An Indian national was one of the suicide bombers who attacked a gurdwara killing 25 Sikh worshippers in Kabul last Wednesday. The Islamic State (IS) named one of the three terrorists who attacked the Gurudwara Har Rai Sahib as ‘Abu Khalid Al-Hindi’. His photograph, holding a Type 56 assault rifle and pointing his finger up in a one-finger Tawhid salute, was published by IS in their propaganda magazine Al Naba on March 26. Top police intelligence sources in Kerala told ‘India Today’ that the photograph was actually that of Muhammad Muhsin, 21, believed to have died in a drone strike in Afghanistan last year. Three IS terrorists had opened fire and lobbed grenades at around 200 worshippers in the gurudwara at 7.45 am on March 25. ISIS-Khorasan claimed the responsibility, which was created by Indian agency RAW and NDS of Afghanistan. The linkage is too obvious.
In August, 2015, IS operative Abu Yusuf al-Hindi alias Shafi Armar, a native of Bhatkal in Uttar Kannad district, was believed to have been killed in a suicide bomb attack in Raqqa. He was the first Indian to be declared a specially designated global terrorist by the US. In 2014, IS, a proto-terrorist group led by Abubakar Al-Baghdadi captured and administered a territory the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq. The group was routed in offensives by Russia, Syria, Iraq and the US and Baghdadi killed by US Special Forces in 2019.With the group coming under increasing pressure in the Middle East, they found sanctuaries in Afghanistan’s provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar. Around 98 persons with families had migrated from Kerala since May-June, 2016; 30 went directly from Kerala directly and 70 from Gulf to the Islamic State’s so-called ‘Khorasan Province’ in Nangarhar.
Since its inception in 1968, RAW has had a close liaison relationship with KHAD, the then Afghan intelligence agency, and worked together to destabilize Pakistan. This relationship was further strengthened in the early 1980s when the foundation was laid for a trilateral cooperation involving RAW, KHAD, and the Soviet KGB. B. Raman, former Additional Secretary of the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India and one-time head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s external intelligence agency. Raman had stated that RAW valued KHAD’s cooperation for monitoring the activities of Sikh militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Sikhs in the Indian state of Punjab were demanding an independent state of Khalistan. According to Raman, Pakistan’s ISI had set up clandestine camps for training and arming Khalistani recruits in Pakistan’s Punjab Province and former North West Frontier Province, and now called KP.
In the mid-1980s, RAW set up two covert groups of its own, Counter Intelligence Team-X (CIT-X) and Counter Intelligence Team-J (CIT-J), the first targeting Pakistan in general and the second directed at Khalistani groups. The two groups were responsible for carrying out terrorist operations inside Pakistan, wrote Ayesha Siddiqa. Indian journalist Praveen Swami wrote that a “low-grade but steady campaign of bombings in major Pakistani cities, notably Karachi and Lahore” was carried out. Since long, India had secret liaison with Mossad, and learned from latter’s experience in suppression, repression on Palestinians and continued perpetrating atrocities on Kashmiris. The Islamic State’s local franchise in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), had claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on the TUTAP protests in Kabul on 23 July 2016. The attack had killed more than 80 people and injured over 230 others in Deh Mazang Square in western Kabul.
In late January 2015, the Islamic State announced its expansion into Khorasan province. The elements of what would become IS Khorasan Province’s (ISKP) main contingent had, however, long existed on the Afghan battlefield. Although the first case of an ISKP presence that attracted public attention took place in Helmand, the actual IS vanguards emerged from Nangarhar province. The IS fighters who pioneered the Khorasan franchise of the IS included TTP elements who had long been settled in the southeastern districts of Nangarhar, in the Spin Ghar mountains or its foothills, bordering the tribal agencies on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. The Afghan government’s support to Mangal Bagh’s Lashkar-e-Islam was an open secret among residents of the Spin Ghar districts near the Durand Line. They had introduced their black flag to the area long before ISKP hoisted a flag of the same colour with different symbols and slogans.