Lashkar-e-Islam

Lashkar-e-Islam (لشكرِ اسلام, abbr. LI or LeI), also written as Laskhar-i-Islam, is a Deobandi jihadist terrorist group operating in Khyber District, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan and the neighboring Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan.

LeI was founded in 2004 as a Deobandi militant group in Khyber Agency (today Khyber District) until it formed an alliance with the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e Taliban, TTP) in 2008 under the pressure of Pakistani counterinsurgency operations against the groups and a desire by the Pakistani Taliban to control the strategic Khyber Pass for attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan. LeI’s 2008 alliance with the Pakistani Taliban and 2015 partial merger with the group transformed the LeI from a local militant organization to a regional and transnational terrorist organization. Though displaced into Afghanistan in 2014 and weakened by Pakistani and later U.S. military operations, the groups maintains an reduced footprint in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

LeI was founded as a splinter from the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (AMNAM) in Khyber Agency in 2004 by Mufti Munir Shakir who led the group until his 2006 exile by local tribes. Mufti Shakir was replaced by Mangal Bagh, a senior commander under Mufti Shakir, until his death in a roadside bomb attack in late January 2021. A day later, the group announced Zala Khan Afridi as LeI’s new leader with Bagh’s son, Tayyab, as deputy. Tayyab was detained by the Afghan Taliban in December 2022.

Background
The Khyber Agency (today Khyber District) was one of seven federally-administered agencies on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and comprises a series of mountains and lush valleys near the historically strategic Khyber Pass. The area is home to Pashtuns (referred to in the region as Pakhtuns), primarily of the Afridi and Shinwari tribes, though members of the Mullaguris, Orakzai, and Shilmanis also inhabit the area. The area played critical roles in the military campaigns of the Persians, Alexander the Great, Kushans, Sassanids, Ghorids, Tatars, Mughals, Durranis, British and Soviets. Following Pakistani independence from the British Raj and the partition, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of the Pakistani state, ordered the withdrawal of all government forces from the tribal areas along the northwest border with Afghanistan, granting the tribes significant autonomy.

Establishment
Lashkar-e-Islam (LI) and the emergence of militant conflict in Khyber District both trace their origins back to the founding of the organization Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in the Tirah Valley of Khyber Agency. The organization’s name derives from the Quranic injunction “enjoining (what is) right and forbidding (what is) evil” (ٱلْأَمْرْ بِٱلْمَعْرُوفْ وَٱلنَّهْيْ عَنِ ٱلْمُنْكَرْ) which represents duties imposed by God in Islam and is the foundation of the Islamic institution of hisbah, the individual or collective duty (depending on the Islamic school of law) to enforce Islamic law. AMNAM was founded in Tirah Valley by the local tribesman Haji Namdar, reportedly under the direction of senior Afghan Taliban commander and key ideologue Ustad Yasir. A key element of AMNAM’s founding, Namdar created an FM radio station and enlisted the controversial radical tribal preacher and Pashtun Deobandi, Mufti Munir Shakir, to broadcast firebrand Islamic sermons.

AMNAM began to compete with the other Islamic militant group in Khyber Agency, Ansar-ul-Islam (AI, not to be confused with other jihadist groups of the same name). AI was a more moderate Barelvi Sunni revivalist movement led by the Afghan Sufi Pir Saifur Rahman, who had settled in the area. Two separate ideologies, Mufti Shakir’s strict Deobandist creed and AI’s moderate Barelvi persuasion, competed in FM radio broadcasts generating a sectarian conflict with both organizations issuing fatwas ordering the other to leave Khyber Agency. As an ideological leader, Mufti Shakir gained a significant following among AMNAM cadres, and eventually left the organization to found Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI) in 2004, taking many of AMNAM’s followers with.

In 2006, in an attempt to quell the escalating conflict between AI and LeI, a tribal council (jirga) of senior Afridi tribesmen from Khyber Agency decided to expel the two non-native leaders of AI (Pir Saifur Rahman) and LeI (Mufti Shakir) from the Agency. The exile of the leaders only worsened the growing conflict in Khyber Agency as more fanatic commanders, Mehbub-ul-Haq of AI and Mangal Bagh Afridi of LeI, took command of the militant groups and continued to clash. Under the new command of Mangal Bagh, LeI became the most organized and powerful militant group operating in the Agency leaving AI and the remnants of AMNAM altogether weakened.

War on Terror
In 2008, the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) began establishing a presence in Khyber Agency in efforts to both resist Pakistani military counterinsurgency operations and to aid the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda in attacks on NATO supply convoys transiting the Torkham border crossing in the Khyber Pass. In an attempt to reassert Pakistani control over the strategic border crossing, stem continued attacks on Peshawar, and under pressure from NATO, the Pakistani military banned LeI, AI, and AMNAM and, through the paramilitary Frontier Corps, launched four military operations in Khyber Agency against TTP, LeI, AI, and AMNAM named Darghlum, Baya Drghlum, Sirat-e-Mustakeem, and Khwakh Ba De Shum. These operations failed to dislodge LeI from the area as Pakistani military and intelligence predominately targeted TTP forces and correctly assessed at the time that LeI had no effective ties to the Pakistani Taliban. Up to late 2008, LeI leader Mangal Bagh had received and declined multiple offers to ally his organization with the TTP, even as both groups found themselves under attack by the Pakistani military in the major Sirat-e-Mustakeem (Arabic: ٱلصِّرَٰطَ ٱلْمُسْتَقِيمَ; lit. ‘Path of Righteousness’) campaign of June 2008 which directly targeted LeI forces in Khyber. Though a militant Islamic group, at the time LeI had a greater focus on the Deobandi revivalist movement (similar to the Afghan Taliban) closing religiously-forbidden music shops and, at times, abducting Christians in Peshawar. During this time, LeI had yet to engage in Islamic terrorism including martyrdom (suicide) operations or bombings of civilian targets, dissimilar to TTP tactics.

TTP’s presence, though not yet part of a consolidated movement, in Khyber Agency was opposed by locals and the militant groups of LeI, AI, and AMNAM who all clashed with the group on occasion. TTP initially attempted to gain influence in the area by sending the influential leader Ustad Yasir to develop relations between the TTP and Haji Namdar of AMNAM who feared the weakening of his organization’s power in the area. The relationship soured quickly after a TTP suicide attack on a tribal council (jirga) killed over 40 tribal chiefs representing each major faction within Khyber Agency. Further, when it was suspected that Haji Namdar was siding with the Pakistani state over the TTP during Sirat-e-Mustakeem, an TTP operative assassinated Namdar in August 2008.

Partnership with Pakistani Taliban
TTP, nevertheless determined to control Khyber and take control of the border to disrupt the movement NATO supply convoys, endeavored to forge a positive relationship with the militant groups in the Agency. It was after the conclusion of Sirat-e-Mustakeem in late 2008, that the LeI and its leader, Mangal Bagh, had been pushed closer to the Pakistani Taliban by Pakistan’s offensive operations. LeI began providing TTP militants access to the region and started to receive tactical instruction from TTP trainers, including in the execution of martyrdom operations. Bagh publicly announced LeI’s new image, no longer a localized Islamic anti-crime organization, but a larger Deobandi jihadist group. Bagh addressed the Pakistani government stating “Now it is difficult for us to live in peace. The conflict will not be confined to Khyber Agency alone; rather it will spread to the entire Peshawar region.”

The shift in tactics, likely a result of TTP instructors’ training of LeI fighters, became apparent soon after with a series of joint TTP-LeI suicide attacks against the Pakistani government in Peshawar, NATO supply convoys, and, on 5 April 2010, the American Consulate in Peshawar which killed 50 and wounded over 100. As part of the operation targeting the most well-protected facility in the city, militants from TTP and LeI drove two vehicles up to the consulate, the first of which detonated next to an armored personnel carrier, and the second of which deployed armed fighters who shot at the consulate before detonating suicide vests. The militants had brought ramps to scale the metal barriers of the consulate and would’ve likely succeeded had pieces of the bombed armored personnel carrier not lodged in the barrier. During the same year, joint TTP and LeI operations against NATO supply convoys at in the Khyber Pass destroyed over 700 cargo and military vehicles.

Weakening
In 2011, LeI militants beheaded a religious scholar of the Zakakhel tribe initiating a surge of violence in the region as the Zakakheli tribesmen joined with AI fighters to attack LeI militants in Khyber Agency, partially weakening LeI’s influence in parts of the Tirah Valley. From 2014 to 2015, the Pakistani military operations Khyber 1 and Zarb-e-Azab forced LeI from Khyber and effectively stunted LeI’s operational capacity, forcing the group’s leaders, militants, and their families to move westward across the border into Nazyan District, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. From their new home in Afghanistan, LeI continued to conduct suicide attacks into Pakistan, with financial assistance from Afghan tribal leaders who supported the fight against the Pakistani government, according to some sources. In May 2015, Laskhar-e-Islam announced that it had merged with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, though the completeness of the merger remains murky as both groups continued to separately claim individual attacks except for larger, jointly-coordinated attacks. LeI carried out at least 18 attacks in 2016 and 21 in 2017. While in the districts of Nazyan, Shirzad, Shinwar, and Achin, Nangarhar, LeI began to form a loose alliance with the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) exchanging fighters and conducting joint suicide attacks. The relationship quickly dissolved in a dispute over natural resources. LeI continued to attack the Pakistani state in and near Khyber District in hopes of retaking the territory and returning to its original base of operations.

Beginning in 2015, a year after LeI’s displacement from Khyber, the United States carried out a number of drone strikes killing LeI commanders and, in 2016, reportedly killed LeI leader Mangal Bagh, whom the U.S. had placed a $3 million (USD) bounty on. News of Bagh had subsided until 28 January 2021 when Bagh, his 12-year old daughter, and two bodyguards were killed in a roadside bombing in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan.

Although Bagh was in Afghanistan at the time of his January 2021 death, it is unclear the state and footprint of the movement since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Afghan Taliban’s establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). Mangal Bagh was replaced by Zala Khan Afridi as leader of LeI days after Bagh’s death. Khan’s deputy, Tayyab (son of Mangal Bagh, also known as Ajnabi) was detained in Spin Boldak, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan by Afghan Taliban authorities — a move likely intended by the Afghan Taliban government to curry favor from Pakistani authorities as the IEA seeks international recognition.

Analysis
Analysts from the United States Military Academy (USMA, West Point) Combatting Terrorism Center (CTC) suggest that LeI’s development from a localized Islamic militant group to a regional suicide terrorist organization was most directly the result of Pakistani military pressure on the group which encouraged the group to form alliances with the stronger and more dangerous TTP and inherit tactics and operations for regional and transnational terrorist attacks. The same analysts compare this process to the transformation of the Tehrek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) group from a local militant group in Swat District to a regional terrorist group allied with the Pakistani Taliban under previously absent Pakistani military pressure.

List of attacks
According to the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), an open-source database on terrorist events between 1970 and 2020 produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorist and Responses to Terrorism (START) and the University of Maryland, Lashkar-e-Islam has claimed responsibility for or been attributed to at least 125 separate terrorist attacks as of December 2020.