New Delhi: Five explosions, four near-synchronous and a fifth after a gap, targeted the Jama-e-Masjid Subhanallah headquarters in Pakistan’s Bahawalpur, used by the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s top leadership to plot multiple attacks against India, including the 2019 bombing of Indian troops in Pulwama, sources living in the city told ThePrint.
The Indian precision attacks, carried out before dawn Wednesday, also targeted buildings in the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s headquarters at Muridke, outside Lahore.
For the most part, two local residents told ThePrint that the Bahawalpur seminary complex had been evacuated by authorities over the weekend, anticipating a possible attack.
“I woke up thinking someone was trying to kick my door in,” the Bahawalpur resident said. “Then, I ran outside and saw the fire.” He added that local authorities had shut down the road running past the seminary after the attack.
The victims in Tuesday night’s attack, the witness said, included some individuals from a slum at the nearby Bahawalpur-Samasatta railway line, who had gathered after seeing the first explosions. A video circulating on social media shows a number of residents gathering to film the fires at the complex.
A Lahore resident said explosions had been heard in Muridke but not in the immediate vicinity of the city.
Following the 2019 suicide bomb attack in Pulwama, Pakistan had announced that it was taking over the administration of the Bahawalpur complex. Later, however, Bahawalpur deputy commissioner Shahzaib Saeed told visiting journalists that it was just a “routine seminary having no links with the Jaish-e-Mohammad”.
According to Pakistan’s counter-terrorism authority, the Jaish has been proscribed since 2002. Gun-wielding guards of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, however, continued to control entry and exit points.
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Kashmir jihadist nursery
Founded in March 2008 on a nine-acre plot purchased by fugitive Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar Alvi, Jama-e-Masjid Subhanallah was built as an alternative to the organisation’s mosque and office complex in the heart of Bahawalpur, Masjid Usman-o-Ali.
Local records show the land was sold to Masood Azhar’s brother and Jaish military chief Abdul Rauf Asghar Alvi for a nominal 15,00,000 Pakistani rupees. The complex included a swimming pool, a seminary, and residential buildings.
A photograph obtained by ThePrint shows the men involved in the Pulwama operation—Muhammad Umar Farooq, Talha Rasheed Alvi, Muhammad Ismail Alvi, and Rasheed Billa—relaxing in the swimming pool before the attack in the shade of a mango grove.
For decades, the Jaish-e-Mohammad used its network of seminaries to trawl southern Punjab’s economic underclass for recruits, promising religious salvation in return for the sacrifice of sons. The mother of one such fidayeen, Imran Majid Butt, wrote this poem: “I wait for the day, O’Allah, when you will call out: ‘Who is the mother of this blood-drenched rose?’”
The Jaish carried out the first suicide bombing in Kashmir in April 2000, using Srinagar resident Afaq Ahmad Shah to drive an explosives-laden car into the headquarters of the Army’s XV Corps in Srinagar.
Following India’s cross-Line of Control strikes in 2016—in response to an attack on the 12 Brigade Headquarters near Uri—the Jaish was used as an instrument to demonstrate that the strike had not deterred the Pakistani military.
The months that followed saw multiple Jaish-e-Mohammad strikes, notably at Pulwama in August 2017 and in Srinagar’s Humhama in October that year. In December, teenage fidayeen suicide-squad Fardeen Khanday and 21-year-old Manzoor Baba struck again in Pulwama—the first known ethnic Kashmiris to have carried out such an operation.
Large numbers of ethnic Kashmiri youth were recruited into the ranks of the Jaish during the massive, Islamist-led protests that seized Kashmir in 2016, following the killing of jihadi social-media icon Burhan Wani. Flying flags and displaying weapons, Jaish cadre openly staged marches.
The conspirators charged by the National Investigation Agency for facilitating the Pulwama bombing—among them, Umar Farooq’s alleged girlfriend Insha Jan, Shakir Bashir, Waiz-ul-Islam, Muhammad Abbas Rather, Bilal Kuchay—were almost without exception drawn into the Jaish-e-Mohammad in the wake the 2016 uprising.
Ahmadpur-Sharqiya, another Bahawalpur-area village claimed by Pakistan to have been the target of an Indian strike, is less well-known than Muridke, but housed a large seminary, local residents told ThePrint.
Local Muhammad Yusuf, killed during a fidayeen operation in Kashmir on 6 June, 2001, is among the known graduates of the seminary.
Lashkar citadel
Lashkar-e-Taiba jihadists, meanwhile, continued to use their headquarters complex at Muridke, 30 km from Lahore, despite the outfit having been banned in 2002.
Last week, ThePrint revealed that the organisation’s leader Hafiz Abdul Rauf, an internationally-proscribed terrorist, was delivering speeches at the Lashkar-controlled Masjid Qadsia, in Lahore, and supervising the construction of a new building owned by the terrorist group in Rawalpindi.
A video on social media shows fires raging at the complex at Muridke, although it is unclear what building was hit. Like the Bahawalpur complex, the centre at Muridke was largely evacuated over the weekend.
“The Muslims ought not be strangers to wars, struggle, religious killing, fighting and battlefields, swords and arrows, blood and martyrdom,” Rauf told his audience at the Lahore mosque. “Allah’s companions are not scared of death, they seek it out.”
Like the Jaish-e-Mohammad seminary, the Lashkar facility at Muridke was placed under state administration. The organisation’s chief, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, was himself placed under house arrest. The action was driven by fear of sanctions by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the multinational organisation that monitors the compliance of governments with processes to cut off funding for terrorism.
Last summer, however, signs of Lashkar resurgence were evident. In April 2024, it held a public commemoration for terrorists Abdul Wahab, also known by the alias ‘Abu Saifullah’, and Sanam Jafar, who were killed days earlier by Indian forces near the town of Sopore in northern Kashmir.
The Lashkar’s operatives in Kashmir, recruited by the organisation’s seminaries across Punjab and Khyber-Paktunkhwa, are believed to receive military training in makeshift camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and in some cases across the border in Pakistan.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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