Even as the United States prepares to withdraw the last of its remaining forces in Afghanistan, hundreds of jihadists from Jaish-e-Muhammad have been stationed at training and logistics facilities in the country, Indian intelligence sources told News18. The facilities, the sources said, were provided by Mullah Muhammad Yakub, the new military chief of the Taliban and a graduate of the Jaish training facilities in Pakistan.
President Donald Trump has said he wants the last of 4,500 US troops in Afghanistan by Christmas, and emergency preparations have started to roll back by at least 2,000 before he leaves office, reports say.
In the ongoing negotiations in Doha, the Taliban agreed to prevent attacks by transnational jihadist groups like al-Qaeda against the United States and its allies, but there is no specific reference to Pakistan-based groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish.
Two residents of Bahawalpur, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, confirmed the claims of Indian officials, telling News18 that several members of Jaish’s local staff, sent home after India’s airstrikes on a seminary in Balakot in the past year, they have abandoned cities and towns across the area in recent weeks.
Following the Balakot airstrikes, Pakistan had announced that it would place Jaish’s headquarters in Bahawalpur, the Markaz Osman-o-Ali, under government administration. However, Bahawalpur residents said that the seminary was operating normally and that Jaish leaders had resumed fundraising and recruitment meetings at the Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh mosques.
“There are Jaish guards with guns outside the seminary,” said a Bahawalpur resident. “The government does not run the seminary, the Jaish does.”
“In this century,” wrote the Jaish chief in an article that circulated online last week, using the pseudonym Amir-e-Mohtaram, or ‘the most respected of commanders,’ “the mother of jihad has been Afghanistan”. “The ocean of rewards in jihad is Afghanistan, the place that defeated three superpowers.”
Afghan officials have long reported that they are fighting Jaish and Lashkar fighters alongside Taliban forces, with hundreds of people taking part in battles. Last month, Helmand Provincial Governor Muhammad Yasin Khan said last month that hundreds of Pakistani fighters from Lashkar and Jaish had engaged in a fight to take over the city of Lashkargah.
This summer the United Nations Security Council group that oversees terrorism-related sanctions in Afghanistan was informed that up to 1,000 fighters from Jaish and Lashkar were fighting alongside the Taliban, “acting as advisers, trainers and explosive ordnance specialists. improvised”.
In turn, the Taliban and their al-Qaeda associates are believed to have provided Jaish’s technologies and techniques to penetrate the Line of Control, ranging from GPS-guided drones to training Indian jihadists to execute complex suicide missions. In September, for example, small drones were used to lift assault rifle ammunition across the Line of Control in Akhnoor, an effort to repair severe shortages of weapons and ammunition.
Fearing sanctions from the multinational Financial Action Task Force against terrorism, Pakistan has kept a tight grip on terrorism crossing the Line of Control. The new Afghan bases, Indian intelligence services believe, will allow an escalation of violence in Kashmir, without the exposure risks that come with maintaining a substantial counter-terrorism infrastructure on Pakistani soil.
“The Kashmir movement may seem buried deep,” announced last week the head of Jaish-e-Muhammad, Masood Azhar Alvi, in the journal of the jihadist group’s home, Medina, “but those who have eyes to see hidden things they know that it has been planted like a landmine, ready to explode at the right time ”. “The entire army of India will be stuck in Kashmir,” Azhar continued. “The problem we will face is how to hold so many ugly and rotten prisoners of war.”
“This is not a joke,” Azhar added. “I am writing this with the greatest responsibility.”
Long-standing relationships with both Azhar and Pakistan’s interservice intelligence may have prompted Yakub, the son of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founding patriarch of the Taliban, to renew the relationship between Jaish and the Taliban. Yakub was appointed to head the Taliban’s military commission this summer and has since presided over a sharp escalation of violence against Afghan civilian and military targets.
A graduate of Azhar’s alma mater, the Binori Town Seminary in Karachi, Afghan intelligence sources claim that Yakub received military training at the Jaish-e-Muhammad facility in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir in the early 2000s.
Nizamuddin Shamzai, the chancellor of Azhar’s alma mater, the sprawling neo-fundamentalist Binori Town seminary in Karachi, played a key role in backing jihadist groups that would flourish in the Taliban. In 1979, his student Irshad Ahmed founded Harkat-ul-Jihad-ul-Islami to fight in Afghanistan. The organization split in 1984, when Fazlur Rehman Khalil founded Harkat-ul-Mujahideen in defiance of the leadership of Qari Saifullah Akhtar.
Since 1988, when al-Qaeda first appeared on the Khost battlefield in Afghanistan, both groups collaborated with Osama bin Laden. Failing to qualify for armed service with Harkat-ul-Mujahideen due to his weight, Azhar was used as a propagandist and fundraiser, even traveling to Africa and Europe.
In 1994, Azhar was sent through the Line of Control to merge the two Harkat factions and ended up being arrested by the Indian authorities. The Harkat made repeated attempts to free him, especially by kidnapping Western tourists in Kashmir. He was released in 1999 in exchange for passengers aboard a hijacked Indian Airlines flight.
Nasser al-Bahri, a bodyguard for bin Laden in the late 1990s, has claimed that the assassinated al-Qaeda chief thought of the operation. “Bin Laden wanted Azhar to be released and had ordered Al Qaeda to plan the hijacking of Indian Airlines with Harkat,” he said in an interview.
Former Pakistani air force officer turned jihadist Adnan Rasheed wrote that he had started his terrorist career after 9/11, traveling to the “office of Jaish-e-Muhammad and then to the Manshera training ground” … “I stayed in their camp for 23 days hoping to go with other brothers to Afghanistan.” Later, Rasheed wrote, he participated in a Jaish meeting where volunteers were sought for suicide attacks in Kabul. Fifteen of the 200 participants volunteered.
Evidence has also emerged from Afghanistan’s intelligence services that the ISI provided training to Indian jihadists based in the south of the country, controlled by former Kashmiri jihad commander Aijaz Ahanger.
Kerala residents Kallukettiya Purayil and Muhammad Muhsin, acting under Ahanger’s command, became the first Indian nationals to take part in Islamic State suicide attacks abroad, a prison and a gurdwara in Afghanistan.
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