A terrorist attack killed dozens of people in the second largest city of Pakistan, Lahore, in late April. Khawaja Asif stated at a meeting with his Russian colleague Sergey Shoigu that Pakistan would continue the struggle against terrorism both inside the country and in the region.
Spiking at the 6th Moscow Conference on International Security, Asif stated that terrorism greatly influenced the structure of societies around the world and threatened the existence of human civilization: “The basic human values of any civilization: culture, freedom of thought and democratic ideals – everything is threatened by the power of disorder, chaos, destruction, and Medieval way of thinking . In recent years we have witnessed an extraordinary rise of terrorism. Terrorist organizations have been constantly emerging in different parts of the planet. The most brutal manifestations of terrorism in Turkey, Brussels and Paris show a new stage of the evolution of Daesh. Now they are focusing their efforts on establishing regional control in Iraq and Syria. The downing of the Russian aircraft over Sinai is yet another example.”
According to Khawaja Asif, it becomes harder to deal with these groups: “The Syrian crisis is now continuing to spread like a cancer. All these factors suggest a significant destabilization of the region. We are seriously concerned about what is happening in Syria and Iraq. In addition, these regional conflicts involve other countries. The refugee problem aggravates. Global politics and politicians have not learned from previous events. In fact, the violence continues. When this happened in Iraq and Libya, there was hope that these mistakes would not be repeated in Syria, but nevertheless the same scenario of ethnic and religious clashes.”
