ISAS Briefs

The Muslim world is once again in turmoil. The Taliban struck Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport on 9 June 2014 and occupied it for several hours. The intruders were ultimately overpowered and killed. All of them were reported to belong to the Uzbekistan Islamic Front, an outlawed group that wants to turn the Central Asian nation into an Islamic state. Its objectives are similar to those of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This attack on the airport put an end to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s strategy of solving the problem of extremism by negotiating peace with the TTP. A couple of days after the episode in Karachi, Sunni extremists in Iraq overran Mosul, Tikrit and other towns in the area, putting the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki under great pressure. Panicking over these developments, United States President Barack Obama seemed ready to jettison a doctrine he had laid out a few days earlier during the commencement address at the Military Academy