ISIS and Taliban conducted joint attack in Pakistan

Three Pakistani soldiers were killed in an ambush in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Sunday, militants said, in an attack for which both ISIS and a Pakistani Taliban faction claimed responsibility.

Militants said they ambushed an unmarked vehicle ferrying soldiers on Sunday morning near the congested Daudzai area of Peshawar. Military sources confirmed the attack but said the killed men were army employees and not soldiers.

The Pakistan army often uses unmarked vehicles for transportation of soldiers and other employees in volatile areas around Peshawar to avoid being identified and attacked.

“They were travelling in a civil van when unknown armed men opened fire at them,” said a security official who declined to be named. “Three of them died on the spot.” Pakistan’s military this month declared that it had foiled ISIS’s attempts to establish operations in the country.

But the group’s Amaq news agency said ISIS was behind the ambush, also claimed by Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, an offshoot of the Islamist militant Pakistani Taliban group.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, which carried out the Easter Sunday bombing in Lahore, in which 70 people were killed, at one time swore fealty to ISIS’s Middle East leadership, but later switched back to the Taliban.

The two groups also both claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a hospital in the Pakistani city of Quetta that killed 74 people last month.