Pro-Pakistan and pro-Caliphate groups fight for Kashmir's 'jihadi' space

NEW DELHI/SRINAGAR: In a ‘martyrs’ graveyard in Eidgah area of Downtown, two tombstones—one that of Srinagar’s chief cleric Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq and the other of his assassin, Mohammad Abdullah Bangroo, stand out. The Mirwaiz was a separatist seeking Kashmir’s ‘independence’ from India and Bangroo, a Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist, fighting for Kashmir’s accession with Pakistan.

That Bangroo was buried next to the Mirwaiz, almost a month after his assassination in May 1990 and both designated as ‘martyrs’, not only captured the struggle between pro-independence and pro-Pakistan forces at the very outset of the violent conflict in Kashmir, but underlined the fact that the latter had won.

29 years later, a new strife to occupy the militant space in Kashmir is going on now between the pro-Pakistan and the pro-Caliphate terror outfits. Last month, an Islamic State of Jammu and Kashmir (ISJK) terrorist was killed by Hizbul Mujahideen following which ISJK declared that Pakistan-backed terror groups in Kashmir were “traitors” to the cause of Islamic jihad. Just two days ago, al-Qaida’s global chief Ayman al-Zawahiri announced that ‘jihad’ in Kashmir was for Caliphate and needed to be freed from the clutches of Pakistan’s ISI and Army.

“In the 90s, hundreds of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (pro-azadi) militants got killed by tip-off provided by Hizbul Mujahideen. Today, the affiliates of ISIS and al-Qaida in Kashmir, ISJK or Wilayah-al-Hind and Ansar Ghazwat ul-Hind (AGuH) are now vying for the same space which once was a turf war between pro-azadi and pro-Pakistan groups,” a senior police officer who did not want to be quoted told TOI.

This new war began in 2014 when masked youth in Downtown first began waving pro-Caliphate Islamic State flags. The trend had started soon after the ISIS assumed prominence with its use of social media technology to run their propaganda videos of seizing key cities in Iraq and Syria and executing people gruesomely in public.

“That the idea of Islamic State had captured the imagination of the militant youth in Kashmir became evident when the commander of pro-Pakistan terror outfit Hizbul Mujahideen, Burhan Wani, began using social media on the lines of the ISIS and also declared that he was fighting for the establishment of Caliphate,” a counter-insurgency official said.

Why Wani chose to shift his goal from Pakistan to Caliphate wasn’t clear at the time but when the floodgates of violence opened after his killing by the Indian security forces in 2016, “it indicated that he represented popular sentiment among the militant youth in Kashmir,” a political activist in Bijbehera told TOI.

The ideological shift, according to many police officers in Kashmir, had happened way before Wani was killed. “That is why Wani’s successor Zakir Musa parted ways with Hizbul Mujahideen and affiliated with al-Qaida and set up its provincial branch, Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind in 2017,” a counter-insurgency expert said.

This coincided with black ISIS shrouds replacing Pakistani green flags which had been used as cerements to wrap slain terrorists in their funerals. “At one point, the tussle became so intense that the green shroud of a slain terrorist was removed and replaced by the black, right at the funeral procession,” another official said.

While mainstream politicians in Kashmir at the time rubbished ISIS flag waving and draping as “juvenile rage attempted at teasing India,” pro-independence separatists and pro-Pakistan terror groups alleged that it was “all stage-managed by Indian intelligence agencies to malign their movement.” The entire separatist bandwagon even called Zakir Musa an Indian agent, an Army officer said.

According to Musa fans in Kashmir on social media, it was only after Indian security forces killed Musa and al-Qaida released audio recordings of Musa’s phone conversations with a Pakistani terrorist Abu Dujana, conspiracy theories about his ideological commitment subsided. In his long discussion with Dujana, Musa settled the ideological battle for all his supporters. “The fight in Kashmir is for Islamic Caliphate and not Kashmiri nationalism or Pakistani nation. I will prove it with my ‘shahadat’ (martyrdom),” Musa told Dujana.

A section of Kashmir’s intellectual class believes that this shift from “freedom for Kashmir to the movement for Pakistan and now to jihad for Caliphate had been inevitable” for a very long time. “Militancy in Kashmir began with the slogan of ‘Islam khatarey mein’ (Islam in danger) and the rhetoric about separate Muslim identity, the genesis of which is the creation of Pakistan. The pro-Pakistan terror groups and even Jamaat believes in Sharia and jihad for Caliphate. They are just strategic about it,” a scholar of Islamic University said.

However, the security establishment in Kashmir believes the transformation is an outcome of the tremendous challenge Pakistan is facing due to its own economic crisis and the pressure from the global terror-funding watchdog, Financial Action Task Force (FATF). “They have a resource crunch and they are being forced to shut down some of their cross-border terror infrastructure. ISIS and al-Qaida, many believe are defeated but they are not. They are alive and thriving by entering newer domains and can activate themselves through their global network as and when they need to,” a counter-terrorism analyst said.

A section of counter-terror grid suspects that Pakistan has been strategically holding back pro-Pakistan groups and making way for pan-Islamist terror groups in Kashmir so as to project that it has taken effective steps to end cross-border terror and has nothing to do with Kashmir’s home-grown jihadi movement.