Shopian: Late most afternoons, nine-year-old Jazim Farooq Wani would skip past the lush fruit orchards studded along the Rambiara river in the small south Kashmir village of Shirmal to play cricket at the Domawani ground, or join older children throwing rocks at the police along the Srinagar-Shopian road.
The killing of jihad icon Burhan Wani in 2016 had unleashed an Islamist-led uprising which swept the Indian state out of southern Kashmir: Locals called it “Azaadi”, or Freedom.
Then, the season of revolt, as historian Chitralekha Zutshi called it, came to an end. Kashmir became a Union Territory, lost its special status, and the protests were crushed. The gaggles of stone-throwing protesters, who had once staged Pakistan Day marches, disappeared into prisons.
Last month, just after his 15th birthday, Jazim Farooq slipped out of his home to become a child soldier fighting with the Lashkar-e-Toiba. He was one of just three volunteers who the police have told ThePrint are known to have joined a jihadist group this year so far. Last year, 26 new recruits were estimated to have joined to replace the 193 jihadists killed in combat, according to people aware of the matter.
Farooq Wani, Jazim Farooq’s father and an assistant sub-inspector serving with the Jammu and Kashmir Police, reported his son missing at the local police station on 28 February, records show. “There must have been some people who misguided him,” Farooq says quietly, “and I pray every day that he comes back home.”
Also read: Was Jamia youth held for ‘IS fundraising’ goaded by Syria girl? NIA probe finds ‘romantic angle’
A jihadist genesis
Like the stories of so many young jihadists, Jazim Farooq’s story lies at the cusp of ideology, family dysfunction, and teenage rage. Educated up to Class 10 at a small private school in Zainapora, Jazim Farooq’s life was shaped by the growing rift between his parents. Farooq Wani left the village home three years ago after years of arguments with his wife Fahmida Begum, according to family members. Though the couple did not divorce, Farooq built a small premises of his own on the edge of the family plot, they added.
Family members told ThePrint the children sided with their mother. The older sons, university-educated construction contractor Sheezan Wani, and university students Zeeshan Farooq and Zamin Farooq, still maintained some relationship with their father. The youngest, though, stopped talking to Farooq.
To friends, family members said on condition of anonymity, Jazim began expressing hatred for his father and the police force, and the Indian state. He began spending growing amounts of time in the home of his paternal uncle, Ghulam Muhammad Wani, also a retired police officer.
Like Wani, much of the family’s patriarchs were made up of a generation that became adults before the long jihad began in 1988-1989, and had clawed their way into government jobs and social respectability. The oldest maternal uncle, Bilal Wani, is a successful construction contractor, while Ma’arifat Wani has an administrative job at the Kashmir University.
The child soldier would reject not just his father, but the system of values and loyalties of this emerging middle class in Kashmir, choosing a darker personal trajectory, a family member said, asking not to be named.
Fathers and sons
Ghulam Muhammad Wani’s son, Adil Husain Wani grew up in the shadow of the series of Islamist-led youth uprisings which had begun in 2010. He would often take his cousin along to watch older youth who would sometimes compete to aim catapults to the most damaging effect. The mobs drew large numbers of children from dysfunctional homes, police say, as well as small-time criminals, the poor and the unemployed.
The neo-fundamentalist Ahl-e-Hadith movement and the Jama’at-e-Islami party, committed to creating an Islamic State, had laid down deep roots in the region from the 1940s on, scholar Yoginder Sikand has recorded. The Jama’at preached that Hindu-dominated India posed an existential threat not just to Kashmiris, but Islam itself.
Emerging in opposition to the National Conference, the Jam’at laid Islamist networks that made southern Kashmir the heartland of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, and later the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad.
Like many of the region’s teenagers, Adil joined stone-throwing mobs battling the police, and processions hailing slain jihadists. The processions died out after 2019, though, after the police began making large-scale arrests, and moving key protest leaders to prisons outside the state.
When it became clear that there was no prospect of a mass movement overthrowing India after Kashmir’s special status was revoked, he joined the Lashkar, and disappeared into Pir Panjal mountain ranges early in the summer of 2020, a person aware of the matter said.
His heroes were an earlier generation of local jihadists from the Shirmal-Heff belt: Saddam Padder, the last survivor of Burhan Wani’s group, who was killed in 2018, his fellow jihadist Bilal Molvi, laid to rest by frenzied supporters after 18 rounds of funeral prayers, or top al-Badr commander Zeenat-ul-Islam, a top recruiter. Hizb-ul-Mujahideen jihadist Shamsul Inam Mengnoo, the brother of an Indian Police Service officer, was another social-media star from the region.
Last jihadists?
For much of 2019 — cut off from weapons and explosives after the Pakistani intelligence services choked off support for Kashmiri jihadists under international pressure — Adil’s group hid out in the region’s hills, occasionally emerging to stage assassinations of migrant workers or government officials, people quoted above said. Last year in October, though, Adil was shot dead by the police at the hamlet of Dragad, not far from Zainapora.
Jazim raged for a while, a family member told ThePrint, and then decided to follow in his cousin’s footsteps. He contacted his brother’s associates in the Lashkar. Late one night last month, investigators say, he turned off his phone, and disappeared into the hills with local Danish Hameed Thoker and Ubaid Ahmad Padder.
The three jihadists are known to have just two, perhaps one, gun among them, intelligence sources say: A weapon used to shoot dead local Kashmiri Pandit resident Purna Krishan Bhat in October. “It is a matter of weeks or months before these kids end up dead, too,” a police officer said.
Even as the jihad began to be ground down in 2003, when General Pervez Musharraf’s regime first began cutting support for Kashmiri groups, outfits such as the Lashkar had turned to large-scale recruitment of child soldiers. A large numbers of teenagers were press-ganged to work as cooks, cleaners, porters and guides, and the best taken across the Line of Control for training.
Families with low incomes sometimes supported their children going, seeing it as one less mouth to feed and support, police officers recall.
Tens of teenagers were suspected to be among terrorists killed at Khari Dhoke in 2003, when the Indian Army began counter-offensive sweeps of jihadist encampments in the mountains around Surankote, south-west of southern Kashmir
For more than a decade after that, jihadist recruitment among young people fell — thousands drifted instead into violent Islamist-led street movements.
(Edited by Nisheeth Upadhyay)
Also read: Kashmiri jihad has disappeared. Its only hope now is for New Delhi to make big mistakes