ISIS claims province in India for first time after clash in Kashmir

ISIS claimed for the first time that it has
established a “province” in India, after a clash between militants and security
forces in the contested Kashmir region killed a militant with alleged ties to
the group.
ISIS’s Amaq News Agency late on Friday announced the
new province, that it called “Wilayah of Hind”, in a statement that also claimed
ISIS inflicted casualties on Indian army soldiers in the town of Amshipora in
the Shopian district of Kashmir.
The ISIS statement corresponds with an Indian police
statement on Friday that a militant called Ishfaq Ahmad Sofi was killed in an
encounter in Shopian.
ISIS’s statement establishing the new province
appears to be designed to bolster its standing after the group was driven from
its self-styled “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria in April, where at one point it
controlled thousands of miles of territory.
ISIS has stepped up hit-and-run raids and suicide
attacks, including taking responsibility for the Easter Sunday bombing in Sri
Lanka that killed at least 253 people.
“The establishment of a ‘province’ in a region where
it has nothing resembling actual governance is absurd, but it should not be
written off,” said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intel Group that tracks
extremists.
“The world may roll its eyes at these developments,
but to jihadists in these vulnerable regions, these are significant gestures to
help lay the groundwork in rebuilding the map of the IS ‘caliphate’,” he added.
Sofi had been involved in several militant groups in
Kashmir for more than a decade before pledging allegiance to ISIS, according to
a military official on Saturday and an interview given by Sofi to a
Srinagar-based magazine sympathetic to ISIS.
He was suspected of several grenade attacks on
security forces in the region, police and military sources said.
“It was a clean operation and no collateral damage
took place during the exchange of fire,” a police spokesman said in the
statement on Friday’s encounter.
The military official said it was possible that Sofi
had been the only militant left in Kashmir associated with ISIS.
Separatists have for decades fought an armed
conflict against Indian rule in Muslim-majority Kashmir. The majority of these
groups want independence for Kashmir or to join India’s arch-rival Pakistan.
They have not, like ISIS, sought to establish an empire across the Muslim
world.
Nuclear powers India and Pakistan have fought two
wars over Kashmir, and came to the brink of a third earlier this year after a
suicide attack by a Pakistan-based militant group killed at least 40
paramilitary police in the Indian-controlled portion of the region.
A spokesman for India’s home ministry, which is
responsible for security in Kashmir, did not respond to a request for comment.