New Delhi: Terrified, 13-year-old Akhar Ali Bakkarwal gave his name and address, had handed over his most prized possession: A hand-me-down Android touchscreen phone that he used to peer into the world lost to him when he’d failed his eighth-grade exams and was put to work grazing the family’s sheep. The three men—wearing black clothes with rucksacks slung over their backs and armed with American military-issue M4 rifles—didn’t look like sheep rustlers or bandits, though.
Their own network-less phone, investigators believe, used Akhar’s internet service and a secure messaging app to send an encrypted message to commanders across the border, reporting their safe arrival. Then, the men retreated, leaving Rs 500 behind for Akhar to recharge his phone.
The messages likely reached a commanding officer at a more than 1,000-acre seminary complex that has grown up near the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s Umm-ul-Qura seminary complex outside Bahawalpur, Pakistan. Eyewitnesses’ testimony provided to ThePrint shows the complex has new multi-storey buildings, perhaps for housing recruits, and what seems like a giant administrative headquarters.
Earlier this week, Indian Army’s Lance Naik Praveen Sharma and Havildar Dipak Kumar Yadav, backing up a Major-rank officer, were shot dead on a ridge above the high-altitude meadow of Gagarmandu, leading up from Ahlan Bala into the high ranges. The two men, an officer present during the operation says, were picked off with precision, the shots from hundreds of metres away, when they moved to find a location from which their observation might be better.
A civilian was also killed and another injured in the chaos that followed.
The men may have been drawn from the 28 Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists, whom Akhar’s step-uncle Haji Muhammad Lateef is now accused of guiding from Kathua to the Pir Panjal mountains. The case has given police and intelligence services their first hard insights into the new Jaish-e-Mohammad campaign, which has brought in up to 150 jihadists—veterans of the Taliban war against the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Afghanistan and well-aware of the importance of communications security.
After their arrival in Kathua, the terrorists used the hotspot on the BSNL 5G network, which powered Akhar’s phone, to connect their own device to the internet; They likely sent messages through one of dozens of open-source apps offering robust asymmetric key encryption. There have also been reports of similar satellite-based communications systems being used in areas where there is no mobile phone signal.
Late that afternoon in February, Lateef arrived to console the traumatised child, a police officer familiar with the case told ThePrint. Lateef had brought several chapatis together with a large tin of dal to power the jihadists along their long hike up the Bilawar Darya, or mountain river, into Udhampur and the Pir Panjal mountains
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Lethal warfare
Fighting in the high mountains has underlined the need for human intelligence: The information that comes from spies who work with jihadists, observe their movements and can pass on real-time information. In Ahlan, a source told police that a Jaish-e-Mohammad operative had asked him to recharge a run-down battery, possibly used to power a satellite communication unit. The forces knew the battery would be brought back to a rendezvous near Hera Ahlan, the upper part of the hamlet.
This information was used by the Indian Army to place ambushes over three key meadows above Kokernag—Rayhalmandu, Gagarmandu and Kanzalmandu. The terrorists detected one of those ambushes, though, and succeeded in sniping the two fallen soldiers. Then, they disappeared into the woods, using tactics that are often helpful in evading drone surveillance.
Estimates for the number of Jaish-e-Mohammad jihadists, who have entered Jammu and Kashmir through Samba and Kathua, vary from 100 to 150. Though some technical evidence becomes available when jihadists use satellite phones, intelligence sources say, there’s rarely enough to launch operations into the brutal mountain terrain. Five soldiers from a special forces unit were killed after a satellite phone was switched with the specific intent of luring them into an ambush.
“They’re sitting on the hills, challenging us to make our way up to them. We respond in numbers, which gives them time to disperse, blend into the Gujjar-Bakkarwal communities in the hills, and then disappear,” says a senior police officer operating in southern Kashmir.
A second encounter, in Chattargul, at over 12,000 feet, was again enabled by human intelligence, who saw a dozen jihadists hiding out in the meadows. Troops took two days to reach the region. Five were injured in the first fire-engagement with troops, but the soldiers retaliated by killing two terrorists.
When specific intelligence has been lacking, the results have often been tragic. Ten Indian soldiers were killed in related operations in Doda’s Deesa area in June, and in Kathua.
In November last year, five soldiers—Captain M.V. Pranjal, Captain Shubham Gupta, Havaldar Abdul Majid, Lance Naik Sanjay Bisht, and Special Forces officer Sachin Laur—were martyred at Rajouri, killing two terrorists in turn.
The jihadists who carried out the execution-style killing of five soldiers in a tent at Chamrer in 2021 and a strike on Hindu pilgrims at Shiv Khori have not been located.
From testimony allegedly provided by Lateef—which cannot be used as evidence for the purposes of his criminal trial—investigators say they have gained new insights into the discipline of the new Jaish-e-Mohammad jihadists.
The small units maintain almost no contact with each other, and rarely visit the high-altitude mountain Dhokes housing Gujjar and Bakkarwal nomads more than once a month. There is no extended interaction with the community.
Local guides carefully vetted by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) are told to procure essential supplies, and leave them at pre-decided dump-sites.
Islamabad restrained jihadist groups after 2019, in return for emerging from a multinational terror-finance watchlist. The gloves seem to have come back on, the massive expansion of the Umm-ul-Qura facility suggests. The Jaish-e-Muhamamad has even been staging rallies in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
Forgotten lessons
Lessons learned in the late 1990s, when Indian forces first began to engage jihadists on the high mountains, seem to have been forgotten. A large-scale offensive against jihadists in the Hill Kaka region succeeded because it was spearheaded by large numbers of local militia recruited as Special Police Officers (SPOs). Though salaries were often as low as Rs 3,000 a month, the SPOs were promised they would be inducted as regular police if they demonstrated good counter-terrorism results.
“Things got a bit out of hand sometimes,” a police officer involved in the operations of Hill Kaka’s so-called Special Group Three recalls. “We had a couple of incidents of our Gujjar SPOs bringing in severed heads of terrorists to prove they’d made a kill.”
For all practical purposes, though, the Special Groups—and their police counterparts, the Special Operations Groups—were shut down in 2019, after Kashmir lost its special constitutional status. Among claims of large-scale corruption, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) directed that only the Director-General of Police could appoint SPOs. The MHA also began insisting SPOs could only be hired from among the people, who met the physical and educational eligibility criteria of regular police
Today, the Jammu and Kashmir Police is unable to fill the 4,500-odd vacant posts from among its 32,000 SPOs—resources desperately needed in the hills. To make things worse, hundreds of SPOs promised regular jobs for their performance are still waiting.
A key error made after 2019, senior police officials say, was weakening the powers of Superintendents of Police. The post-2019 reforms meant district-level police chiefs in charge of operations could not independently reward individuals, who showed exceptional success at executing counter-insurgency operations.
Efforts to control the flow of cash—once liberally handed out in return for successful operations—also choked on the government’s anti-corruption efforts, some Kashmir police officers argue. The police began making electronic payments to SPOs, many of whom were less than enthused about having a permanent record of their earnings. In some cases, cheques were issued to reward sources and police personnel for operations. This introduced long delays and bottlenecks in the system—as well as the risk of future exposure.
“The war in the Pir Panjal doesn’t need more gadgets, it needs small units drawn from local communities who can take on the jihadists in terrain they are familiar with,” a senior police officer says. “These kinds of highly-kinetic operations can’t be handled by bureaucrats sitting at police headquarters, let alone the Ministry of Home Affairs.”
Later this year, as the snows set in on the mountains, terrorists on the Pir Panjal will have to move closer to inhabited areas. That could mean more strikes on civilians and security force personnel in the Kashmir Valley, as well as Jammu.
“Ever since Pulwama,” an intelligence officer says, “Pakistan has pretty much held its hand. They haven’t sent 150 highly-trained fighters to sit around on the hills, and we should really think through what might lie ahead.”
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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