Making Pakistan A Nuclear Threat (Daniel 8:8)

ISIS Has A New Partner, And The Duo Immediately Launched A Deadly Attack In Pakistan

Yochanan Visser
August 9, 2016 at 11:57am

On Monday news broke that the Islamic State had formed an official alliance with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The pact between the two jihadist movements could have repercussions beyond the battlefield in Afghanistan, as was proved Monday in neighboring Pakistan, which is the only Muslim country known to be in the possession of nuclear weapons.

The Taliban and Islamic State carried out one of the worst terrorist attacks ever in Pakistan when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of mourners at a hospital in the city of Quetta in the southwest of the country.

The blast killed 70 people and wounded more than 112 others. Authorities expected that the death toll would rise even further.

“The bomber struck as a crowd of mostly lawyers and journalists crammed into the emergency department to accompany the body of a prominent lawyer who had been shot and killed in the city earlier in the day,” Reuters reported, citing a local reporter.

Both the Taliban, via its Pakistani branch Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, and the Islamic State, via its news agency Amaq, took responsibility for the attack.

Both movements try to destabilize Pakistan and to radicalize the population of the nuclear-armed country. This common goal is apparently behind the new alliance between the former rivals.
When the Islamic State became active in Afghanistan in 2014, the Taliban sought to stamp out the movement and fought fierce battles with ISIS in several provinces of Afghanistan. As Western Journalism reported in January this year, the Islamic State originally fought the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan because it claimed that the Taliban maintains a close relationship to the Pakistani government. ISIS saw the Taliban as a proxy of Pakistan and accused Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, the emir Taliban, of being an “apostate” whose orders should not be followed.
Recently, however, all this apparently had become less relevant and the two jihadist movements stopped fighting each other and turned their guns on U.S.-backed government forces.
The lull in the fighting with the Taliban gave the Islamic State the possibility to extend its deadly suicide bombing campaign to the Afghan capital Kabul and now to Afghanistan.

At the end of July, Kabul suffered the worst suicide bombing since 2001 when the Islamic State killed more than 80 people and wounded 231 others during a demonstration by the Shiite Hazara community in Afghanistan.

The White House responded to the new suicide attack on Pakistan and said in a statement Monday that the Obama administration would “remain resolute in joining with the people of Pakistan in confronting terrorism in Pakistan and across the region.”

The suicide attack on the hospital in Quetta marked the second time the Taliban — now together with the Islamic State — struck Pakistan in a little more than four months.

At the end of March, the Taliban murdered at least 69 Christians who gathered for Easter celebrations in a park in Lahore, Pakistan. Most of the victims in that attack were children and women who came to the park to enjoy the many attractions there.

Earlier this year the Islamic State attacked Pakistan for the first time when three terrorists from the ISIS Afghan branch Wilayat Khorasan entered the compound of the Pakistani consulate in Jalalabad and started a well-planned operation that lasted for hours, killing scores of Pakistani and Afghan employees of the consulate.