Islamic State claims 'province' in India for first time after clash in Jammu and Kashmir

The terrorist organisation's Amaq News Agency late on Friday announced that the new province is called "Wilayah of Hind".

ANI photo

NEW DELHI/SRINAGAR: Islamic State (ISIS) claimed for the first time that it has established a "province" in India, after a clash in Jammu and Kashmir between terrorists and security forces killed a terrorist with alleged ties to the group. The terrorist organisation's Amaq News Agency late on Friday announced the new province, that it called "Wilayah of Hind", in a statement that also claimed ISIS inflicted casualties on Army soldiers in the town of Amshipora in Shopian district of the state.

The ISIS statement corresponds with a police statement on Friday that a terrorist called Ishfaq Ahmad Sofi was killed in an encounter in Shopian. ISIS' 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.

ISIS 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. "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 terrorists.

"The world may roll its eyes at these developments, but to jihadists in these vulnerable regions, these are significant gestures to help lay the groundwork in rebuilding the map of the ISIS 'caliphate'," added Katz.

Sofi had been involved in several terrorist 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 ISIS. He was suspected of 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 terrorist left in Kashmir associated with ISIS. Separatists have for decades fought an armed conflict against the Centre.