New Delhi: That morning, the gentle sting of September in the south Kashmir air, Khurshid Ahmad Ganie left for work as he always did, taking his bike from the small village of Maltalhama to the metal-shuttering factory he worked at in Dialgam. Lots of people claim to have seen him since, like some kind of evil spirit of the forest: In the Kund-Malwan forest of Kulgam, just in July, with two Pakistani terrorists; in the villages of Devpora-Padpawan in Shopian in April; in March, in Poshama, Kanjiullar, Adijen.
Each time, though, the man leading leading The Resistance Front—the terrorist group which claimed responsibility for the massacre on Baisaran Maidan, Pahalgam—has evaded police and army patrols. Last week, the TRF was designated an offshoot of the Lashkar-e-Taiba by the United States Treasury Department, meeting a long-standing Indian demand.
Ganie, who dropped out of the Government High School in Ashmuji after finishing eighth grade, is the Lashkar’s sole man standing in Kashmir—watching over a lean, mobile network designed to survive adversity—Indian intelligence sources believe.
Though India’s security establishment has taken some emotional comfort in the terror designation, intelligence officials who have spoken to ThePrint say they are also painfully aware of how anaemic their understanding of the TRF-LeT’s networks is. The digital communication systems used by jihadists in the mountains have proved hard to penetrate. There’s little information, too, on the networks of supporters who sustain the TRF-LeT’s combat units.
Even though growing numbers of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) units have been pumped in, and Director-General of Police Nalin Prabhat has ordered aggressive combat operations in the high forests, not a single TRF-LeT terrorist has been killed or captured in the weeks since the massacre. Levels of violence, data from the independent South Asia Terrorism Portal shows, remain similar to those seen in 2011-2012, long before India began using military force to retaliate against cross-border terrorism.
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The boss across the border
Fifty-one years old, according to government records seen by ThePrint, and a laboratory technician with qualifications from Kerala, who for a long time ran the Bhat Lab, performing bloodwork on the main road in Majgund, Sajjad Gul’s family hailed from the village of Ajas-Bandipora in northern Kashmir and migrated to Srinagar’s Nawa Bazaar in 1972. Later, they purchased a home on Rose Avenue near the Hindustan Machine Tools factory—the picture of urban upward mobility.
He was Educated at the prestigious Sri Partap College in Srinagar, and then at the Asia Pacific Institute of Management in Bengaluru, graduating in 1999. There is no record that he participated in terrorism-related activity during this period, according to a dossier maintained by police and accessed by ThePrint.
Late in 2002, though, Gul was arrested along with a friend from Pattan, Mehra-ud-Din, on charges of handling Hawala funds for an operation to carry out bombings in New Delhi, according to authorities. He spent 5 years in prison, the latter part of it in Srinagar before being released in 2007.
Again, in May 2016, he was arrested by police in Kashmir for the possession of two live grenades. Gul, however, succeeded in getting bail in March 2017, after prosecutors failed to produce a charge-sheet within the mandatory time.
Then, in 2017, Gul acquired a passport using false credentials and travelled across the Wagah border to Pakistan. From there, he began running an incendiary blog called Kashmir Fight, which slandered and threatened journalists he described as pro-Indian
Their most high-profile victim was newspaper editor Shuja’at Bukhari, who is believed to have been running an informal cross-Line of Control dialogue between Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen leadership in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
From 2018 to 2022, as Pakistan battled to have its name removed from a counter-terrorism sanctions list maintained by the multinational Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the TRF-LeT maintained a low profile. The organisation’s social media activities all but disappeared, and few gatherings were held. Late in 2022, however, as the sanctions threat waned, the LeT-TRF again began holding public events across Pakistan.
Last summer, Gul was suspected by Indian intelligence to have held a meeting with key TRF unit leaders in Keller forest, above Shopian. The precise nature of those instructions is unknown, but LeT-TRF units later staged a series of attacks, targeting both civilians and the Indian Army.
At around the same time, ThePrint had revealed, posters began appearing in Pakistani villages, announcing public commemorations of jihadists killed in Kashmir.
A continued terror push
From his new home in Rawalpindi, Gul proved adept at organising low-grade terrorist attacks in Srinagar, enough to signal to his audience that the LeT-TRF hadn’t given up the fight because of the FATF. A second-year commerce student at Srinagar’s Gandhi Memorial College, teenager Mehran Shalla was accused of executing the gangster-style point-blank executions of, among others, small-time Srinagar gangster and alleged police informant, Meeran Ali, police sub-inspector Arshad Ahmad Mir, and school-teachers Supinder Kaur and Deepak Chand.
In his spare time, Mehran worked for a courier firm, delivering packages across Srinagar’s old city. Like many of his peers, Mehran had become swept up in the street battles which pitted young Kashmiris against police after the killing of jihadist youth icon Burhan Wani. He seemed, however, to have left that life behind, two of his family members said to ThePrint last year.
Local commander Muhammad Abbas Sheikh—once a roadside tailor in the village of Qaimoh—was given charge of new TRF-LeT recruits like Mehran. Two of his other recruits, Manzoor Ahmad Mir and Arafat Ahmad Sheikh, both residents of Pulwama, were also teenage rioters and were killed along with Mehran, show police records.
Though Abbas Sheikh had never received intelligence tradecraft or weapons training across the Line of Control, he came from a family with impeccable jihadist credentials: Ibrahim Sheikh, Abbas’ oldest brother, had been killed in 1996 while serving with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, while another brother, Ibrahim Sheikh, would die 10 years later while fighting in the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Naseema Banu, Abbas’ oldest sister, had a son, Asif Sheikh, who was killed in 2008; Tauseef Sheikh, another sister, also joined the Lashkar, according to a police dossier maintained on Abbas Sheikh.
Abbas Sheikh was killed by police in August 2021, and the network was taken over by his lieutenant, Basit Dar. The 2005-born Basit Dar had also served time in jail for his role in the violence in 2016, and then ranked a small cooking-utensil store in the village of Redwani Payeen, near Kulgam. Educated at the Government Middle School in Redwani, Basit had dropped out of school after 8th grade.
He would be killed, in his turn, in 2024—leaving Khurshid Ahmad Ganie in charge.
Lashkar’s political strategy
Tight control of operations is maintained, though, by senior Lashkar operatives housed in Pakistan. The top military commander in charge of Kashmir, Indian intelligence officials believe, is Sajid Saifullah Jatt—also known by the nickname ‘Sajid Langda’ (or Lame Sajid). A native of the village of Changa Manga near Kasur, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, Sajid served in Kashmir from 2005-2007, and married a Kulgam woman, Shabbira Kuchay.
The couple’s son, Umar Raja Afaq—just an infant when his parents fled Kashmir through Nepal to Pakistan—continues to live with his maternal grandparents near Kulgam. Though he visited his parents’ home in 2009, he returned, evidently uncomfortable in the Punjabi-speaking milieu.
Lashkar leaders—using the name of its political proxy, the Pakistan Milli Muslim League, or Pakistan National Muslim League—had been regularly giving speeches promising violence against India even before the Baisaran Maidan attacks, ThePrint had reported. Following the 4-day war in May, Lashkar commanders like Faisal Nadeem and Abdul Rauf had made repeated public appearances.
The Lashkar’s strategy appears to be to rebuild the political conditions created a decade ago. Lashkar jihad commanders, like Sajid, had capitalised on a growing Islamist political current. In 2006, protestors targeted an alleged Srinagar sex-work ring, claiming it had been propped up by the Indian military. Then, the next year, the rape and murder of a Kashmir teenager provided Islamists with an opportunity to campaign against migrant workers, alleging they were part of an Indian plot to bring demographic change.
Early in 2008, an Anantnag schoolteacher was also attacked after a video of a group of his students dancing to pop music was circulated. In 2008, these mobilisations exploded, after the grant of land-use rights to the Amarnath shrine.
Islamist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani claimed there was a conspiracy to settle Hindus in the region. “I caution my nation,” he reportedly warned, “that if we don’t wake up in time, India and its stooges will succeed and we will be displaced”.
Even though Sajid had fled Kashmir, his successors grew into cult figures, operating unchallenged in rural areas. The burial of Bahawalpur-born Abdul Rehman, also known as Abu Qasim, drew tens of thousands; two villages fought pitched battles for the honour of burying him. His successor, Abu Dujanah—like Sajid, married to a local woman, Rukayyah Dar—appeared at the 2016 funeral of jihadist social-media icon Burhan Wani, to ecstatic applause.
This time, intelligence sources say, the Lashkar is banking on political tensions building up over the Government of India delaying the restoration of statehood, which the jihadists hope will precipitate a crisis between young people and the state. As this process unfolds, highly trained Lashkar operatives—many the highly-skilled veterans of battles against North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces in Afghanistan—will continue to harry Indian forces in the mountains of the Pir Panjal, occasionally staging strikes to mount pressure on the political system.
Even though India has made significant progress in integrating Kashmir with the wider national milieu, deep theocratic currents still run through the society.
In 1925, Sayyed Hussain Shah Batku, a Delhi seminary student carried the Lashkar’s foundational Ahl-e-Hadith sect to Kashmir in 1925, denouncing key practices of mainstream Islam in the State, such as the worship of shrines and veneration of relics, according to historian Chitralekha Zutshi’s book titled Languages of Belonging.
Along with his followers Anwar Shah Shopiani, Ghulam Nabi Mubaraki and Sabzar Khan, Batku attacked traditionalists for following practices tainted by their Hindu heritage, like the recitation of litanies before Namaaz.
“Look,” one senior Home Ministry official points out, “you can’t defeat terrorists by lobbing missiles once in a while, as the Americans learned in Afghanistan and Iraq. You have to be on the ground, armed with deep knowledge of the communities in which you are operating. And we just don’t have that today.”
“Ever since the Jammu and Kashmir Police cadre was merged with the Union Territory cadre,” one senior official said, “we haven’t really been able to develop a pool of young officers who are committed to long years of counter-terrorism work. The rank-and-file believe their Indian Police Service commanders will float in and out of the state, and thus don’t build the deep personal ties that are necessary for sustained intelligence work.”
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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