Jihadist Coalition Pushes Pakistan-Afghanistan to Crisis Point — SkimNews
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- The September 18, 2026 Kohat attack killed 31 people, including 16 police officers, and wounded over 100 when a suicide car bomber rammed a police complex during Friday prayers and gunmen staged a 20-hour standoff targeting the mosque inside.
- Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen Pakistan (IMP) claimed responsibility via Telegram; the jihadist coalition was formed in April 2025 from Lashkar-e-Islam, the Hafiz Gul Bahadur Group and Inqilab-e-Islami Pakistan, and had become Pakistan's second-most-active jihadist group after the Pakistani Taliban by late 2025.
- Al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) had spent months promoting IMP as a model affiliate and global front — including in the June-July 2026 issue of its magazine Nawa-e-Ghazwa-e-Hind — making the mosque targeting and civilian deaths particularly damaging to its unification narrative.
- The Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, AQIS and the Afghan Taliban all publicly condemned the attack within hours, exposing sharp fractures in the jihadist ecosystem that AQIS had been trying to consolidate into a single coalition.
- Pakistan retaliated with airstrikes on Afghan soil — its first since June — after authorities identified at least one bomber as an Afghan national, reopening the cycle of cross-border action and Afghan retaliation.
- Pakistan now ranks first in the Global Terrorism Index, facing its worst security crisis in two decades, with relations having crossed into open war in February 2026 when Islamabad struck Taliban military installations across the border.
- The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) runs a parallel competition strategy as a transnational rival, while nominally allied groups within the Pakistani Taliban-AQIS-IMP axis outbid each other for relevance through more extreme tactics — a dynamic the authors link to the Kohat attack's excess.
Why it matters: Pakistan now ranks first on the Global Terrorism Index in its worst security crisis in two decades. The Kohat attack undermined AQIS's months-long effort to showcase IMP as a unifying model, making the coalition's flagship affiliate a liability just as cross-border counterterrorism cooperation has collapsed into open war.
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