The recent killing of Abu Ismail, the Lashkar-e-Taiba chief in Kashmir, indicates the extraordinary grasp of the forces’ intelligence in south Kashmir. This is a huge change, given how weak such intelligence seemed to be just six months ago – not to speak of last year.
In fact, the boot was on the other foot: militants seemed to have key intelligence about the forces’ movements. The army was ambushed on a couple of occasions, sometimes lured with false information. A police jeep with an SHO and his personnel was also ambushed just three months ago.
That ambush, threats to other police personnel, and the heist of a bank van in April have evidently stung the police into sharpening their intelligence antennae.
Possible Reasons for Boost in Military Intelligence
Other reasons suggested for the turnaround include the clampdown on funding of militants, and general public fatigue.
Certainly, the furious mood that followed the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani on 8 July 2016 is gone.
So much so that there was no public response in the locality when Ismail was killed, or when his predecessor Abu Dujana was killed six weeks before.
Neighbours did not interfere even when the army demonstrated to the media how they got Dujana, a few hours after that encounter. These operations were executed with surgical swiftness; the forces evidently had no trouble laying cordons.
All Eyes on Zakir Musa
There has been speculation over the extent to which rival militants might be adding high value to the enhanced intelligence. The role of Zakir Musa, who split from Hizb-ul Mujahideen to form an Al Qaeda unit in the Valley in May, has been in particular focus.
Some analysts associate nihilistic societal rejection with the sort of extreme ‘radicalised’ militancy of which Musa has become a symbol.
But Musa’s journey began in a middle-class family, dyed-in-the-wool followers of the orthodox Jamaat-e-Islami.
One of his siblings is a doctor, and the other a lawyer, while Musa himself attended an engineering college in multi-cultural Chandigarh before he became a militant alongside Burhan Wani.
Contrast to Burhan Wani
While Burhan was still alive and in the months following his killing in July last year, Musa was generally known in south Kashmir as an angry young man who imposed his will – feared rather than loved.
Though Musa was nominated from Pakistan to succeed Burhan, he broke with Hizb in mid-May after stating that he would slit the throats and string up Hurriyat leaders in Lal Chowk if they kept describing Kashmir’s movement as political.
Rejecting democracy and any nationalism, including Pakistani, he has flayed the Pakistan Army as a US lackey. Posters accusing Musa of being an Indian agent came up in south Kashmir on 15 September night. Top Hizbul militants, and sections of the media, had already publicly voiced this suspicion.
This idea is sobering, for to promote Musa’s ideas would be to play with fire.
One can see how badly the US’ support for jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s turned out. Islamic State’s emergence a few years after the US invasion of Iraq also had disastrous consequences.
A New Chapter
Musa’s parting with Hizbul four months ago brought back, for the first time in 23 years, a situation in which Kashmiri militants were vigorously in the field as separate outfits. Hizbul has been the only predominantly Kashmiri group in the field since 1994, when most other Kashmiri militants became mercenaries working with the army or the BSF.
From that time on, other groups in the field largely comprised foreigners – including the largely Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Harkat ul Jihad Islami (aka Harkat ul Mujahideen), which comprised largely Afghans and Pakistanis, and (for a while around 2000-02) Jaish-e-Mohammed.
When there were several Kashmiri groups in the early 1990s, they sometimes battled each other – particularly Hizb and JKLF, and Hizb and Al Umar. Some of those battles were over area domination, ideological differences, or ego clashes.
(The writer is the Kashmir-based author of ‘The Generation of Rage in Kashmir’ and a journalist. He can be reached at @david_devadas. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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