Whatever the reality maybe, making up and breaking up is not something I associate with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
With their grim beards and demeanour, they seem more like the staying together sort, not interested in indulging in petty jealousies. Fights about who said what and when, and who is right or wrong are the culprits of ending things, divorce and such.
It was this perception that was challenged recently when one part of the Taliban split off from the other portion and formed a new group. The “original” Taliban, as they can be called now, used to be led by the infamous Maulana Fazlullah, the former Swat ski lift operator turned guerrilla warrior.
The new group, which calls itself Jamatul Ahrar is led by a man called Omar Khalid Khorasani. He is the one who appears sporting a black turban and beard in various Taliban videos. It is said that, in their unerring commitment to uniformity, all the Taliban love to look like all the other Taliban.
We're lucky to not have to rely on wardrobe or facial hair choices, to tell the new group apart from the old group.
In one of its initial releases, the new Jamatul Ahrar called “IS” the group rapidly evoking havoc in the Middle East their “mujahideen brothers”. The particular transnational bent of this new shoot that has sprung from the old tree of Taliban extremism, was seen yet again in a statement that came from Al Ahrar just a few days ago.
On September 4, 2014 Ehsanullah Ehsan, the group’s spokesperson welcomed the creation of a new Al Qaeda affiliated jihadi group“for the Indian subcontinent”. The announcement of the creation of that group had been made by the Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahiri, who promised in his video message, that the new “Al Qaeda in the subcontinent operation” would take the fight to Myanmar, Bangladesh and India”.
Al Ahrar then, is the portion of the Taliban interested in the sort of transnational alliances that would allow it to transcend the Pakistan-Afghan region. While not officially tied up with the 'Islamic State', the emergence of this new branch of the group suggests differences in where the top leadership of the Taliban organisation wants to invest its resources.
Also read:Jamatul Ahrar welcomes new Al Qaeda branch
In yet another episode of emerging transnational connections (whose details and determinacy remain admittedly murky), an unnamed group of activists led by an Afghan national was reported to be distributing IS pamphlets translated into Darri and Pashto in parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The pamphlet declared that the Caliphate planned expanding its boundaries from Iraq and Sham, to Khorasan which is are currently known to all the rest of us as Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The bits and pieces and make ups and break ups may not all come together very neatly now, and with the analysts and commentators of Pakistan focused on the divisions and multiplications going on in Islamabad, the extent of the IS threat in Pakistan cannot be exactly known.
Given, however, that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan continue to control swathes of Pakistani territory, including enclaves of urban areas like Karachi and that a chunk of the group has recently broken and seems immediately interested in poking its nose toward transnational rather than regional extremism; there is cause to worry.
Furthermore, in what has been seen about the tactics of IS, their modus operandi is astoundingly similar to that of the early Taliban.
Know more:Ideological purification: Understanding the TTP split
Banning women from public spaces, executions of known thieves and traitors in town squares, moral or hisba police that roam streets and markets; all strategies that the Taliban have used in their captures of towns like Swat, are precisely what the IS has instated in the Syrian city of Raqqa.
The IS, of course, has gone farther than just that, it controls a larger chunk of territory, has issued passports and declared Al-Baghdadi as Caliph.
Joining hands may permit and promote the existence of a transnational realm, one that has been imagined by militants of all ilks for quite a while.
The possibility of this will of course be determined by the future; its realisation on the ability of the Pakistani state and polity to abandon old gripes; the divisions of ethnicities and sects; and the schism between civilian and military, to look at the world through the lens of new threats that promise of a more complete and unprecedented annihilation.