Afghanistan Peace CampaignAn alliance led by powerful militant leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur, whose fighters once targeted U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has claimed responsibility for a deadly mosque assault inside a police compound in northwest Pakistan.
The attack, during Friday prayers, killed seven civilians and 16 police officers, and wounded at least 100 people, according to the police officials in Kohat, a city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The assault, which lasted for hours and involved a car explosion, a suicide bombing and multiple armed attackers, indicates the growing threat of Mr. Bahadur’s group, experts said.
He is one of the longest-surviving militant commanders in the restive region, whom both U.S. and Pakistan forces have failed over the years to neutralize. His re-emergence could mean deepening violence in western Pakistan and worsening relations with Afghanistan.
The operation highlights the Bahadur network’s capacity to execute “complex, serious attacks on security forces,” said Elizabeth Threlkeld, director of the South Asia Program at the Washington-based Stimson Center.
The detonation of an explosives-laden vehicle outside the mosque began the assault of the compound on Friday afternoon. Armed militants then entered the complex and fought security forces for hours; a suicide bomber detonated explosives near a facility of the police’s intelligence unit. Eight attackers were killed, the police said.
An alliance led by Mr. Bahadur, Ittehad-ul Mujahideen Pakistan, claimed responsibility in a statement on Friday.
Provincial police officials said in a statement that the attack was carried out by Islamist militants but did not name a specific group.
A United Nations report in August noted the group’s global ties. Al Qaeda’s affiliate in the region had “formed the backbone” of Mr. Bahadur’s network, the report said. It also linked the alliance to several suicide attacks against Pakistani security forces this year.
During the war, Mr. Bahadur concentrated his operations across the border in Afghanistan, targeting U.S., NATO and Afghan forces. While he was closely aligned with the Taliban, his network of fighters maintained a truce with the Pakistani state. That earned his faction the name “the good Taliban,” Ms. Threlkeld said.
For years, he “survived and thrived as a local power broker” by navigating relationships among competing jihadist factions and shifting between pro- and anti-state positions in Pakistan, according to Riccardo Valle, an independent researcher who specializes in the region’s militant groups.
Mr. Bahadur also survived a U.S. drone attack in 2011 targeting him and his network of fighters. In 2012, he banned polio vaccinations in North Waziristan, days before 161,000 children were to be inoculated. He linked the ban to American drone strikes and fears that the C.I.A. could use the polio campaign as cover for espionage.
But it was not destroyed.
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban’s return to power altered the landscape again.
An umbrella group of militants on the border, known as the Pakistan Taliban, began a series of attacks against Pakistan, which has accused Afghanistan’s Taliban government of supporting the attacks. Afghan officials have denied this, and the dispute is at the center of the heightened armed conflict between the two countries.
Mr. Bahadur, who always maintained his independence from the Pakistani Taliban, began rebuilding his network separately, according to regional experts. From his base in Afghanistan and with his long ties to Al Qaeda intact, he began making alliances in North Waziristan and the surrounding tribal districts, drawing in fighters and commanders from numerous groups, including remnants loyal to commanders who had been killed during the war.
In 2022, Mr. Bahadur formed the Ittehad-ul Mujahideen Pakistan alliance and began a wave of suicide bombings and ambushes against security forces in Pakistan. While the Pakistani Taliban claims that it avoids civilian targets, Mr. Bahadur’s alliance does not.
Fakhar Kakakhel, author of a book on militant groups in the region, said that a high-profile attack like Friday’s bombing of the mosque is an effort to project power and attract new recruits.