Just over nine months later, Zawahiri’s message seems to have resonated, although not without some challenges in Afghanistan after the July 2015 announcement that longstanding Afghan Taliban leader and al-Qaeda supplicant, Mullah Omar, died in 2013 without any acknowledgement at the time. By reinforcing several other trends of Islamist exceptionalism in South Asia, the AQIS declaration seems to have blunted most of ISIS’ appeal. Although present in a loose way due to the labeling choices by some fragmentary jihadist groups in Afghanistan, ISIS’ impact in South Asia has been conspicuously less than in other regions in general and especially on a Muslim per-capita basis. The dramatic successes of the Salafi-Jihadist terrorist movement, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its creation, the Islamic State (IS) in the far western part of Asia known as the Middle East (or Southwest Asia) stunned the world in mid-2014. These successes were facilitated by the presence of motivated and fanatical foreign fighters from Europe and from Asia and by the tactical alliance with former Iraqi insurgents and former members of the Ba’thist regime of Saddam Hussein.