Daesh claims setting up ‘province’ in India

NEW DELHI/SRINAGAR: The Islamic State (Daesh) 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 and killed a militant with alleged ties to the group.

IS’ Amaq News Agency late on Friday announced the new province, that it called “Wilayah of Hind”, in a statement that also claimed Daesh inflicted casualties on Indian army soldiers in the town of Amshipora in the Shopian district of Kashmir. The IS statement corresponds with an Indian police statement on Friday that a militant called Ishfaq Ahmad Sofi was killed in an encounter in Shopian. Sofi had been involved in several militant groups in Kashmir for more than a decade before pledging allegiance to Islamic State, according to a military official on Saturday and an interview given by Sofi to a Srinagar-based magazine sympathetic to IS.

He was suspected of involvement in 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 IS.

The IS’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. “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 IS 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.