ISIL has arrived in Pakistan. During October, two militant factions based in the northwest tribal areas straddling Afghanistan announced they had pledged allegiance to the self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. Several other factions are likely to follow suit. By the new year it is possible that 1,000 militants could have switched allegiance to ISIL.
In the current political climate, that’s an alarming headline. It’s also misleading. Neither of the Pakistan-based factions were inspired to act by ISIL’s advances in Syria and Iraq, nor do they plan to relocate and join the fight there. Rather, their decisions were acts of desperation forced upon them by the Pakistani military’s ongoing campaign in North Waziristan, the last sliver of tribal territory controlled by militants.
The decisions also reflected a shared perception that the collective jihadist leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan had failed them. In effect, they defected to ISIL rather than joining it. Thus, the identity of the defectors is where the facts of this story lie.
The first faction to defect was the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the single-largest, non-native Al Qaeda affiliate to have relocated from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas in 2001. They also proved to be the fiercest of that fearsome bunch. Within the tribal areas, they established exclusive pockets of territory, notably in South Waziristan, until they were evicted in 2006 by native militants. Hundreds died on either side in what even Taliban veterans described as the worst bloodshed they’d ever seen.
Wounded and weakened, they retreated to North Waziristan, pursued by Central Intelligence Agency drones that picked off one leader after another.
Nonetheless, IMU personnel remained at the heart of the most audacious attacks on Pakistan’s strategic installations, including the June attack on Karachi airport that prompted the launch of the military offensive in North Waziristan.
Under threat of eradication, the IMU asked Al Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahri for help. He could offer them neither sanctuary nor resources, so they turned to Afghanistan-based former associates of the late Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and through them, was put in touch with the leadership of ISIL. The IMU was welcomed with open arms and understandably so, considering its deserved reputation as tip-of-the-sword of Pakistan’s militant insurgency.
From an inside-the-jihad perspective, the IMU decision was a political watershed. Without implicitly saying so, they chose ISIL over Zawahri, the man of words. In doing so, they broadcast the worst-kept secret of the Af-Pak militant community: Zawahri is not just unpopular, he’s widely despised by hardliners of the militant warrior class as a political opportunist.
Once that conversation became mainstream among militants, further acts of mutiny were inevitable and came in the shape of a mass defection to ISIL by factions of the Pakistani Taliban. Its chief, Mullah Fazlullah, is an even more divisive character than Zawahri, and this wasn’t the first time faction leaders had rebelled against him – practically all regional commanders have rejected him.
However, it was unprecedented for native militants to revoke their allegiance to Mullah Mohammed Omar, chief of the Afghan Taliban, and transfer it to another. Hitherto, the elusive one-eyed founder of the Taliban was the holiest of what South Asian militants deemed to be holy, and thus considered above reproach.
Shock is still reverberating through the militant ranks of South Asia. Like the citizens of a country in political crisis, they are on tenterhooks, awaiting the response of Mullah Omar, Ayman Al Zawahri and Mullah Fazlullah. Expectations vary: Omar’s priority is to maintain a semblance of unity because he wants to conserve limited human resources for Afghanistan, where the Taliban is rapidly reasserting its presence in areas of the country recently vacated by withdrawing US-led Nato forces. He will probably dispatch emissaries to defectors they believe they can woo back. But the trinity of terror will also act decisively to re-establish their political writ, because anything short of a ruthless response would be seen as a sign of weakness by the militant warrior class. But punitive action, overt or otherwise, would also be seen as unfair and grow the ranks of potential defectors to ISIL.
The outcome depends on the scope of Baghdadi’s political ambitions. The number of South Asian-based militants to have sworn allegiance to him is still a very small percentage of the whole, which is about 30,000.
However, it is large enough for ISIL to declare the establishment of a new franchise in South Asia, with its own command and control structure. The insurgency in Pakistan is in transition from a territorial phase to a campaign of assassination attacks. That accords Baghdadi with the option of raising the ISIL banner above the scene of a high-profile IMU-executed strike in Pakistan, giving him leverage in Zawahri’s backyard that could be used to extract concessions in Syria and Iraq.
Indeed, it’s all very reminiscent of how, in 2003, Zarqawi blackmailed Osama bin Laden into acknowledging his leadership of the insurgency he’d already launched in Iraq.
Tom Hussain is a freelance journalist and political analyst based in Islamabad
