Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM)
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Pakistan’s sword arm
2016: ISI instigates two Jaish factions
The Times of India, May 27 2016
Behind ISI's renewed India terror offensive: Tale of 2 Jaish factions
Rajshekhar jha Investigations conducted by Indian intelligence agencies point towards a pattern linking a failed attack in Delhi in mid-December, the Pathankot attack on January 2 and the two attacks on the Indian consulate and mission in Afghanistan on January 3 and March 2, respectively.
All these strikes bear the stamp of two Jaish factions -Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Jaish ul Haq (JuH). TOI had reported on May 26 about Jaish's failed attack in Delhi in mid-December.
Sources say ISI has been pitting the two Jaish factions against each other and pressuring them into targeting Indian installations to prove their worth. While JeM is headed by Maulana Masood Azhar, JuH is led by Maualana Abdul Rehman (MAR). Both are connected to the IC-814 hijacking of 1999. Rehman orchestrated the hijack while Azhar was freed in exchange for passengers. According to an intelligence report, this approach is resulting in back-toback strikes. The theory is further nailed by the timing of the strikes, origin and background of operatives and their targets -all of whom are India-centric, sources say. The ploy to “divide and counterpoise“ is a time-tested ISI strategy, sources say, indicating that ISI was di rectly involved in the opera tions. Sources say the confes sion report of two Jaish ter rorists, Ahmed Khan Durra ni and Abdul Qadri, who were arrested by Kabul poli rested by Kabul poli ce in March, has opened a can of worms, revealing how Pakistan is pro viding both the Ja ish groups with in frastructure to run their training camps. The duo said they were trained at an ISI-operated trai ning camp in Bare Khyber Pankhutnkhwa.
There is a reason as to why Jaish is in focus after a long gap. At a time when mo vements of groups like Lash kar-e-Toiba and jihadist Ha feez Saeed are being watched closely, Jaish has proven to be ISI's trump card. As the ISI and Pakistan army escalated their attempts to target an Indian establishment outside J&K after PM Narendra Modi's Lahore stopover last year, the two factions of JeM emerged as a strategic choice for them.
While it is difficult for ISI to distance itself from LeT strikes, they are more comfortable doing so where Jaish is involved due to a lack of direct evidence connecting the two.
Jaish's revival is being considered dangerous for Delhi and other metro cities.Unlike the Lashkar and other outfits, Jaish's fidayeens are far more organised and more lethal. The Indian agencies are hoping they can nip in the bud the outfit's fresh attempts.
Pakistan’s main arm since 2017
Aarti Tikoo Singh, February 15, 2019: The Times of India
Masood Azhar’s Jaish-e-Mohammad continues to be Pakistan intelligence agency, ISI’s most favoured group for terror attacks in India, after Lashkar-e-Taiba made way for it two years ago.
Intelligence sources in Srinagar told the TOI that Jaish, which has been involved in suicide attacks in Kashmir since its launch in 2000, emerged as a stronger contender against Hafiz Saeed’s Lashkar-e-Taiba after the latter’s parent organization Jamaat-ud-Dawah announced to enter mainstream politics. Even as its political organization Milli Muslim League (MML) was denied the permission to contest, the Dawah fielded around 260 candidates under a different registered political party Allah-o-Akbar Tehreek in Pakistan’s 2018 assembly and general elections.
As a result, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), emboldened by China's repeated blockage of India's bid to designate Azhar a terrorist at the United Nations, decided to spend most of its resources on the Jaish. Last year, after China clearly told New Delhi that it was not going to blacklist him, Azhar issued a threat to the BJP government over Ram Mandir, saying that his men were ready to lay down their lives and burn down the temple if it was built.
Founder of Jaish, Azhar is mastermind of several deadly terrorist attacks in India, including the one on Uri military base in Kashmir in 2016 in which 17 security personnel were killed. Though he was detained for a while under ‘protective custody’ after the Pathankot terror attack, he has been freely and actively holding public rallies and organizing recruitment camps for the Jaish since 2016. In the early 90s, Azhar travelled in Middle East, Africa and the UK to raise funds for Islamist jihad in Kashmir and continues to have a massive following in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
Incidentally, Azhar, who was released by India in exchange for the passengers of the hijacked IC814 plane, unlike other chiefs of terror groups based in Pakistan (Hafiz Saeed and Syed Salahuddin), has committed his own family to the jihadist war in Kashmir. He has been sending several of his young nephews to recruit, train and organize terrorists in Kashmir and launch terror attacks.
It became apparent two years ago, when his nephew, Talha Rashid, was killed in an encounter with security forces in Pulwama. His another nephew Mohammad Usman was killed in a gun-battle in Tral. Usman was believed to have targeted and killed eight soldiers in over a dozen attacks. According to intelligence sources, Mohammed Umer, son of Azhar’s elder brother Ibrahim, also infiltrated into Jammu and Kashmir last year. NIA, in 2018, filed a chargesheet against Masood Azhar’s brother and Jaish’s deputy chief Maulana Abdul Rouf Asgar for planning the attack on an Army camp in Nagrota in November 2016.
Intelligence sources believe that the Pulwama suicide bombing on Thursday, is also a handiwork of Asgar.
Massod Azhar
A brief profile, as in 2016
The Times of India, Dec 20 2016
The National Investigation Agency's chargesheet against Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar comes days ahead of Dec 31, the day China's refusal to back India's move in the UN to get the terror kingpin declared a global terrorist, is set to lapse.Here's how Azhar -in Delhi's list of 50 most-wanted terrorists -masterminded attacks on Indian soil
Who is Masood Azhar?
The jihadist became a household name in India in Dec 1999 when he was freed from Kot Balwal jail in return for 155 passengers held hostage on Indian Airlines flight IC814 that was hijacked to Kandahar in Afghanistan.
