IS on decline in the Middle East but its influence rising in Pakistan

When Noreen Leghari disappeared from her hometown of Hyderabad, Pakistan, in February, her parents thought she had been abducted. But then she reached out to them on Facebook.

"I've joined Daesh," said the 20-year-old medical student, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, "I'm in Syria for jihad. Stop searching for me." Leghari, who had been in contact with extremists online for a year, was actually in the Pakistani city of Lahore. In April, security forces stormed her hideout there, killing one of her two accomplices - whom she had also married - and recovering two suicide vests and hand grenades. Leghari had planned to detonate herself at a crowded church two days later, on Easter Sunday.

It was the latest example of the Islamic State's growing reach in Pakistan, where the group is finding willing recruits through its efforts online even as its territory is shrinking in Iraq and Syria. Even young Pakistani women and educated youth from liberal families have proven susceptible to the lure of the Islamic State's brand of extremism.

In another case, three young men, all graduates of elite Pakistani universities, were inspired by the Islamic State and gunned down 47 Shiite Muslims on a bus in Karachi. The subsequent investigation unraveled a cell of a dozen women raising funds for Islamic State operations, including the bus massacre. While there are no concrete numbers on how many Islamic State members are in Pakistan, a report issued last January by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense think tank, estimated the group had recruited 2,000 to 3,000 individuals in the country.

Security experts say that number is relatively low, especially when compared to the recruitment levels of more established terror groups like al-Qaida or the Taliban. But they agree the threat to Pakistan is real and rising. "Clearly you can no longer say that the IS is not a problem," said Moeed Yusuf, an analyst at the United States Institute of Peace, a U.S. government-backed conflict resolution organization.

The first signs of the Islamic State's presence in Pakistan appeared in late 2014, while the country was aggressively cracking down on the Taliban. Women and girls from Islamabad's Jamia Hafsa - a madrassa adjacent to Lal Masjid, the infamous militant mosque in the heart of Pakistan's capital - addressed a message to the chief of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, "the caliph" and to "our brothers, the mujahideen." "We pray for you every night here in the land of Pakistan," said one of the women in Arabic, standing in a black burqa, against the backdrop of Islamic State flag.