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
Islamic 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 ISIS 'caliphate'."
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.