror theater, the self-proclaimed Caliph, Al-Baghdadi, and IS leadership declared Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India as the state of Khorasan envisioned to be led by IS in South Asia.
The Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Taliban Fazlullah faction, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Ahle-Sunnat-Wal-Jamaat are just some of the unsavoury terror organizations that were orchestrating deadly operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India much before the advent of ISIS.
Prior to 2014, ISISSouth Asia was a mere spectator, but thereafter has become a spoiler of significant proportion. ISIS has been expansionist in South Asia since 2014. In initial maps released by ISIS Iraqi & Syrian head-quarters, the merciless death merchants of the Levant envisaged far-reaching geographical expansion whose caliphate was to span from Spain in the West to India and China in the east.
South Asia prominently being featured in their initial map makes the region intensely susceptible to their sinister designs.
Pakistan already has an over-crowded terror operating theater which is why ISIS Khorasan (ISISdenoting the ISIS South Asian affiliate) has not found it easy to make institutionalized inroads. Vestiges of Al Qaeda remain, Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP ) – especially the Fazlullah faction – are still the fiercest extremists. They recently pursued realigning with Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Sipah-i-Sahaba who bear a soft spot for ISIS-Khorasan, per intelligence agencies. The killings of SP Chaudhry Aslam in Karachi and ANP leader Bashir Bilour in Peshawar are grim reminders of such radical alignments.
Though there is still no overwhelming explicit evidence of ISIS’s central leadership in Iraq and Syria actively, consistently and overtly directing terrorist activities in Pakistan, its poisonous ideology has spread like cancer amongst our midst, inspiring individuals or groups in South Asia (at times autonomous previously unaffiliated ones) to recruit, raise funds, logistically organize and execute attacks to demonstrate to ISIS their support. It is this potential for convergence among multiple terrorist groups that causes most consternation and cause for concern.
ISIS regional ruling ambitions, ubiquitous social media sway, radical extremist ideology, and vast recruitment pool of existing and potential militants in Pakistan, imply that ISIS cannot be ignored as a potentially pernicious threat to Pakistan`s social fabric and its subsequent fallout for the entire South and Central Asian region as a whole.
A mélange of “push” and “pull” factors contributed to these local militants’ decision to join ISIS —“push” aspects include a disillusionment with their idols in TTP or the Afghan Taliban plus TTP’s losing grip of territorial control in the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA), which obliged its top brass to worm their way into Afghanistan. “Pull” factors include a virulent apocalyptic allure toward the ideology and successes of ISIS or its ability to bankroll extremists more lucratively than other radical groups.
ISIS enjoys much more influence and traction in Afghanistan as compared to Pakistan though recently they have gained an increasing foothold in Pakistan as well, with copious evidence of their nationwide penetration. ISIS is not finding it easy to fully operationalize itself in Pakistan due to commendable law enforcement clampdowns and military operations in a more stable Pakistan as compared to a strife and war-torn Afghanistan, yet ISIS and the government of Pakistan understandably does not want to stir up an alarmist hornet’s nest over ISIS-K, but as time unfolds ISIS in South Asia has evolved from a fledgling operation to a mature terrorist organization capable of carrying out complex and diverse attacks, conducting fifth generation asymmetrical warfare, reconnaissance and retaliation missions using escape and evasion techniques. Naive or negligent deniability can no longer be used to cloak the reality that ISISin South Asia is a hazardously growing menace.
This essay explores ISIS`s presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, how its poisonous ideology will shape both existing and upcoming extremists in the region, and what a resilient response from the Pakistani government, authorities and civil society could entail networks’ have emerged in the shadows.
Such wayward nostalgic dreamers relish the renaissance of age-old caliphates. It is these very sentiments and naive impulses which remain entrenched in a tiny minority of brain-washed ideologically-conditioned South Asian militant fascists, hell-bent on super-imposing and force-feeding their narrowly distorted version of religion over all of society. It is this deadly and dreamy nostalgia that ISIS exploits to the hilt, riding on a populist, identity-based sectarian tide of insular dogma.
ISIS zealots, eerily growing in number, have snaked their way into Afghanistan, Bangladesh (witness the recent lynching of multiple secular bloggers), a radicalized minority in Pakistan and an inflammatory India where an orgy of RSS BJP induced communal violence and the lynching of Muslims has anti-climaxed to pre-partition 1947 proportions.
Such an inhumane treatment of Muslims in India, of wrongly accusing them of eating beef, gifts the ghastly ISIS India grounds to exploit legitimate Muslim grievances, and commit atrocities, take for instance the March 2017 Madhya Pradesh train blast claimed by a self-proclaimed Indian `emir` of ISIS-K.
Under Modi`s government, the so-called largest “democracy” on earth, India, is where religious, ethnic, minority and communal violence and bigotry are at an alarming high. The Dadri, Dimapur and Jharkhand mob lynches in India with flagrant human rights violations in Occupied Kashmir – a valley where tears flow from the eyes of mothers and pellets are fired into the eyes of their sons, where Burhan Wani is iconoclastically idolized as society gets radicalized – is igniting the country towards incendiary fascism. A highly toxic cocktail in a heavily nuclearized South Asia.
ISIS South Asia banks on a psychological breakdown of the Islamic society from deep within, which as witnessed above, is exactly what is occurring, leaving behind a trail of victims and an identity based insecurity vacuum swiftly filled by ISIS-K.
South Asia`s imperialist legacy and the British Raj have also left an indelible grievance and a victimhood subjugation mentality in South Asia. Scarring the egos, hearts and minds of angry insecure theocrats, whose offspring, to this day, remain intoxicated by an insatiable anger towards Western colonialists and coalition forces, makes it easier for ISISand other terror miscreants to infiltrate their minds and incite their desire for historical revenge.
Such misplaced pent up frustration and anger is a malevolent malaise channeled and vented in all the wrong ways, for all the wrong reasons, by all the wrong people, which explains (to a degree) the recent spate of mob lynching in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and India.
ISIS and other militants, frothing at the mouth, feed off such frustration not only to survive but to thrive. Exacerbating ethnic sectarian and religious bigotry and bias, most notably between Shias and Sunnis, is their most favourite fetid past time – creating generational rifts amongst fellow Muslims in already highly-strung sectarian societies such as Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.
ISIS fascists articulate the artificiality of borders carved out during the British Raj. They highlight the “manufactured” nature of nation-states in the region and artificial borders carved up amongst them only to divide, rule and conquer. Interestingly, this conceptually feeds into Benedict Anderson`s seminal theory of nations being nothing more than “imagined communities”. Just like imperialist predecessors, ISIS too by accentuating a non-realistic global Caliphate seeks to super-impose an “imagined community” over the Ummah, wilfully ignoring that there can never be a single interpretation of Islam. That Islam is a mosaic and not a monolith.
ISIS label all South Asian nation states as phony and convince malleable minds that existing governments are illegitimate sham democracies bought by the highest financial bidders. Pseudo-democracies and oligarchies for sale from rented states.
As ISIS in Iraq and Syria are suffering crushing defeat, where Syria is likely to be chopped up into multiple pieces, they have now focused their recruitment efforts in farther flung corners such as China’s Xinjiang province, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia. With incremental but incessant momentum ISIS activates their terror cells in China, the Caucuses and South Asia via network building and establishing contacts with like-minded Salafi Takfiri radicals, weaving a web of influence in South and Central Asia to offset territorial setbacks in the Middle East. In Iraq itself ISIS has lost 50% of the territory it once held and 25% of its land grab in Syria has been reclaimed by the opposition.
From the get-go ISIS Khorasan (ISIS-K) South Asia was a secondary contingency plan if they were to lose the Middle East. Such contingency planning and back-up shows their ability of foresight and also unearths their expansionist aims and claims. They eventually envisage uniting radicals in Pakistan and Afghanistan, co-opting even the Taliban (which will never happen), as a single army and, at the same time, have been asking al-Qaeda (again impossible) to join their ranks in an unholy alliance to erect and establish a single Islamic caliphate.
As the initial Arab founders of IS were busy in the raging blood drenched battlefields of Iraq and Syria, they saw an opportunity with the fracturing of TTP and immediately started courting South Asian terror misfits to embrace their global franchise as local chapters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, just as any global trans-national entity would, in what this CQ author dubbed (in a previous CQ edition) as IS being a new breed of Multi-National Terrorist Corporation (MTC) ™ in the 21st century.
From the ashes of a botched up Iraq invasion emerged ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Its preliminary territorial land grab attracted many terrorist outfits and recruits to its fold. In an already over-saturated South Asian terror theater, the self-proclaimed Caliph, Al-Baghdadi, and IS leadership declared Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India as the state of Khorasan envisioned to be led by IS in South Asia.
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