This report, “Weekend Carnage in Kashmir Casts Grim Light on Renewed Recruitment by Hizb-ul-Mujahideen,” gives the impression that the jihad is losing ground in Jammu and Kashmir, but not so. What’s more, the jihadis there are connected to a broader, more worrisome global network.
The Director General of the Jammu and Kashmir Police, Dilbag Singh, has warned that “Pakistan-backed militants were trying to scale up violence and disturb peace in Kashmir.” While an anti-India campaign — accusing India of “Islamophobia” — has been aggressively pushed by Pakistan and its supporters, jihadis in Kashmir have escalated their activities and are committed to a global vision of jihad. As written in the Hindu Times:
Security forces gunned down three local terrorists in a gun battle, the fourth in a little over a week, in Jammu and Kashmir’s Shopian district. The terrorists were killed after local police and Indian Army personnel had launched a joint operation in Turkuwagan village early on Tuesday in the district in south Kashmir.
“A new kind of jihadism has risen from the dark soil laid by a decayed political system, a jihadism which, inspired by global projects, is driven by a millenarian impulse hostile to all forms of politics.”
Meanwhile, a story in The Indian Express in the fall of 2017 highlights the life of a jihadi and the tells the tale of the “Kashmir jihad’s changing colour,” which includes “the journey the Kashmir jihad has taken over the last 10 years.” The journey has been marked by successes and failure, but it is a relentless one, backed by Pakistan, and it envisions an expansion beyond Jammu and Kashmir.
Last year, “Al Qaeda’s Chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, told “Mujahideen in Kashmir” to inflict “unrelenting blows” on the Indian Army and government in Jammu and Kashmir.
This latest “carnage in Kashmir” is a hint of much more to come in the Islamic insurgency against India, while India’s resistance is deemed to be “Islamophobic.” In a letter sent to the U.N. ambassadors of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Pakistani ambassador Munir Akram presented Muslims as the victims. He “said the plight of India’s hapless Muslims and the Kashmiris in occupied Kashmir should be a matter of grave concern for the OIC and all Muslim States.”
Not surprisingly, Akram — dubbed the “diplo-basher” for smashing his girlfriend’s head against a wall — made no mention of jihad terror, nor of the plight of innocent women in the region as “terrorists active in Jammu and Kashmir, who had waged jihad in the name of Islam, were involved in sexual exploitation of innocent Kashmiri women in the valley.” According to “testimony of one of the victims of the sexual exploitation at the hands of Jaish-e-Muhammad terrorists”, the treatment of the women is described as having “a sharp similarity between the rampant sexual abuse of women in Jammu and Kashmir with that of subjugation of women as sex slaves by the ISIS in Syria.”
“Weekend Carnage in Kashmir Casts Grim Light on Renewed Recruitment by Hizb-ul-Mujahideen,” by Praveen Swami, News 18 India, June 8, 2020:
Eight hundred people, perhaps more, filled the Eidgah ground in the small town of Arwani on Monday morning, for funeral prayers to mourn the killing of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen jihadist Owais Ahmad Malik — ignoring both a police ban on public gatherings and the lockdown imposed to contain the coronavirus pandemic in southern Kashmir, which is emerging as the region’s worst-affected area.
Fuelled by ever-more effective intelligence generated by the Jammu Kashmir Police, Indian forces have brought the Hizb — once the region’s most feared jihadist group — to its knees across its south Kashmir strongholds.
Nine Hizb terrorists have been shot dead in fire engagements that ran over the weekend alone, bringing the total numbers of jihadists killed so far this year to over 70.
Lacking in weapons, ammunition, funding, training and leadership, the Hizb still continues, however, to cast a grim spell over the minds of many young men in southern Kashmir.
From local accounts and police records, it is clear that Arwani-born Malik was an improbable local hero. Lacking the religious or ideological credentials of an earlier generation of jihadists, his last significant run-in with police came last year, when he was held while peddling marijuana — widely grown in south Kashmir’s sun-drenched Pir Panjal range. In his home town, two local residents told News18, he was once known for involvement in minor crime.
But hundreds of young people threw stones at police and Indian Army soldiers when they surrounded Malik in the village of Reban-Zainapora, near Shopian, in a desperate effort to help him escape.
Though clashes like these were common from 2014 to 2016, they slowly diminished and then disappeared after Kashmir’s special constitutional status was revoked in August. Ever since March, though, stone-throwing mobs have confronted counter-terrorism operations with increasing frequency.
In 2016, police sources say, Malik had developed ties with local Hizb cadre, forged through participation in street-battles with police during the massive Islamist-led protests which swept southern Kashmir, after the killing of jihadist Burhan Wani.
Police records suggest Malik fell in with local Hizb commander Ishfaq Itoo — a prominent jihadist who was alleged to have staged four drive-by shootings targeting the police station at Yaripora, a remote village nestled on the lower slopes of the Pir Panjal mountains. The two men are alleged to have run a protection-racket targeting Shopian-region political activists and business people.
In 2018 and 2019, police in the south Kashmir town of Bijbehara filed First Information Reports naming Malik as a member of the Hizb and alleging he was involved in recruiting jihadists….
gravenimage says
Jammu and Kashmir: 800+ Muslims defy lockdown to attend jihadi’s funeral, jihad murderer hailed as hero
…………….
I’ve always said that it tells you a great deal about people when you see who their heroes are–in this case, murderous thugs.
OTTER says
The Muslims of Kashmir have ethnically cleansed the Hindus from the Valley. Not a word about it the international media as for them, as for them, Muslims and Islam can be mentioned only as victims. When they commit terrorism, they suddenly are not Muslim and Islam has nothing to do with it. Then its the ‘root causes’ nonsense that is called in to explain: Whitey did it, the Jews did it, Hindus did it, Buddhists did it. Never them. They are the most murderous people in the world, who, if you believe the Western and Indian secular press have no agency at all.
The situation in Kashmir is getting serious. The only language the Muslim understands is force. And brute, overwhelming force.
James Lincoln says
OTTER says,
“Muslims and Islam can be mentioned only as victims.”
Regarding the mainstream media, that is a true statement.
And therein lies the problem…
DDMisra says
The government should not have handed over the bodies to the people who could celebrate!
Those should have been disposed off secretly.
Even now the government can crack down on those who organised the funeral as collaborators of terrorists.
The problem is the lack of will of the government to enforce the law.
Rakesh Sharma says
They are not handing over it anymore they stopped that practice 6 months ago
Rakesh Sharma says
1990s Genocide of Kashmiri pandit(Hindus) happened in Kashmir after the Friday prayers all Muslim mobs came out on street and start shouting you have few hours to leave the Kashmir or convert to Islam other slogan And then blood shed started five hundred thousand Kashmiri Pandits had to leave Kashmir they all were prosper rich and had properties there but that night they came on street empty handed. Thousands of Kashmiri pandits was killed by their neighbors whom they were living from the ages.
One of the real story I want to tell you guys to show the cruelty happened to Kashmiri Pandit one girl was raped in front of her father then they put her on the wood sawmill and cut the girl into two pieces and those Islamist took her blood mixed into the rice and compelled her father to eat it. The newborn babies were snatched from mother and in front of them they killed them by putting throwing hardly on the floor and then they raped those crying mothers. Nothing happened because that time the home minister of Kashmir was Muslim and he(Mufti) gave his consent to it.
This Massacre took place in 1990 still Kashmiri pandits could not go back to their own land because the majority of those peace lovers(Muslims) are there and in their own country they are living in Jammu and Delhi refugee camps
Congress party was involved in this from the beginning now BJP government came they abolished Article 370 and 35A and now they are playing the victim cards because according to Article 370 they have special rights like they could marry to the Pakistani citizen and give them Indian citizenship.ISI of Pakistan and Kashmiri jihadist used the Article as weapon and given so many terrorists citizenships in Kashmir and they ran their jihadist agenda in Kashmir
Now Army if India is killing all the terrorist those took weapon in their hand in the name of religion and soon the situation will be sorted out