Pakistan’s foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi, may have admitted that the founder and chief of the terror group behind the Pulwama attack, Masood Azhar, is in Pakistan, but he conveniently forgot to mention that the entire family of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) emir is involved in terror operations — controlled from a swank second HQ at Bahawalpur in Punjab province that the group moved to in 2017.
According to the intelligence dossier provided to Pakistan by India after the latter’s preemptive strike on a Jaish camp in Balakot, Pakistan, the new HQ is located at Markaz Usman-o-Ali, Railway Link Road, Bahawalpur, officials in India’s intelligence establishment said, asking not to be identified.
The entire decision-making body of the Deobandi terrorist group functions from within the complex under the direct command of Maulana Masood Azhar. A rabid India hater, Azhar has not been seen in public since 2017 as he has a life-threatening condition of spinal cancer, but his is still the final word in his sprawling terror empire, the officials added.
The HQ is a huge, modern building, and used for special events and meetings by Azhar’s brothers, the operating chiefs responsible for terror strikes in both India and Pakistan, and also Afghanistan, according to the officials.
Masood Azhar, officials said, still lives in the first headquarters of the group.
{{/usCountry}}Masood Azhar, officials said, still lives in the first headquarters of the group.
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Azhar’s elder brother, Ibrahim Azhar, was the principal orchestrator of the hijacking in December 1999 of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar with the help of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence and the Taliban. India freed Masood Azhar and two other jailed militants in return for the passengers and crew taken hostage.
Ibrahim Azhar is involved in JeM’s Afghan operations in support of its ideological affiliate, the Taliban.
Ibrahim’s elder son Usman Hyder was killed on October 30, 2018 in Jammu & Kashmir’s Tral area, only 10 days after he infiltrated into the Kashmir Valley. Ibrahim’s younger son Umair is hiding in the Pulwama area today and there are desperate attempts being made to ex-filtrate him with Pakistani JeM terrorists engaging the Indian security forces almost on a daily basis. Pulwama is where, on February 14, a Jaish suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) men, killing at least 40 troopers.
Masood Azhar himself has two sons—Abdullah and Wali—and two daughters. Both the sons are involved in radicalising cadre for Islamic jihad in Kashmir.
Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar is another brother of Masood Azhar and the head of JeM’s operations against India. Rauf has four sons (the oldest is only 16), and two daughters.
Masood Azhar has two more brothers, also younger than him. Maulana Ammar and Talha Saif are both believed to be involved in the terror factory of JeM.
While Masood Azhar is believed to have lost his brother-in-law Yusuf Azhar in the Balakot strike, according to Indian intelligence officials, Talha Rasheed, the son of Azhar’s other brother-in-law Abdul Rasheed Kamran, was killed by Indian security forces in an encounter in Pulwama on November 6, 2017.
“Given his clout with the Taliban and the Rawalpindi GHQ, Masood Azhar is running terror camps in Balochistan and in the Taliban stronghold areas in Afghanistan around the Khyber and Spin Boldak passes for action on either side of Durand or Radcliffe lines,” said a senior Indian official.
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