What happened to feared Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ)?
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Pakistan has one of the most saturated and multi-actor threat landscapes in South Asia where several militant groups have emerged and disappeared over the years. Still, other groups have endured in Pakistan’s evolving and challenging operational environments through innovation, alliance-making and adaptations. In fluid and complex threat environments like Pakistan, militant groups vanish more frequently and those which persist must show exemplary regenerative resilience.
A variety of factors can contribute to a militant group’s demise, such as counter-terrorism operations, leadership detentions and decapitations, financial disruptions and ideological delegitimization. However, it bears mention that the demise of a militant group quintessentially does not mean demise of the militancy. The latter, despite the former’s termination, continues in one form or the other through new threat actors which most often comprises of the demising group remnants. Therefore, defeating a terrorist group and defeating terrorism are qualitatively two different phenomena and necessitate different sets of responses.
In Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) has single-handedly dominated the country’s sectarian landscape for the last three decades and has bitten the dust. LeJ carried out its last major attack in October 2016 when it targeted a police training center in Quetta, Balochistan. In subsequent years, the majority of LeJ’s attacks in Balochistan were claimed by Daesh-Khorasan due to an operational understanding between the two groups. The struggling LeJ struck an informal agreement of operational cooperation with Daesh-K. In return for allowing Daesh-K to claim its attacks, LeJ received financial incentives and sanctuaries in the former’s Afghan hideouts. Both have an ideological convergence on sectarian targeting. With time, the LeJ-Daesh-K operational alliance morphed as the latter absorbed the former’s fighters into its ranks. As LeJ lost its top leaders and suffered organizational setbacks, its foot soldiers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces joined Daesh-K.
LeJ emerged as Al-Qaeda’s operational arm in Pakistan broadening its target list to Pakistani security forces, minority communities, foreign targets such the 2002 Sheraton Hotel Karachi attack and the 2009 Sri Lankan cricket team attack in Lahore.
Abdul Basit Khan
In 1996, Riaz Basra, Malik Ishaq and Akram Lahori co-founded LeJ as the militant wing of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP). The main reason of LeJ’s inception was SSP’s drift from militancy to politics. As SSP mired itself deeper into politics, LeJ dedicatedly focused on militancy. After 9/11, as the geopolitical situation evolved with the US military intervention in Afghanistan, SSP and LeJ drifted further away. While SSP stayed focused on the politics, LeJ emerged as Al-Qaeda’s operational arm in Pakistan broadening its target list to Pakistani security forces, other religious minority communities, foreign targets such the 2002 Sheraton Hotel Karachi attack that killed eleven French engineers as well as the 2009 Sri Lankan cricket team attack in Lahore.
LeJ also struck an operational alliance with TTP when it emerged as the most feared group on Pakistan’s militant landscape in December 2007 in return for sanctuaries and hideouts in the ex-FATA region. The counter-terrorism pressure in Punjab forced LeJ to flee to the northwestern tribal regional near the Pak-Afghan border. In subsequent years, TTP and LeJ jointly unleashed a reign of terror against shrines and the Shia community across Pakistan.
As Pakistan continued to tighten its counterterrorism noose around LeJ’s factions in Sindh and Punjab arresting and eliminating leaders like Malik Ishaq and his sons, Asif Chottoo, Naeem Bukhari and Usman Saifullah Kurd, LeJ was survived by its remnants in Balochistan and Afghanistan. To avoid total decimation, some LeJ elements moved to Syria to join Daesh’s militant campaign there. Others, including LeJ Al-Alami (LeJ-A), struck an operational alliance with Daesh-K, as discussed above, to survive and stay relevant in a hostile environment.
In 2021, LeJ’s Saifullah Kurd faction from Balochistan under its new leader Khushi Muhammad, merged with TTP. Of LeJ-A’s two factions, one is continuing the operational alliance with Daesh-K, while the other is operating autonomously. LeJ has been completely wiped out from Punjab and Sindh and its parent organization SSP which now operates as Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) has long disassociated itself from the group and denounced its violent campaign. It will not be out of place to observe that Daesh-K has overtaken LeJ as the dominant sectarian militant group in Pakistan’s threat landscape and claims a monopoly over it. Daesh-K’s last major attack against the Shia community was reported in March 2022 when a mosque was targeted in Peshawar, killing more than 50 worshippers.
Despite LeJ’s decimation, the sectarian militancy and ideology live on. This brings into sharp focus the fact that Pakistan’s anti-militancy response needs to expand from counterterrorism to counter-extremism as well. As long as radical ideologies are not rebutted through robust counter-narratives, the elimination of militant groups will only remove the symptoms and not the causes.
Pakistan has come a long way in its fight against violent extremism downgrading terrorism from an existential to an internal security threat. Indeed, kinetic responses or the use of hard power is essential in blunting the sharp edge of militant groups. At the same time, non-kinetic responses, or the use of soft power to prevent hate speech and promote moderation through strengthening of inclusive and pluralistic values and respect for diversity and peaceful co-existence is equally important. This is a battle for Pakistan’s heart and soul, we must not lose it.
- The author is a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore. Twitter @basitresearcher.
