What Is Going On???

In a significant move aimed at reducing tensions, the Indian Army (IA) and Pakistan Army (PA) on February 25, 2021 announced that they would cease firing across the Line of Control (LoC) while recommitting themselves to a 2003 ceasefire agreement. According to India’s Union Ministry of Home Affairs, there were 2,140 ceasefire violations (CFV) by Pakistan in 2018, 3,479 in 2019, and 5,133 in 2020. In 2021, there were only 664 incidents as of June 30. Of those 664 violations, almost all occurred prior to February 25. In contrast, only six violations were reported from February 25 to June 30, 2021. 

July 17, 2019: Hafiz Saeed, chief of the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), gets arrested on July 17, 2019 in terror-financing cases. The Saeed-led JuD is the front organisation for the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which was responsible for carrying out the 2008 Mumbai attack that killed 166 people, including six US citizens. The US Department of the Treasury has designated Saeed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. He was listed under UN Security Council Resolution 1267 on December 10, 2008.

February 2020: Hafiz Saeed is sentenced to 11 years in jail by an anti-terrorism court in two terror-financing cases.

December 24, 2020: Hafiz Saeed is sentenced to 15-and-a-half years in jail by an anti-terrorism court in Lahore for another terror-financing case.

Just six days after his re-arrest on January 2, 2021, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi was sentenced to three concurrent five-year sentences on terror financing charges on January 8, 2021. The speed with which the wheels of justice turned in Pakistan in the case of Lahkhvi’s terror-financing case are in sharp contrast to the years he remained charged in the 26/11 Mumbai attack case, in which he was eventually bailed out. Lakhvi had been listed as a global terrorist by the UN on December 10, 2008. Also designated as global terrorists were Haji Muhammad Ashraf, its chief of finance; and India-born Mahmoud Mohammad Ahmed Bahaziq, described as a financier for the group who served as its chief in Saudi Arabia. He was first arrested in Muzaffarabad on December 7, 2008 and jailed in 2009. Six years later he hit the headlines again when an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan trying him for the Mumbai killings ordered his release on bail. In April 2015 he walked free from prison.

February 2, 2021: At a hearing in the capital Islamabad, the court ordered that British citizen Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh be moved from death row to a government-run “rest house”, where he is to be kept under a form of house arrest. Sheikh, along with three others, was accused of kidnapping Daniel Pearl, who was reporting a story for the AWSJ newspaper on armed religious extremist groups in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi in January 2002, months after the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Pakistan’s northwestern neighbour, Afghanistan. Sheikh, who was arrested in 2002 and convicted later that year, had already served his seven-year sentence on the kidnapping charge.  Sheikh was indicted in the US in 2002 for hostage-taking and conspiracy to commit hostage-taking, which resulted in the murder of Pearl, as well as for the 1994 kidnapping of another US citizen in India. Following his acquittal, the US Justice Department said that it was ready to take custody of Sheikh and try him. But he remains inside Pakistan till this day.

June 23, 2021: An IED explodes outside Hafiz Saeed’s Lahore residence. In retaliation, the LeT conducts two drone-strikes on the high-security technical area of the Indian Air Force (IAF) Station Jammu on the intervening night of June 26-27, 2021.

April 8, 2022: Hafiz Saeed is given a 21-year jail sentence to be served at the Kot Lakhpat Jail, Lahore for his conviction in four terror-financing cases.

January 13, 2022: The Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) Lahore awards the death sentence to Eid Gul of the banned Tahreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Peter Paul David, Sajjad Shah and Ziaullah on nine counts. Another suspect Ayesha Bibi was handed down five years imprisonment. Eid Gul had installed explosives in the car used in the blast near Hfiz Saeed’s Lahore residence. The car belonged to Peter Paul David and other three--Sajjad Shah, Ziaullah and Ayesha--were facilitators.

May 2022: 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks planner Sajid Mir is sentenced by a Pakistani anti-terrorism court in Lahore on terror-financing charges in a speedy 20-minute trial completed just three weeks after he was arrested, three days before a US-Pakistan ministerial meeting and a month before the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Plenary session that gave Pakistan a reprieve by removing it from the FATF’s grey-listing. Mir was sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of terror-financing and a fine of Rs.4.2 lakh was also been imposed on him. In September 2022, Beijing had put a hold on a proposal moved at the UN by the US and co-supported by India to designate Sajid Mir as a global terrorist.

March 1, 2022: Mistry Zahoor Ibrahim (alias Zahid Akhund) of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), considered the deadliest of the five hijackers of Kathmandu to Delhi Flight IC-814 (1999), is killed in Karachi.

February 20, 2023: Bashir Ahmed Peer (alias Imtiaz Alam), a Hizbul Mujahideen commander, is shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.

February 26, 2023: Syed Khalid Raza of al-Badr Mujahideen is killed in Karachi.

March 4, 2023: Syed Noor Shalobar of ISIS-Khorasan is assassinated on by unknown gunmen in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa area of Pakistan. Shalobar was responsible for recruitment and spreading terror in the Kashmir Valley.

May 6, 2023: Paramjit Singh Panjwar, Pakistan-based chief of Khalistan Commando Force’s (KCF), accompanied by two armed guards, Panjwar was taking a walk in the early hours in a park inside Sun Flower Housing Society in Lahore’s Johar Town when the two assailants struck. One of them shot him in the head, fled towards the complex’s entrance gate, and then drove off on a motorcycle along with his accomplice.

July 15, 2023: Mullah Sardar Hussain Arain, a leading figure of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), the frontal organisation of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), came under an attack allegedly by the Sindhudesh Revolutionary Army (SRA) in Qazi Ahmed town of Shaheed Benazirabad District (formerly known as Nawabshah District) in Sindh. He died on August 5.

September 8, 2023: Riaz Ahmad (alias Abu Qasim), among the masterminds of the Dhangri terror attack, was shot at point-blank range and killed in a mosque in PoJK’s Rawalkot district.

September 13, 2023: Maulana Zia ur Rehman of LeT is killed at a park in in Karachi’s Gulistan-e-Jauhar neighbourhood.

September 19, 2023: Laal Mohammad alias Mohammad Darji, reportedly an ISI agent and supplier of fake notes, is killed in Kathmandu. He reportedly used to get fake Indian currency notes from Pakistan and Bangladesh and bring them into India. Mohammad was also involved in providing logistical support for the ISI, and facilitated asylum for other agents.

September 29, 2023: 30-year-old Mufti Qaiser Farooq, a former member of LeT and a close associate of Hafiz Saeed, is killed near a religious institution in Karachi’s Samanabad area. Farooq suffered bullet wounds in the back and was shifted to a hospital where he died during treatment. A 10-year-old boy was also wounded in the attack.

October 11, 2023: Shahid Latif, a former JeM operative and allegedly the mastermind of the 2016 Pathankot Air Force Station attack, is shot dead by three unknown men riding a motorcycle in Sialkot’s Pasrur area. An associate of Latif is also killed and another associate injured in that attack.A resident of Gujranwala in Pakistan, Latif had built an extensive network while he was in prison in Jammu from 1994 to 2010, and that helped him run his network and operations across the border. He was known as a “master infiltrator”. 

October 20, 2023: Dawood Malik is shot dead by unknown assailants in Mir Ali Pakistan's North Waziristan. The attack occurred at a private clinic. Malik was the founder of Lashkar-e-Jabbar and a close aide of one of India's most wanted terrorists, Masood Azhar. 

On November 5, 2023 Khwaja Shahid, also known as Mian Mujahid, is purportedly kidnapped and later discovered beheaded near the Line of Control in PoJK. Shahid was a prominent LeT figure and one of the masterminds of the 2018 terrorist attack on an Indian Army Cantonment in Sunjuwan that had claimed seven lives.

November 9, 2023: Former LeT terrorist Akram Khan, alias Akram Ghazi, head of LeT’s recruitment cell, is shot dead in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Bajaur tribal district.

November 10, 2023: LeT cadre Mohammed Muzamil and his associate Naeemur Rahman were shot dead by unknown gunmen in Pakistan's Punjab province's Chowk Khokhran in Sialkot district. Police in Pakistan’s Punjab province has branded the incident as an aftermath of a fake land dispute case.

November 12, 2023: Maulana Raheem Ullah Tariq, a JeM leader and close associate of Maulana Masood Azhar, is shot dead by unknown men in Karachi.

December 3, 2023: LeT terrorist Hanzla Adnan, the mastermind of the deadly attack on a BSF convoy in Udhampur on August 5, 2015 and the attack on a CRPF camp at Pampore on June 25, 2016, gets shot by unknown gunmen outside his house in Karachi’s Nizamabad area. He succumbed to his injuries on December 5. Recently, Hanzla Adnan had shifted his operations base from Rawalpindi to Karachi and was a member of the Milli Muslim League, a front of the LeT.

From the above listings of select prosecutions and targetted killings, it becomes evident that both India and the US have adopted the FATF route to compel Pakistan to come down heavily upon the LeT/JuD, with limited success being achieved thus far. But much more needs to be done. For instance, China on October 19, 2022 put a hold on a proposal by India and the US at the UN to blacklist Pakistan-based Hafiz Talah Saeed, the son of Hafiz Saeed, in the second such move within two days to designate Pakistan-based terrorists as global terrorists under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UNSC. China also put a hold on a joint India/US proposal at the UN to list LeT leader Shahid Mahmood as a global terrorist. Mahmood has been a longstanding senior LeT member based in Karachi and has been affiliated with the LeT since at least 2007. As early as June 2015 through at least June 2016, Mahmood served as the vice chairman of Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), a humanitarian and fundraising arm of LeT. Earlier in June 2022, China had put a hold, at the last moment, on a joint proposal by India and the US to blacklist Pakistan-based terrorist Abdul Rehman Makki under the 1267 Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee of the UNSC. Makki is a US-designated terrorist and brother-in-law of Hafiz Saeed. Then in August 2022, China again put a hold on a proposal by the US and India to blacklist Abdul Rauf Azhar, the senior leader of Pakistan-based JeM. Azhar, born in 1974 in Pakistan, had been sanctioned by the US in December 2010. He has served as JeM’s acting leader in 2007, and as one the JeM’s intelligence coordinator. In 2008 Azhar was assigned to organise suicide attacks in India. He was also involved with JeM’s political wing and has served as a JeM official involved with terrorist training camps.

Then there is the case of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar, whose existence inside Pakistan has never been acknowledged by Islamabad. Dawood was designated as a global terrorist by the UN under the UNSC Resolution 1267 and he is listed in al-Qaeda sanction list on November 3, 2003 and the UNSC had also issued a special notice in his name on April 6, 2006. Yet another high-profile terrorist whose existence inside Pakistan continues to be denied is Masood Azhar Alvi, who as the leader of JeM, was designated as a global terrorist by the UN under the UNSC Resolution 1267 on May 1, 2019. All in all, therefore, both the US and India have chosen to target the wanted terrorists through legal means, and not through extra-territorial assassinations.

Thus, the ‘crown jewels’ of Pakistan-based ‘Jihadi’ tanzeems continue to be treated as strategic assets and enjoy state patronage and sanctuary. Those terrorists that have been killed since March 2022 are primarily the ‘runners’ or ‘executors’ at the ground-level who are not responsible for command-n-control of terror-strikes. And the only conceivable reasons why the killings have taken place is that these entities have gone rogue and have challenged the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) Directorate’s diktats to refrain from violating the ceasefire along the LoC and refrain from engaging in fund-raising activities aimed at financing cross-LoC terror-strikes.

It is also now evident that the PA wants to stay focussed primarily on its western borders along the 2,670km-long Durand Line, astride which the Pakistani provinces of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are now facing a steadily worsening internal security situation and which require an increased deployment footprint by the PA. Small wonder therefore that since taking over as the PA’s COAS on November 29, 2022, Gen Syed Asim Munir has visited troops deployed along the LoC only twice thus far: on December 3, 2022 and April 6, 2023. In contrast, his predecessor Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa visited forward areas along the LoC on January 22, 2018; June 16, 2018; October 25, 2018; November 21, 2018; December 28, 2018; February 22, 2019; June 5, 2019; August 12, 2019; September 6, 2019; April 29, 2020; May 24, 2020; August 1, 2020; October 21, 2020; December 22, 2020; June 2 and 12, 2021; and December 24, 2021. 

(to be concluded)