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….