JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Pakistan struck several strikes in Afghanistan early today in what it now calls an open war. It's the latest escalation between the neighboring countries after peace talks collapsed late last year. Pakistan's government says the strikes were retaliation for Afghan forces attacking Pakistani troops along the border. From Islamabad, Betsy Joles reports on what's behind the renewed fighting.
BETSY JOLES, BYLINE: The open war comment came from Pakistan's defense minister, Khawaja Asif. It's a more urgent version of what he and others in Pakistan have been saying for months.
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KHAWAJA ASIF: We want to coexist, peacefully coexist.
JOLES: Here's Asif speaking in Parliament two weeks ago - broadcast and clips on Dawn News. He says terrorism has been imposed on Pakistan.
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ASIF: (Non-English language spoken).
JOLES: "So who will we hold accountable for this blood," he asks. He's alluding here to the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which Pakistan blames for giving space to militant groups operating across their shared border. That's how Pakistan's government justified an earlier round of airstrikes in Afghanistan last weekend, which it said were targeting camps and hideouts of these groups. They came after several deadly bombings in Pakistan this month, including a suicide blast at a Shia mosque on the outskirts of the capital Islamabad.
HASSAN ABBAS: The attacks show that they are missing something.
JOLES: Hassan Abbas is a Washington, D.C.-based academic who's written multiple books about extremism in Pakistan. He says Pakistani counterterrorism has heavily focused on the TTP, also known as the Pakistan Taliban. This is a group that frequently targets police and security officials and pledges allegiance to the Afghan Taliban. That helps explain why Pakistan went after the Afghan Taliban directly on Friday, claiming to have killed their personnel while also targeting posts, tanks and artillery. This was a big move. But Abbas says there's another group in the mix here that needs to be kept in mind, and that's ISIS-K. It's an arm of the Islamic State founded more than a decade ago by militants from Pakistan and Afghanistan, some of them defectors from the TTP. Its affiliates were behind the mosque blast in early February. Afghanistan denies harboring ISIS-K, which has major ideological issues with the Taliban.
ABBAS: One of the reasons why Afghan Taliban argue that we are not going to take on TTP, and we are not going to help Pakistan find TTP sanctuaries and everything else - because if you're going to do that, TTP is going to jump the ship, and TTP is going to go on the side of IS-K and will be among those who attack us.
JOLES: The K and ISKP or ISIS-K stands for Khorasan, a loosely defined geography spanning parts of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. It's considered significant by the Islamic State, since some believe this region will produce an army ahead of Judgment Day. Like ISIS affiliates in other parts of the world, this hard-line Sunni Muslim group supports the creation of a transnational Islamic caliphate. So experts say it's not just Pakistan that needs to be concerned about ISIS-K. Lucas Webber is a senior threat analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, which aims to disrupt extremism online. He says he watched ISIS-K expand its reach as the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021. That surprised some colleagues who saw it as a regional group.
LUCAS WEBBER: I said, well, are you reading what they're writing? - because they are now kind of switching up, and now they're becoming more ambitious in the propaganda.
JOLES: That, according to Webber, has turned ISIS-K into an international extremist network. This alarms authorities across North America and Europe. In 2024, Austria busted an ISIS-K-linked terror plot that was supposed to target a Taylor Swift concert. Webber says the group has been relatively quiet in recent months outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but...
WEBBER: It's not because they don't have the capabilities. They're just very patient.
JOLES: And the dynamics around this group are often hyperlocal, says Iftikhar Firdous. He's the founder of The Khorasan Diary, which monitors militancy in the region. In Pakistan's rough border belt with Afghanistan, he says allegiances get formed locally and lines between militant groups get blurred. That makes these relationships...
IFTIKHAR FIRDOUS: Very anarchic in nature - they don't follow a certain pattern. It's usually a marriage of convenience.
JOLES: In other words, they're not always purely ideological. This all adds up to an ever-shifting security landscape in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where militants may find new opportunities in the chaos of the moment. For NPR News, I'm Betsy Joles in Islamabad.
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