Sri Lanka advisor links Pakistan lynching to Taliban takeover

Regional countries discuss the fallout of Afghanistan events at the Indian Ocean Conference in Abu Dhabi

Drawing a link between the ’s Sialkot on Friday to the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, a senior Sri Lankan Government advisor, speaking at a regional conference where countries spoke about the outcome of events in Afghanistan, said that terrorist groups and religious radical groups across South Asia had been emboldened.

“The lynching and burning of the Sri Lankan is a clear reflection of the spread of Salafi Wahhabism in the region. And it’s a cancerous ideology that has to be contained, isolated and eliminated,” said Rohan Gunaratna, Director General of the Sri Lankan military think tank, the Institute of National Security Studies, who accompanied President to the Indian Ocean Conference in Abu Dhabi, in an interview to The Hindu. Speaking at the conference, Mr. Rajapaksa had called for a regional mechanism to share intelligence and coordinate actions against the threat posed by “religious extremism and terrorism”.