FThe tide of anger surged from Lal Chowk and Khanqah-e-Maula to the new city, along the bend of the Jhelum, propelled by streams of people pouring out of the streets of the old city of Srinagar.Martyr’s Cemetery‘ At Idgah.
Ashfaq Majeed Wani was an unlikely hero. The kidnapper of former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s sister, Rubaiya Sayeed, and executioner of Kashmiri Pandits, Wani accidentally blew himself up with a grenade in 1990 during his only known attack on the Indian Army, a failed ambush outside the Firdaus cinema in the city was attacked.
Even fewer ‘martyrs’ had a right to glory through that first spring of long Jihadin March 1990 Mehndi On his sons going to Pakistan,” the Scholar Navnita Behera Recorded. The children were holding placards that read ‘Indian dogs go home’.
Late last month, Aqib Mushtaq Bhat was buried in a small cemetery in southern Kashmir. He was shot dead by the police a few days later. he allegedly shot Sanjay Sharma refused to move out of the house of the bank guard of Kashmiri Pandit four times. This time, there was no one to mourn for Aaqib,
Faced with vanishing support from crisis-hit Pakistan and a lack of legitimacy among young people, Kashmir’s jihadi movement is disintegrating. The number of ethnic Kashmiris active in jihadi groups, intelligence officials told ThePrint, has come down to 28, the lowest in a decade. The Hizb-ul-Mujahideen—once the numerically largest jihadist group in Kashmir with thousands of members—has virtually disappeared.
This is not the first time that Kashmiri jihadism has faced such a crisis. And on each of these occasions, it was saved by missteps and wrong decisions by India.
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Graying Jihad
Hizb-ul-Mujahideen chief Muhammad Yusuf Shah delivers a baby, leaving his home in Rawalpindi on February 20 a funeral speech For his lieutenant Bashir Ahmed Peer – one of the earliest members of the organization, and one of the latest members of the jihadists to be killed In which some people suspect it to be an Indian intelligence operation. “As long as we have a drop of blood left,” Shah vowed, “we will not sell Kashmir.”
Even as Hizb patriarchs in Pakistan are inciting their followers to violence, their children had long ago made peace with the state. Leading up to the Islamist-led youth insurgencies that began in 2010, this would make the leadership’s call for sacrifice ring hollow.
Two of Shah’s five sons—Syed Shakeel Ahmed and Shahid Yusuf—are now in jail, facing trial on charges of terror financing. Until last year, however, both men were government employees, Shakeel worked as a nursing assistant at the Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) and Yusuf was in the agriculture department.
Another son, Wahid Yusuf, works as a surgeon in (SKIMS). He was accused by former Chief of Research and Analysis Wing AS Dulat got my seat at the prestigious Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Government Medical College in a back-door deal between his father and the Intelligence Bureau.
The fourth son, Syed Mueed, worked till his termination of service last year with the Government-run Entrepreneurship Development Institute. The fifth son, Syed Javed works as a computer technician at the Regional Education Office in Soibug.
Hizb’s oldest surviving son, second-in-command Ghulam Nabi Khan, runs a labor-contract business serving Indian Army units stationed around Pahalgam. Police officials say that Naseer Ahmed Khan and his younger siblings, Irfan and Ilyas, are never believed to have been involved in jihad. Hamin Bhat, the only son of Hizb’s third commander Zafar Bhat, is a farmer.
Even as Islamist-led youth protests began in Kashmir after 2010, the gray jihadi leadership in Rawalpindi appeared compromised and out of touch. Organizations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, as well as a new generation of Kashmir-based leaders, such as Ashiq Hussain Faktu and Asiya Andrabi, became symbols for this new generation of young Islamists.
Read also: Soldier or Lashkar, Hizbul worker? Identity of a Kashmiri man in question after he was shot
inner battle
Since August 2000, Hizb had faced internal divisions with commanders seeking talks with India. “Don’t shoot,” Hizb second-in-command Ghulam Rasool Dar famously shouted to photographers before a meeting with government officials, “my life is in danger.” The division did not end even after the assassination of Commander Abdul Majeed Dar on the orders of the Shah. Even the Jamaat-e-Islami, the political party from which the Hizb emerged, broke fast,
For pro-negotiation Hizb commanders, the bourgeois lives of Jamaat patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s children and grandchildren have forever defied his call for jihad.
In 1997, Jamaat-e-Islami chief Ghulam Muhammad Bhat called for an end to “gun culture”. For many in Hizb, the time had come to make a political deal that would get them out of a grim, pointless cul-de-sac.
To make things worse, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence withdrew support for Hizb after the 2008 Mumbai attacks and shut down training camps. it was a decision shah complained bitterly of At a rally held in Muzaffarabad in 2010.
With the rise of youth Islamism the Hizb found itself ill-equipped to capitalize. The organization bloodied top commanders sent from Pakistan to lead operations inside Kashmir, including Ghulam Rasool Khan, Ghulam Rasool Dar and Suhail Faisal. Yasin Itoo, a young commander who had radicalized during several prison terms, whom the Hizb hoped would revive its fortunes in southern Kashmir, was killed in 2017,
The most visible Hizb commander to emerge in the period leading up to the 2016 insurgency was Riyaz Naikoo, born in 1985 in Beighpora village in south Kashmir’s Pulwama area, the son of a tailor. Although he proved adept in his use of social media to attract recruits, the organization remained ineffective militarily.
Fed up with the Hizb, two of Naikoo’s top recruits—social media icons Burhan Wani and Zakir Rashid Bhat—moved to other jihadi organizations with deep ties to global jihadism. Although Burhan’s killing would lead to large-scale street violence across southern Kashmir, Hizb failed to convert it into a grassroots revival.
two years before he was killed in 2020, Naikoo complained publicly Due to lack of support from Pakistan, due to which there was a shortage of weapons and training.
Read also: NIA attaches property of Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist in J&K’s Kupwara
last men standing
Educated at the local government school in Malangpora near Pulwama, Aqib was one of the few youths drafted into the Hizb after 2019. Recruited through a courier by Saifullah Mir, an Industrial Training Institute-educated pharmacologist who was Naikoo’s successor, Aqib dropped out of college. Joined Hizb in 2021. Kashmir Police investigators believe he was responsible for shooting Pataleshwar Kumar and his father, two migrant workers in Bihar. jaco chaudharyLast year.
However, local Hizb commander Zubair Wani had a stranglehold of funds and weapons – and Aqib soon became frustrated with the group’s inability to train and equip its recruits. Previous generations of Hizb cadre had received extensive military training in camps in Pakistan; Aqib learned to fire pistols at unarmed civilians only at point-blank range.
Earlier this year, he joined Lashkar-e-Taiba – along with fellow recruit Ejaz Bhat – after Sharma was killed.
After the 1971 war, Pakistan stopped supporting jihadist groups such as Al-Fatah and the National Liberation Front in Kashmir. This seemed to end the possibilities of armed struggle against the Indian state. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi struck a deal with Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, the former prime minister of Kashmir, that guaranteed New Delhi’s status as hegemon.
The choke-hold New Delhi gained on politics in Kashmir came at the cost of all opposition space for Islamists. The political autocracy created by the National Conference with the support of the Congress inspired many youths to take up arms. Youth protests led by Islamists began in southern Kashmir in 2003 – with deadly consequences.
“Crossing the Line of Control was as mysterious to a Kashmiri youth as Eve St Agnes to a virgin,” Nazir Geelani quipped. Remembered that, Kashmiri youth, Geelani said, “seemed mesmerized by the belief that the solution to all their problems in the Indian part of Kashmir lay in the Pakistani part of Kashmir.”
Since 2001, the jihad in Kashmir has often sat on the edge of an abyss – only to break free from failure to create a sustainable and democratic political system. Today, as New Delhi looks to find Hizb’s last men standing, it should be careful not to make the same mistakes.
The writer is National Security Editor with ThePrint. He tweeted @praveenswami. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)