WIDENING INSURGENCIES
Pakistan’s widening insurgencies are waged by competing groups with different support bases and ideologies but a common enemy in the Pakistani state.
Last week’s attack in Kohat was claimed by a militant group called Shura Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen.
It is headed by warlord Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who had once hosted al-Qaeda and Arab extremist fighters in the bordering region, said Abdul Basit, an analyst at Singapore’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies. The group initially focused on attacks against US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
At the time, that stood in stark contrast with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its insurgency against the Pakistani government in the northwest.
Bahadur’s group turned against Pakistan after a major Pakistani military offensive around 2015 that targeted a safe haven of the group in North Waziristan district, Basit said. That pushed the group’s fighters into Afghanistan.
The long-term repercussions of that shift are still playing out today, said Basit, as Bahadur’s group has become “an umbrella of different militant groups where al-Qaeda is the architect and Gul Bahadur is the face.”
While the public focus in Pakistan has been on the TTP, which was behind most of the deadly attacks, retaliatory Pakistani airstrikes have hit both the TTP and Bahadur’s hideouts in Afghanistan since late last year, Pakistani officials say.
Afghanistan had launched drones against Pakistan in July, which Islamabad had said its forces had intercepted and shot down.
The worst single incident occurred in March, when more than 400 people were killed in a Pakistani airstrike on Kabul, which the Afghan Taliban said targeted a drug rehabilitation centre.
Islamabad denied the charge, saying it “precisely targeted military installations and terrorist support infrastructure”.
Pakistan has a large air force, with 422 combat aircraft and more than 260 helicopters, according to data from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Afghanistan has no fighter jets but is known to possess at least six aircraft and 23 helicopters, and drones that have previously been used in fighting with Pakistan.
