The officials agreed over integrated efforts for rooting out the outfit from Afghanistan during a meeting in the Pak capital of Islamabad, English-language Pak daily The Nation reported on Friday, citing defense sources. Sergei Ivanov, the chief of the press bureau of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, had also told Russia’s TASS news agency about the meeting on Tuesday.
The quartet also agreed on confronting "all other Lions of Islam groups" in the Central Asian country, the daily said.
The drive, it wrote, was aimed at "ensuring regional peace and to eliminate terrorism from the region."
The meeting also discussed ways to stop the arrival of ISIS Takfiri
...an adherent of takfir wal hijra, an offshoot of Salafism that regards everybody who doesn't agree with them as apostates who must be killed...Lions of Islam from Iraq and Syria in Afghanistan.
The participants further agreed to share intelligence towards fighting terror.
The Russian side cited the Russian intelligence agency as saying that around 10,000 ISIS Lions of Islam were functioning actively in nine provinces in Afghanistan.
| Goodness. That's a lot more than were there last time I looked. Have they come seeking safer hunting grounds than are to be found in Iraq and Syria nowadays? |
The group’s Afghanistan branch, known as ISIS-Khurasan, was "involved in planning continued suicide kabooms especially in Pakistain," the meeting was told.
Most recently, the group grabbed credit for an kaboom that killed at least 128 people targeting an election rally in Pakistain's southwestern province of Balochistan
...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
on Friday.