...a disputed territory lying between India and Pakistain. After partition, the Paks grabbed half of it and call it Azad (Free) Kashmir. The remainder they refer to as "Indian Occupied Kashmir". They have fought four wars with India over it, the score currently 4-0 in New Delhi's favor. After 72 years of this nonsense, India cut the Gordian knot in 2019, removing the area's special status, breaking off Ladakh as a separate state, and allowing people from other areas to settle (or in the case of the Pandits, to resettle) there....
, Pakistain is again employing the tactics of brainwashing the local youth in the name of religion and exploiting the "religious fault lines", officials said here on Sunday, according to a report by news agency PTI.
The change in tactics should also be seen in the light of Pakistain's desperate attempt to get out of the grey list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), they said.
The terror movement, initiated by Pakistain's spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence
...the Pak military
intelligenceagency that controls the military -- heads of ISI typically get promoted into the Chief of Army Staff position. It serves as a general command center for favored turban groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, tries to influence the politix of neighboring countries, and carries out a (usually) low-level war against India in Kashmir...
(ISI) under the garb of calls of 'Azadi' (freedom) and right to self-determination, has slowly and steadily transformed into a low-intensity conflict that stands on the pillars of "religion and radicalisation" today, the officials said.
From 2016, to get itself out of the FATF grey list, the ISI started creating multiple pseudo terror groups like The Resistance® Front (TRF), Kashmir Tigers (KT), The People's Anti-Fascist Force (PAFF) and Kashmir Janbaz Force (KJF), to name a few.
These groups are nothing but shadow groups of banned terror outfits Lashkar-e-Taiba
...the
Army of the Pure,an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is
banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI...
(LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad
...literally
Army of Mohammad, a Pak-based Deobandi terror group founded by Maulana Masood Azhar in 2000, after he split with the Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin. In 2002 the government of Pervez Musharraf
bannedthe group, which changed its name to Khaddam ul-Islam and continued doing what it had been doing before without missing a beat...
(JeM) and Hizbul Mujahideen
...
Party of Holy Warriors, founded by Muhammad Ahsan Dar in September 1989. One of the Pak sock puppets waging jihad in Indian Kashmir. It was originally organized as the armed wing of Jamaat-e-Islami. In 1990, Dar declared Hizbul as the
sword arm of Jamaat. Hizbul murdered many of the pro-independence intelligentsia in Kashmir. After the organization was taken over by Syed Salahuddin Dar and several other ex-Hizb leaders were assassinated between 2001 and 2003...
set up with the primary aim of creating a smoke screen to shield Pakistain from FATF sanctions and the secondary aim of re-strategising and giving terrorism in Kashmir an indigenous face.
"Pakistain is definitely changing its subversion narrative, giving it a religious tone not only to manipulate the minds of the youth in the Valley but also to exploit the religious fault lines that exist within India," an official said.
Having seen its failure in mobilising locals, especially after the death of veteran separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani in September last year, the ISI believes that religion holds the key to its next move in Kashmir.
"The neighbour has been and still remains the biggest menacing factor that has pulled back Kashmir and its people. Having vitiated and radicalised the Sufi soul of the Valley for the last three decades to meet its nefarious design, the masters of destruction across the border now believe that the time is ripe to infuse religious schism into the mix, and champion itself (Pakistain) as the saviour of religion," the official said.
Analysis of the recent intercepts and questioning of arrested Lions of Islam show that the ISI and others in Pakistain are desperate to polarise the local population in Jammu and Kashmir and generate dissent against the State in the name of religion, the officials said.
Carrying out a detailed analysis of last year's incidents of targeting of minorities in Kashmir, especially prominent chemist Makhan Lal Bindroo, the officials said that initially terror groups grabbed credit and labelled him as a government agent but the number of people who joined his funeral was an eye-opener as locals, despite the false claims, expressed their anger at his killing.
The officials said the changing contours of Pakistain's narrative in Kashmir are the outcome of the fact that its rhetoric of the right to self-determination has failed and the propaganda machinery being run from across the border has realised the futility of the call for "freedom movement and resistance against the so-called occupational forces".
Once the vanguard of the indigenous face of terrorism in Kashmir, Hizbul Mujahideen has fallen in the hierarchy of terror groups with its cadres dwindling drastically. As on January 1, the outfit only had 30-odd Lions of Islam operating in the Valley, primarily in Anantnag district in south Kashmir, and negligible presence in north and central Kashmir.