IS opens deadly new front in Pakistan's aging terror war

DHABEJI, Pakistan -- Hafeez Nawaz was 20 years old when he left his religious school in Karachi to join the Islamic State group in Afghanistan. Three years later he was back in Pakistan to carry out a deadly mission: With explosives strapped to his body, he blew himself up in the middle of an election rally last month, killing 149 people and wounding 300 others.

The attack in southwestern Baluchistan province near the Afghan border just days before Pakistan's July 25 parliamentary elections has cast an unwelcome spotlight on Nawaz's tiny village of Dhabeji, where the presence of an IS cell in their midst has brought the full weight of Pakistan's security apparatus down on its residents.

"Now we are all under suspicion," said Nawaz's neighbor, who gave only his first name, Nadeem, for fear of the local police. "The security agencies now consider Dhabeji a security threat area."

Nawaz's trajectory from religiously devout student to jihadi and suicide bomber is an all too familiar one in Pakistan.

Since battlefield successes routed the Islamic State group from its strongholds in Syria and Iraq, hundreds of Pakistanis who traveled to join the extremists' so-called "caliphate" are unaccounted for and Pakistan's security personnel worry they, like Nawaz, have gone underground waiting to strike.

Sitting in his office in a compound surrounded by high walls and heavily armed guards, Karachi's counterterrorism department chief, Pervez Ahmed Chandio, said the Islamic State group is the newest and deadliest front in Pakistan's decades-old war on terror.

"It is one of the most dangerous threats facing Pakistan, and we are ready to fight this war," he said.

The amorphous nature of IS has counterterrorism officials such as Chandio most worried. When one cell is disrupted another emerges, sometimes within weeks and often in an unrelated part of the country.

"It's what they don't know that is the most worrying for counterterrorism departments around the country," said Mohammad Amir Rana, executive director of the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, which tracks militant movements in the region. "Its hideouts, its structure, its strategy are all unknown. They are an invisible enemy who is defeated in one area, only to resurface in another."

A U.N. Security Council report earlier this year warned of the changing face of IS, saying the extremist group was "entering a new phase, with more focus on less-visible networks of individuals and cells acting with a degree of autonomy."

Hafeez Nawaz was just such a case.

Three years ago, he joined his older brother, Aziz, to study at Siddiquia Madrassa in Karachi's Shah Faisal Colony neighborhood, an area where the level of sectarian violence at the time was so brutal even police could not enter. A crackdown by paramilitary Rangers has since led to the arrest and killing of hundreds of militants and criminals.

Today, the religious school is among 94 madrassas under surveillance in Karachi and elsewhere in southern Sindh province, Chandio said. They have been identified as breeding grounds for radicalism, schools where jihadis have emerged and perpetrators of attacks attended. Many are financed by oil-rich Saudi Arabia to promote the rigid Wahabi sect of Islam practiced in the kingdom, Chandio said. The origin of the money, whether from the Saudi government or Saudi philanthropists, is not clear, but the teachings at these schools espouse a rigid interpretation of Islam and the superiority of Sunni Islam.

It was at Siddiquia Mosque that Nawaz's brother, Aziz, fell in with a crowd of would-be jihadis and was persuaded to travel to Afghanistan's Spinboldak region on the border with Pakistan in 2014 to join the Taliban. But his allegiance was short-lived as commanders squabbled, and Aziz returned to Pakistan. Once back home, he inducted his younger brother, Hafeez, into the jihadi circle, but this time, it was the Islamic State group holding sway, said Chandio, who was part of the counterterrorism squad using little more than body parts and grainy cell phone pictures, identified Hafeez Nawaz as the suicide bomber behind the July 13 election rally attack.

Chandio learned from the brothers' father Nawaz and Aziz packed up their three sisters and their mother and moved them to Afghanistan in 2016 to live among an Islamic State affiliate there. Two of the sisters have since married IS operatives. Their youngest brother, Shakoor, who was sent by their father a year later to plead with them to return, remains in Afghanistan, as does Aziz.

Chandio suspects 19-year-old Shakoor is now an IS operative and could be the next suicide bomber. He said Shakoor fits the criteria: a young man in his late teens or early 20s, religiously devout and susceptible to radicalization.

Hafeez Nawaz was just 23 when he walked into the middle of the election rally in Baluchistan's Mustang area and detonated the suicide vest spraying shrapnel throughout the tent packed with local tribesmen.

Nawaz's father and his oldest brother, Haq Nawaz, are now in custody, caught trying to flee to Afghanistan, Chandio said.