Tag Archives: Pakistan

Pakistan says it foiled Islamic State expansion into country

Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa, the military's top spokesman speaks during a news conference in Rawalpindi, Pakistan,

By Kay Johnson and Asad Hashim

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (Reuters) – Pakistan’s military on Thursday said it has crushed Islamic State’s attempt to expand there, dismissing as propaganda claims by the Middle East-based Islamist militants that they had carried out a major bombing last month.

The comments were, however, a rare acknowledgment by a senior Pakistani official that Islamic State, mainly based in Syria and Iraq, has had any active presence in a country that is home to myriad militant groups including the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, al Qaeda and the Haqqani network.

Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa, the military’s top spokesman, also rejected U.S. complaints that it was not acting against the Haqqani network, suspected of carrying out suicide bomb attacks in Kabul, saying Pakistan was pursuing an “indiscriminate operation” against all militants.

Pakistani authorities have so far arrested 309 people associated with Islamic State (IS) on its territory, he said. They were involved in attacks on media and security personnel, and were planning attacks on government, diplomatic and civilian targets, he added.

“They tried to make an ingress, and they failed and they have been apprehended so far,” Bajwa said.

Most of those captured by Pakistan were established Pakistani jihadists who had switched loyalties to Islamic State’s self-proclaimed worldwide caliphate, but about 25 were foreigners including Afghans and some Syrians, he said.

Bajwa said that of a core group of 20 organizers, “we have captured all of them, except for one who I am sure is not in Pakistan”.

He said IS fighters were still present in the Afghan provinces of Nangarhar, Khost and Kunar, which lie along the border with Pakistan.

The movement’s leader for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hafiz Saeed Khan, was killed last month by a U.S. drone strike in eastern Afghanistan.

International concern that Islamic State was establishing an operational presence in Pakistan increased after the group said it carried out a suicide bombing at a hospital in the city of Quetta that killed more than 70 people.

However, a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban also claimed the hospital bombing and Bajwa said he believed the Islamic State statement was false.

“We haven’t got any evidence of involvement by Daesh. I think this was just an attempt to glorify themselves,” he said, using the name by which IS is also known.

“NO GOOD OR BAD TALIBAN”

The military spokesman also dismissed U.S. concerns that Pakistan has been selectively targeting militant groups on its soil.

“There is no concept of good or bad Taliban,” he said.

“Terrorists of all organizations, including Haqqanis, including Afghan Taliban, have been killed and some apprehended … so if you say that you know actions have not been taken or (are) not being taken, that is wrong.”

He spoke a day after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Islamabad to push harder against militants hiding within its borders.

The United States has criticized Pakistan in the past for not acting against those groups, and last month it refused to release $300 million in military disbursements for that reason.

Critics say Pakistan has targeted only militants who attack its own state, not those active in neighboring Afghanistan and India.

Pakistan has been fighting the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella group of militants fighting to impose strict Islamic law in Pakistan, since 2007.

It is also home to other armed groups, such as the Haqqani network and Afghan Taliban, who fight international forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

Bajwa criticized international and local security forces in Afghanistan for not sealing the border when the Pakistan army began the latest phase of its military offensive against Pakistan-based militants in July 2014.

“Before the operation started, Pakistan had informed all stakeholders at all levels, political, diplomatic, military … We told them that you will have to take action … and that did not happen unfortunately,” he said.

He also released rare figures on progress in its anti-militant operation, saying more than 3,500 had been killed. He added that 516 soldiers had also been killed and 2,272 wounded.

It is difficult to verify those figures independently, as access to the conflict zone is heavily restricted.

“We have paid $106.9 billion (on) this war … If anyone points a finger at Pakistan or casts an eye of suspicion on Pakistan, they need to know this cost,” said Bajwa.

(Editing by Mike Collett-White)

Teacher in violence-torn Indian Kashmir starts makeshift classrooms

A protester prepares to throw a stone towards an Indian policeman during a protest in Srinagar against the recent killings in Kashmir

By Fayaz Bukhari

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) – Wedding halls and prayer rooms have been turned into classrooms in Indian-administered Kashmir as families struggle to provide children with a normal life after more than 50 days of the Muslim-majority region’s worst violence in years.

At least 68 civilians and two security officials have been killed and more than 9,000 people injured, according to official tallies, in clashes between protesters chaffing at Indian rule and security forces.

Authorities trying to stifle protests that erupted after a young militant leader was gunned down by the security forces on July 8 ordered schools and colleges to close two days later.

There’s no sign of them re-opening.

Teacher Ghulam Rasool Kambay, seeing children becoming increasingly restless cooped up at home, decided to do something.

He opened a tutorial center in a village on Aug. 3 and now has more than a dozen of them in villages in a district south of the region’s main city of Srinagar.

“The response is good. We have about 800 students in these centers. Parents are eager to send their children as they have no option right now,” Kambay told Reuters.

Students find their way to the makeshift schools in small groups through back lanes, careful not to attract the attention of police.

They often sit on the floor as there are not enough desks and share books.

“It’s more like a self-learning exercise, just a way to keep in touch with books,” said Muneer Wani, 16, at his temporary school at a mosque where classes begin after morning prayers.

Muneer said it was the only place to meet friends and study.

“We can’t even go outdoors.”

Disputed Kashmir is claimed by both India and Pakistan and has been a flashpoint for more than 60 years, sparking two wars between them.

Militant groups have taken up arms to fight for independence from Indian rule or to merge with Pakistan. India has blamed Pakistan for supporting the violence. Pakistan denies that.

Thousands of teenage boys defy a curfew every day and gather in groups to throw stones at police. Almost all of the deaths have been caused by security forces shooting at protesters.

On the streets of Srinagar, people have scrawled “Go India, go back”.

Zubair Ahmad said he was too worried about the safety of his two children to send them to classes at a nearby mosque.

His wife has been teaching them at home instead, but the children were getting restless, he said.

“It is very difficult for children … they’ve become aggressive.”

(Writing by Rupam Jain; Editing by Tom Lasseter, Robert Birsel)

U.S. aid to Pakistan shrinks amid mounting frustration over militants

A State Department contractor adjust a Pakistan national flag before a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Pakistan's Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan on the sidelines of the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism at the State Department in Washington February 19, 2015.

By Idrees Ali

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Pakistan’s continued support for resurgent militant groups hostile to the United States, coupled with warming U.S. military and business relations with India, is sharply diminishing Islamabad’s strategic importance as an ally to Washington, U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials and outside experts said.

The United States has cut both military and economic aid to Pakistan sharply in recent years, reflecting mounting frustration among a growing number of officials with the nuclear-armed country’s support for the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.

That frustration has dogged U.S.-Pakistan ties for more than a decade, but has spiked anew as the militant Islamic group has advanced in parts of Afghanistan that U.S. and allied forces once helped to secure, U.S. officials and analysts say.

“We’re seeing a very definitive and very sharp reorienting of U.S. policy in South Asia away from Afghanistan-Pakistan and more towards India,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert with the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think-tank.

(For graphic showing U.S. annual military and civilian aid to Pakistan since 2011 click http://tmsnrt.rs/2boG04J)

The U.S. relationship with Pakistan has long been a transactional one marked by mutual mistrust, marriages of convenience, and mood swings.

The long-standing U.S. frustration with Pakistan’s refusal to stop supporting the Taliban, especially within the U.S. military and intelligence community, is now overriding President Barack Obama’s administration’s desire to avoid renewed military involvement in Afghanistan, as well as concerns that China could capitalize on fraying ties between Washington and Islamabad, the U.S. officials said.

Obama announced last month he would keep U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan at 8,400 through the end of his administration, shelving plans to cut the force in half by year end.

American civilian and military aid to Pakistan, once the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, is expected to total less than $1 billion in 2016, down from a recent peak of more than $3.5 billion in 2011, according to U.S. government data. The United States has not appropriated less than $1 billion to Pakistan since at least 2007.

The decrease also comes amid budget constraints and shifting global priorities for the United States, including fighting Islamic State militants, a resurgent Russia and an increasingly assertive China.

In March, Republican Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would seek to bar $430 million in U.S. funding for Islamabad’s purchase of $700 million of Lockheed Martin Corp. F-16 fighter jets.

Earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter refused to authorize $300 million in military reimbursements to Pakistan, citing the limited gains the country has made fighting the militant Haqqani network, which is based in the country’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. The approval of such funding has been mostly routine in the past.

LIMITS OF COOPERATION

The U.S. Congress has yet to authorize hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan for the next fiscal year. The Pentagon is due to authorize $350 million in military aid for the next fiscal year, and is unlikely to approve it under the Obama administration, a U.S. defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“Congress is no longer willing to fund a state that supports the Afghan Taliban, which is killing American soldiers,” said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution expert and former CIA officer who headed Obama’s first Afghanistan policy review.

In a stark illustration of the limits of U.S.–Pakistan cooperation, the United States killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a drone strike in Pakistan’s remote Baluchistan region in May, without informing Pakistan.

Some U.S. officials still warn of the dangers of allowing relations with Pakistan to deteriorate. In a July 26 opinion piece in the Financial Times, Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued that “the strategic imperative for improved relations between the U.S. and Pakistan is clear – for the safety of American troops and the success of their mission in Afghanistan, for the stability of the region and for the national security of both Pakistan and the U.S.”

A senior Pakistani defense official said the United States will continue to need Pakistan in the fight against terrorism. Authorities in Islamabad have long rejected accusations that Pakistan has provided support and sanctuary to militants operating in Afghanistan.

“We have lost over a hundred billion dollars in fighting terrorism, which is more than anything they have given us,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In any event, the official said, Pakistan can turn to other sources of aid, including China. Last year the two countries launched a plan for energy and infrastructure projects in Pakistan worth $46 billion.

Nevertheless, the U.S. tilt toward India, Pakistan’s arch-foe, is likely to continue.

U.S. defense companies including Lockheed Martin and Boeing Co. are entering the Indian market, and the country has become the world’s second-largest arms buyer after Saudi Arabia, according to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Earlier this year, India and the United States agreed in principle to share military logistics, as both sides seek to counter the growing maritime assertiveness of China.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali in Washington. Additional reporting by Tommy Wilkes and Mehreen Zahra-Malik in Islamabad.; Editing by John Walcott and Stuart Grudgings)

Blast wounds 13 in Pakistani city on edge after big large suicide attack

Security officials gather at the site of a bomb explosion in Quetta, Pakistan,

By Asad Hashim and Gul Yusufzai

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) – A roadside bomb hit a Pakistani security vehicle and wounded 13 people on Thursday in the southwestern city of Quetta, days after a suicide bombing at a hospital killed at least 74 people, most of them lawyers, officials and media said.

The driver of the police pickup truck managed to drive the damaged vehicle to the Civil Hospital of Quetta – the same facility hit in Monday’s attack – to get the wounded to medical treatment.

The truck was parked outside the hospital with its mangled bonnet, blown-out wheels and blood-stained interior later on Thursday.

About 10 police officers were guarding the entrance to the hospital.

Provincial interior minister Safaraz Bugti said Thursday’s bomb targeted police escorting a judge, who was not hurt in the attack.

“It was a judge’s car that was passing, but I believe it was the police who were the target,” he said on Pakistani television.

Medical Superintendent Abdul Rehman Miankhel told Reuters that 13 wounded people, including four members of the security forces, were being treated at the hospital.

An announcer for Geo TV warned viewers not to gather at the scene in central Quetta for fear of a second bombing, like the one on Monday.

The Monday attack hit a large group of lawyers gathered at the hospital to mourn the head of the provincial bar association who was shot dead earlier that day.

“Care must be taken that a rush not be created at the scene as the terrorists have reached the point of barbarity where they target crowds like this,” the news announcer said.

Monday’s suicide bombing was Pakistan’s deadliest attack this year. It was claimed by both a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, and also by the Islamic State militant group, which has been seeking to recruit followers in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Targeted killings have become increasingly common in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province that has seen rising violence linked to a separatist insurgency as well as sectarian tension and rising crime.

Later on Thursday, Bugti told Reuters that security at all potential targets was being beefed up around Baluchistan.

A Chinese-funded trade corridor with promised investment of $46 billion is due to pass through the gas-rich province and the government has promised to boost security.

“We have already done (added security) for our schools, educational institutions and universities … Watchtowers have also been constructed,” he said.

“But obviously this new threat against hospitals has emerged – we are checking that and will beef up.”

(Writing by Kay Johnson; Editing by Paul Tait, Robert Birsel)

Suicide Bomber kills at least 70 at Pakistan Hospital

First responders and volunteers transport an injured man away from the scene of a bomb blast outside a hospital in Quetta

By Gul Yousafzai

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) – A suicide bomber in Pakistan killed at least 70 people and wounded dozens more in an attack on mourners gathered at a hospital in Quetta, according to officials in the violence-plagued southwestern province of Baluchistan.

The bomber struck as more than 100 mourners, mostly lawyers and journalists, crowded 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, Faridullah, a journalist who was among the wounded, told Reuters.

Abdul Rehman Miankhel, a senior official at the government-run Civil Hospital, where the explosion occurred, told reporters that at least 63 people had been killed, with more than 112 wounded, as the casualty toll spiked from initial estimates.

“There are many wounded, so the death toll could rise,” said Rehmat Saleh Baloch, the provincial health minister.

Television footage showed scenes of chaos, with panicked people fleeing through debris as smoke filled the hospital corridors.

The motive behind the attack was unclear and no group had yet claimed responsibility, but several lawyers have been targeted during a recent spate of killings in Quetta.

The latest victim, Bilal Anwar Kasi, was shot and killed while on his way to the city’s main court complex, senior police official Nadeem Shah told Reuters. He was the president of Baluchistan Bar Association.

The subsequent suicide attack appeared to target his mourners, Anwar ul Haq Kakar, a spokesman for the Baluchistan government, said.

“It seems it was a pre-planned attack,” he said.

Police cordoned off the hospital following the blast.

Aside from a long-running separatist insurgency, and sectarian tensions, Baluchistan also suffers from rising crime.

In January, a suicide bomber killed 15 people outside a polio eradication center in an attack claimed by both the Pakistani Taliban and Jundullah, another Islamist militant group that has pledged allegience to Islamic State in the Middle East.

Quetta has also long been regarded as a base for the Afghan Taliban, whose leadership has regularly held meetings there in the past.

In May, Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed by a U.S. drone strike while traveling to Quetta from the Pakistan-Iran border.

(Writing by Asad Hashim; Editing by Paul Tait and Simon Cameron-Moore)

Killings, Kidnappings and burnout; the hazards of aid work

Red Cross workers assist a collapsed migrant after he crossed Greece's border with Macedonia, in

By Katie Nguyen

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – You’re an aid worker speeding back to base after a long, cold day questioning people who have fled fighting about what they need to survive. Out of nowhere a girl runs into the road and is knocked over by your driver.

Within minutes, your four-wheel drive is surrounded by bystanders. First they shout, then they start banging windows and rocking the vehicle. Before long they prise open the car door and pull your driver out. Some are armed. What do you do?

It’s perhaps the toughest dilemma aid workers face during their brief stint in war-torn “Badistan” – in reality, a training camp in the grounds of a golf course near Gatwick Airport where they are confronted with mass casualties, a minefield and gun battles in various role-play scenarios.

The three-day course run by security risk management company, International Location Safety (ILS), is one of scores aimed at mitigating the risks of working in the field where aid staff kidnappings have quadrupled since 2002.

The perils of the job came under scrutiny in November when a court in Oslo found the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) guilty of gross negligence and awarded damages to a former employee abducted by gunmen from a Kenyan refugee camp in 2012.

It was the first case of its kind to reach a court judgment, igniting debate over whether aid agencies would become more risk-averse as a result.

“There has been an increasing bunkerisation of aid workers who operate out of compounds and are restricted in where they go,” said ILS Managing Director George Shaw.

“It does worry me that it will continue to happen. But that would be a lack of understanding of what the (NRC) ruling means. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do high-risk programs. It means we should do high-risk programs safely.”

NO SUCH THING AS RISK-FREE

Michael O’Neill, a former director of global safety and security at Save the Children International and now deputy chair of INSSA, an international NGO safety and security group, said the NRC case made it clear that organizations could do better.

“It’s not enough just to write (a security risk management system) down on paper. It’s not enough just to say it’s there,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “If it can happen to NRC, then who among us is not vulnerable at some level?”

Convening the first World Humanitarian Summit on the biggest issues facing the delivery of relief, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on warring parties to respect and protect aid workers, as well as the wounded and sick, from attack.

The summit in Istanbul later this month comes as leading aid officials warn of ever-increasing humanitarian needs due to crises ranging from Syria’s conflict to climate change.

The year 2013 was the worst for aid workers with 460 killed, kidnapped or seriously wounded, according to Humanitarian Outcomes which has collected data on the topic since 1997.

Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and Syria have gained a reputation for being most dangerous for aid workers, with the majority of attacks over the past decade or so occurring there.

Afghanistan alone accounted for 27 percent of those attacks between 2005 and 2014. But Somalia, with fewer aid workers, has seen an even higher rate of violence against humanitarians.

National staff are by far the most vulnerable. In 2014, they accounted for 90 percent of victims, roughly in proportion to their numbers in the field, Humanitarian Outcomes said.

REDUCING THE THREATS

Few believe all risks can be eliminated, but many agree that one of the most important ways to lessen them is to get the support of locals.

Too often aid workers are targeted because they are no longer perceived to be neutral. Wouter Kok, a security adviser for Medecins Sans Frontieres, said assuring all sides in a conflict of the agency’s impartiality is key to its security approach.

“We have to get back to that independence,” said Kok, who works for the Dutch arm of the medical charity.

“What we’ve seen in the last 10 to 20 years is that belligerents have tried to use humanitarian aid to win hearts and minds, and sometimes organizations have allowed themselves to be used,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Understanding the nuances of a conflict, the local culture and people’s motivations, together with strong negotiating skills, are also critical to mitigating risks, experts said.

Big organizations are increasingly aware that aid programs need to be designed with security in mind, INSSA’s O’Neill said. “Good programming and good security go hand in hand.”

For example, poorly designed food distributions can quickly turn ugly. But seeking the input of local communities, giving people a clear idea of what they will receive and setting up a complaints table away from the lines are some ways to reduce the risk, he said.

Caring for the mental health of aid workers is an overlooked but crucial aspect of keeping them safe, said Sara Pantuliano, director of humanitarian programs at the London-based Overseas Development Institute.

“The one thing that is forgotten the most is the levels of stress and trauma aid workers experience, and that is particularly true for local staff because they often have family affected by this crisis,” Pantuliano said.

“I think people don’t even raise the issue of being under stress or the threat of burning out or needing a proper break, needing to recuperate, because they may be accused of not being fit for the job,” she added.

For more on the World Humanitarian Summit, please visit: http://news.trust.org/spotlight/reshape-aid

(Reporting by Katie Nguyen; editing by Megan Rowling and Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Pakistan, Indonesia lead in malware attacks

An illustration picture shows a projection of text on the face of a woman in Berlin

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Pakistan, Indonesia, the Palestinian territories, Bangladesh, and Nepal attract the highest rates of attempted malware attacks, according to Microsoft Corp.

Countries that attracted the fewest include Japan, Finland, Norway and Sweden, Microsoft said in a new study, based on sensors in systems running Microsoft anti-malware software.

“We look at north of 10 million attacks on identities every day,” said Microsoft manager Alex Weinert, although attacks do not always succeed.

About half of all attacks originate in Asia and one-fifth in Latin America.

Millions occur each year when the attacker has valid credentials, Microsoft said, meaning the attacker knows a user’s login and password. A technology known as machine learning can often detect those attacks by looking for data points such as whether the location of the user is familiar.

On average, 240 days elapse between a security breach in a computer system and detection of that breach, said Tim Rains, director of security at Microsoft. The study, Microsoft Security Intelligence report, comes out Thursday.

(This story corrects headline to Indonesia, not India)

(Reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by David Gregorio)

Strong earthquake in Pakistan leaves six dead

By Asad Hashim

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Six people were killed across northern Pakistan although there appeared to be no widespread damage after a strong earthquake rattled major cities across South Asia at the weekend, authorities said on Monday.

The 6.6-magnitude quake on Sunday startled residents in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and forced some in high-rise buildings to flee into the streets of the Indian capital, New Delhi.

It was also felt in Islamabad and in Lahore in Pakistan’s east, about 630 km (390 miles) from the quake’s epicenter in remote northeastern Afghanistan, just inside the border with Tajikistan and across a narrow finger of land from Chitral – a district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan’s northwest.

Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said five people were killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Another was killed in northern Gilgit-Baltistan state, the NDMA said. At least seven people were reported injured across Pakistan, many of them in the northwestern frontier city of Peshawar.

There were no immediate reports of widespread damage in either Afghanistan or India, despite the quake rattling buildings in all three countries for more than a minute.

The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at a depth of about 210 km (130 miles).

Despite its depth, the quake still caused widespread panic in areas such as Chitral, a Reuters witness and a villager in the area said.

“It was a very dangerous situation, because our houses were already damaged from recent rainfall,” said Isa Khan, whose home in the village of Susoom, about 25 km (15 miles) north of Chitral, suffered moderate damage.

Most of the homes in his village are made of mud and brick. “We saw a lot of walls being damaged in front of us,” Khan said.

Pakistan’s NDMA said in a statement the air force had been asked to conduct an aerial photography survey to assess the damage in mountainous Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Khan said Chitral residents were still awaiting compensation after a 7.5-magnitude quake hit the area on Oct. 26 last year, killing more than 300 people and destroying thousands of homes.

The Hindu Kush area between Pakistan and Afghanistan is seismically active, with quakes often felt across a region where the Indian and Eurasian continental plates collide.

Just over a decade ago, a 7.6-magnitude quake in another part of northern Pakistan killed about 75,000 people.

(Additional reporting by Gul Hammad Farooqi in CHITRAL and Jibran Ahmed in PESHAWAR; Editing by Paul Tait and Himani Sarkar)

Floods kill At least 55 in Pakistan

Residents use a bridge covered with floodwater after heavy rain in Nowshera District on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan

By Asad Hashim

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Flash floods triggered by heavy rain in Pakistan have killed at least 55 people and rescuers were trying on Monday to help thousands of survivors including some cut off by a landslide in a mountain valley, officials said.

The weather system that brought the unusually heavy rain was expected to move northeast, towards northern India, although more isolated storms were expected in northern Pakistan, the Meteorological Department said.

Yousuf Zia, a disaster management official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said nearly 150 homes had been destroyed and tents and blankets were being distributed to the homeless.

“There are 30 people stranded by a landslide in the Kohistan Valley where we have sent a helicopter to rescue them,” Zia said.

Forty-seven people were killed and 37 injured in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Zia said, while eight people were killed in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, officials there said.

Landslides caused widespread damage to roads and communication infrastructure in the Pakistani side of Kashmir, they said.

One of the worst-affected districts was the Swat Valley, northwest of the capital, Islamabad, where 121 mm (4.76 inches) of rain fell on Sunday, the Meteorological Department said.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar claims responsibility for Easter bombing in Pakistan

Pakistan Blast

PESHAWAR, Pakistan/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – The Taliban faction that killed at least 70 people, many of them children, in a park in Lahore on Easter Sunday has been quickly gaining attention in militant circles.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar’s recent rise to prominence – Sunday’s attack was the fifth it has claimed since December – plus its onetime pledge of allegiance to Islamic State show the fractured and sometimes competitive nature of Pakistan’s myriad militants.

“They are nowadays the main group claiming attacks in the past few months,” said Mansour Khan Mehsud, lead researcher of the FATA Research Group, said of Jamaat-ur-Ahrar.

In Sunday’s attack, 29 of the 70 killed were children enjoying an Easter weekend outing. Pakistan is a majority Muslim state but has some two million Christians, and Easter is a public holiday.

It was the most deadly attack in Pakistan since the December 2014 massacre by the Taliban of 134 school children at a military run academy in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

A spokesman for Jamaat-ur-Ahrar (JA) on Monday threatened other attacks, including more against religious minorities.

“We don’t target women and children, but Islam allows us to kill men of the Christian community who are against our religion,” spokesman Ehansullah Ehsan said.

The group’s leader, Omar Khalid Khorasani, has a background that reads like a history of Pakistani militancy.

Born Abdul Wali in a small village called Lakaro in the northwestern Mohmand tribal region, Khorasani started out as an anti-India jihadist fighting in Kashmir, according to a long-time friend and militant colleague who spoke on condition of anonymity.

He later joined the Pakistani Taliban in 2007 to fight the government to establish strict sharia Islamic law.

In 2013, Khorasani was one of the candidates to lead the Pakistani Taliban – who are separate from but loosely allied with the Afghan Taliban – after its chief Hakimullah Mehsud was killed in a U.S. drone strike.

After losing out to Maulana Fazlullah, Khorasani left the next year to form his own group.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar in September 2014 swore allegiance to Islamic State, also known as Daesh.

“We respect them. If they ask us for help, we will look into it and decide,” spokesman Ehsan told Reuters of Islamic State, while rejecting the main Pakistani Taliban leadership.

By March 2015, however, the group was again swearing loyalty to the main Pakistani Taliban umbrella leadership. The reason for its return to the fold remains murky, but JA never specifically disavowed Islamic State either.

Khorasani was seriously wounded in a NATO air strike in eastern Afghanistan last year, Ehsan confirmed, but said he has fully recovered and is in hiding. Like many Pakistani militants, Jamaat-ur-Ahrar’s fighters sometimes flee into Afghanistan to escape a Pakistani army crackdown along the border that began in 2014.

Pakistani authorities have expressed fears that the ideology of the Middle East-based Islamic State – which places greater emphasis on killing Christians and minority Shia Muslims – could intensify sectarian violence in Pakistan.

Targeting minorities is not-uncommon among Pakistan’s predominantly Sunni Muslim militants, but it is a far more pronounced trait of Islamic State.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar had previously targeted Christians – in March 2015, it claimed two church bombings in Lahore that killed 14 people – but researcher Mehsud said he doubted JA’s loose affiliation to Islamic State was the cause.

Pakistan has been plagued by militant violence for the last 15 years, since it joined a U.S.-led campaign against Islamist militancy after the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

While the army, police, government and Western interests have been the prime targets of the Pakistani Taliban and their allies, Christians and other religious minorities have also been attacked by various factions.

Nearly 80 people were killed in a suicide bomb attack on a church in the northwestern city of Peshawar in 2013.

JA is vying for attention in the militant-saturated northwest that has some 60-70 armed Islamist groups, researcher Mehsud said.

“They target Christians and other minorities because it will get media attention … this is not something new,” he said. “They want to strike fear and show that they are still here and the military has not defeated the Taliban.”

(Additional reporting by Asad Hashim and Mubasher Bukhari; Writing by Kay Johnson; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)