Impact on India continues ......

A key catalyst for the ISI plan was an active member of HuA known by the name of Maulana Masood Azhar, a rabble-rouser

and a prolific writer. Azhar is a close ally of the Taliban and is considered to be a friend of Mullah Omar. He travelled extensively,

gathering contributions and recruits, setting up offices with the bjective of ‘recruiting a million men’ for the Kashmir Jihad.

He entered India on January 29, 1994, disguised as a Portuguese, Adam Issa, but was caught on February 10 while on his way to Srinagar. Upset by this turn of events, the HuM commander, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, with the support of the ISI, hatched a series of plans to rescue the Maulana, losing in the process another of their young and ambitious recruits, Syed Omar Sheikh, a London School of Economics alumnus who turned to terrorism after a visit to Bosnia. Sheikh, before his arrest near Delhi (1994), was instrumental in unleashing a wave of violence in Kashmir and helping in consolidating extremist elements in other parts of India.

Sheikh was close to the ISI, an association that went back to his days in Bosnia where he was involved in smuggling arms with the help of a former Pak Army official. One of his key contacts in the ISI was Brigadier Ijaz Shah, who went on to become the Punjab Home Secretary and director of Intelligence Bureau.

HuA and several of its front organisations, including al Faran, launched a wave of killings and abductions in the valley. In 1994, the group issued open threats to disrupt the Amarnath Yatra and carried out bomb attacks in Jammu, killing at least 20 pilgrims. These incidents led the US to ban HuA (1997), provoking the ISI to engineer a burst of violence before dissolving the group to form Jaish-e-Mohammad in January 2000, a few weeks after the IC-814 Indian Airlines hijacking and release of passengers in Kandahar in exchange for Syed Omar Sheikh, Maulana Masood Azhar, (who became the leader) of JeM and Mushtaq Zargar.

To be continued...