PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Daesh
suicide bomber who killed 64 people at a Shiite mosque in northwest Pakistan
last week was an Afghan exile who returned home to train for the attack, police
said Wednesday.
اضافة اعلان
There have been
warnings
Afghanistan could become a recruiting ground and staging post for
militants since the Taliban returned to power last year following the hasty
withdrawal of US-led forces.
The Taliban have
pledged they will not allow Afghan soil to be used to plot attacks on other
nations, but last month the
UN Security Council said “terrorist groups enjoy
greater freedom there than at any time in recent history”.
Two senior
Pakistan police officials told AFP that the suicide bomber responsible for
Friday’s Peshawar blast had prepared for the attack in Afghanistan.
It was claimed by
Daesh, whose Daesh-Khorasan affiliate has been active for years in both
Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it is in violent competition with the Taliban.
The officials said
the attacker was an Afghan national in his 30s who moved to Pakistan with his
family decades ago.
“The bomber went
(back) to Afghanistan, trained there and returned without informing his
family,” one of the senior police officials told AFP.
“(Daesh-K) is
becoming a strong threat for us, they are operating from Afghanistan but they
have sleeping cells here,” he added.
Taliban officials
did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
International apprehension
Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the
Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS), said there was “a lot of apprehension” in the international community
over the prospect of Afghanistan becoming a haven for militancy.
While the Taliban
can rein in sister groups like Al-Qaeda — which carried out the 9/11 attacks —
“they cannot guarantee they will do the same about the groups which are not
under their control like Daesh-K”, he said.
“There are a lot
of questions on the
Taliban’s ability to govern Afghanistan,” said Rana.
Police said they
had killed three “facilitators” of the Peshawar attack in an overnight
operation, and arrested 20 others suspected of involvement.
Daesh also claimed
responsibility for what it said was a suicide blast on Tuesday that killed
seven paramilitary troops near a site in southwestern Pakistan where the
president had visited less than half an hour earlier.
Since the
Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, Islamabad has acted as a key broker
between the hardliners and the international community.
Pakistan was one
of just three nations to officially recognize their first regime from 1996 to
2001.
Its own version of
the Taliban, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, have also staged attacks from
hideouts in Afghanistan, testing the diplomatic relationship.
Rana suggested
Daesh-K may be intensifying attacks in Pakistan in order to “increase pressure
on the Taliban in Afghanistan” from Islamabad.
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