Rameez Makhdomi
ISIS and Lashkar e Toaiba have launched a scathing attack against one another. Islamic State, has dubbed the Pakistani Army as “apostate” and mocked the al-Qaeda’s support to militancy in Kashmir which it said was controlled by the military establishment in the neighbouring country.
“In India, they (al-Qaeda) are the allies of the nationalist Kashmir factions whose advances and withdrawals are only by the order of the apostate Pakistani army,” an article in the IS mouthpiece Dabiq said in one of the harshest criticism of the al-Qaeda’s role in Khorasan, a region that includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and parts of northwestern and western India.
Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba launched a counter attack on Saturday denouncing the Islamic State as “a product of anti-Islamic Western countries” and said it had no role and space in Jammu and Kashmir.
“Kashmiris don’t want aid and support from an external group. They are capable enough to fight against the Indian aggression themselves,” LeT spokesperson Dr Abdullah Ghaznavi told a Srinagar-based news agency.
Though the IS has had limited presence in India till now, security agencies estimate that around two dozen people from the country have joined the outfit in Syria and Iraq.
The IS’ black flag has also appeared during anti-India demonstrations in Kashmir in recent times.
Pertinently, The IS mouthpiece—a glossy magazine into its twelfth edition now—draws its name from the name of a place in Syria which is prophesised to be the setting for one of the final battles leading to an apocalypse.
The latest issue displays pictures from the Paris carnage as well as a photograph of an IED-fitted into a can of Schweppes Gold pineapple juice—that apparently brought down a Russian Metrojet airliner over the Sinai peninsula in Egypt on October 31, killing all 224 people on board.
ISIS has gained much importance due to its brutal tactics.