Gruesome Video Reveals Militant Hub Thrives in Pakistan's Troubled Baluchistan Province
24 years after 9/11 brought the world to Afghanistan to wage a war on terror, a cacophony of militant groups flourish in Pakistan and Afghanistan and no new strategy
A violent 36-minute video made sometime last month by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) and widely circulated on social media tells a frightening story of brutal militant groups operating openly in the remote and desolate Mustung region of Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province, carrying out attacks across the region, even making agreements among each other __ which occasionally and violently break down as this video shows.
The video is significant because it is the first confirmation of ISKP operating in Pakistan’s deeply troubled Baluchistan province, which is rich in gas and mineral resources, and yet its 15 million residents are among the poorest in Pakistan. They are also trapped between a heavy handed military and intelligence, which is routinely accused of picking up people without charge and without legal protection, many of whom are never heard from again, and a cacophony of militant groups, with suspicious backing.
The largest and most active among these groups is the ISKP, which Pakistan has repeatedly denied operates on its territory and the Baluchistan Liberation Army.
In this wide-ranging and often gruesome video, the ISKP claims the BLA is receiving training from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and money from India. In often disturbing detail, the video reveals Pakistan’s inability to gain control of this part of the country creating a fertile ground for militant groups, which also find refuge and space in neighboring Afghanistan.
These groups have slaughtered civilians on buses and trains, carried out daring and devastating attacks on Pakistan military outposts as well as audacious attacks on Chinese nationals hundreds of kilometers away in Karachi, a city of 16 million on the Arabian Sea coast, and in Basham in Pakistan’s distant northwest. They have carried out suicide attacks in Afghanistan, targeting Taliban leaders and often taking deadly aim at the country’s minority Shiite population.
The ISKP has even been blamed for the March 2024 attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, which Russia blamed on Ukraine. They have carried out attacks in Iran, small scale attacks in the Central Asian states of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and in India, claiming attacks in the disputed Kashmir territory. They also have terrorist designs on the United States, Russia and China.
“With transnational membership and ambitions, ISKP is a threat to all governments in the region, including the Taliban regime, Pakistan, Iran, Central Asian states, and India,” said a 2024 report by the Washington-based think tank The Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It is also an international threat. It has been behind multiple plots in Europe, and it seeks to develop the capability to strike in the United States as well as attack the United States’ strategic competitors, both China and Russia,” the same report went on to say.
Even as these groups often share common enemies, they also battle each other deepening the violence in the region. In the video the ISKP accuses the BLA of attacking an ISKP camp, breaching an understanding that neither would attack the other. The battle lasted three days.
The brazen and brutal video with its disturbing content, as well as the increasing frequency and ferocity of attacks, which are slowly creeping beyond the region and into international territory, is a testimony to the failure of America’s so-called War on Terror.
The Taliban, ousted in 2001 by a U.S.-led invasion force of more than 130,000 international troops at its peak, are back in Kabul and solidly in power. Al Qaeda’s threat has been downgraded, yet the dangers posed by the ISKP, the BLA and the Pakistan-focused Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) headquartered in Afghanistan have been upgraded.
While these groups may be among the strongest in the region, there are quite literally dozens of militant groups, with varying agendas, varying strength, varying deadliness, and varying ambitions flourishing in the Pakistan/ Afghanistan region, say several organizations that monitor militant activity in the area, including the United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring team.
The array of militant groups said to be in the region include, among so many, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Chinese Uighurs of the East Turkestan independent movement and Jamaat Ansarullah.
Meanwhile, the newest ISKP video is a chilling collection of images, video clips and interviews glorifying beheadings, showing multiple scenes of carnage, attacks on Pakistan’s military and on Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban. The video is a litany of threats and warnings to a whole host of countries, the most prominent among them being the United States, France, Iran , Afghanistan and Pakistan. While most of the video is in Pashto, the language of ethnic Pashtuns, who dominate the northwest of Pakistan and large swathes of Afghanistan, some interviews are in Urdu, Pakistan’s national language. There is even a small threatening narrative in French.
When the U.S. and NATO, pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, the then U.S. President Joe Biden said an ‘over the horizon’ counter terrorism strategy would tackle and diminish the growth of militant groups in the region.
He was wrong.
Like the War on Terror, this too has failed. In a December 2024 report, the Atlantic Council, a Washington- based think tank said: “Over the horizon counter terrorism approach doesn’t work. It’s time for a new approach.”
But instead of searching for new approaches, the U.S. and its allies have embraced failed tactics. Just as when the Taliban were last in power, the U.S., and its allies are isolating the Taliban to force them to capitulate to their demands. Their interaction consists of meetings with Taliban officials in the Middle Eastern State of Qatar and occasionally some, not the U.S., make forays into Afghanistan.
It’s a stunningly misplaced strategy, and mind boggling that it is again being embraced when it was that same strategy of isolation that created fertile ground for the plotting of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and ensured an ignorant west would be an easy target.
After years of isolating the Taliban, and rarely stepping foot into Afghanistan, America ands its allies launched a war to avenge the 9/11 attacks, with little, to know understanding of the country, the people and even Al Qaeda.
The shocking reality of how little America knew going into Afghanistan in 2001 was revealed in The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock’s 2020 book The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War.
Whitlock writes: “The reality is that on 9/11 we didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda,” Robert Gates, who served as director of the CIA in the early 1990s and later replaced (Donald) Rumsfeld as defense secretary, said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview. “. . .the fact is that we’d just been attacked by a group we didn’t know anything about.” The Bush administration made another basic mistake by blurring the line between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The two groups shared an extremist religious ideology and a mutual support pact but pursued different goals and objectives.”
Even if they say they are smarter today, they aren’t. The reasons are many, but significant among them is that operating from a distance, outside the country guarantees the intelligence and understanding of the ground realities are limited, distorted and most often wrong.
The latest ISKP video is a warning, not only because of the gruesome content, and brazen admission of their location, or at least one of them, but because it reminds us of past mistakes, failed strategies and an arrogant and misplaced belief in the abilities and quality of western intelligence. It should serve as an incentive to seek out new strategies, rethink old, failed policies and find the humility to look to the people of the region for answers.