NEW DELHI: Masood Azhar, the head of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), responsible for the attack on the CRPF convoy, has had India in his sights for nearly three decades. He formed the terror organisation within a few months of his release at Kandahar on December 31, 1999. Azhar was flown to freedom in a special plane in exchange for the passengers on board an Indian passenger plane hijacked from Nepal.
REUTERS■ Soldiers examine the debris after a terrorist attacked a CRPF convoy in Pulwama on Thursday.
Azhar made his presence felt within a few months. On 20 April 2000, the JeM carried out the first suicide bombing in Kashmir, exploding a bomb in an Indian army barracks, killing five soldiers. Azhar, in fact, is the father of fidayeen attacks, and he has the dubious distinction of introducing them in the Valley where the gun first surfaced in 1989.
The second suicide attack was even bigger. On October 1, 2001, three Jaish militants carried out an attack on the Jammu and Kashmir state legislative assembly in Srinagar, using a Tata Sumo loaded with explosives. As many as 38 people were killed in an attack that shook the security establishment. Then too, the terror group claimed responsibility and named a Pakistani national Wajahat Hussain as the suicide bomber. In Thursday’s attack, Jaish named a local, home grown militant, who is believed to have rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into the CRPF convoy carrying as many as 2500 personnel.
The last big attack – the Jaish did not openly claim responsibility for this – was on the air force base in Pathankot in 2016. Phone calls made by the suicide bombers who infiltrated the high-security zone were tracked to the Jaish headquarter in Bahawalpur. The Narendra Modi government allowed a joint investigation team from Pakistan to visit Pathankot but according to the Dawn newspaper, the team concluded that India itself had staged the attack. The Pathankot attack led to cancellation of India-Pakistan talks and the two countries have had no formal engagement since.
Azhar first landed in India in 1994 on a fake Portuguese passport and few know that Srinagar was not the city he first went to. He chose Lucknow as his first stop after landing at Delhi’s international airport on January 29, 1994. Reaching Ayodhya was far more important because , according to his interrogation report, the demolition of the Babri Masjid was the spark that ignited his desire for jihad.
Protected by the deep state in Pakistan, Azhar is considered a big asset, who has escaped being proscribed by the United Nations Security Council because China has continually blocked moves to declare him a global terrorist. His terror group is also suspected to be behind the attack on an army camp in Uri that killed 19 army soldiers in 2016. The government retaliated through multiple surgical strikes across the line of control.