As Far As The Saffron Fields: The Pulwama Conspiracy

By Danesh Rana

In March 2019, two militants were killed during a siege at a house in Nowgam, on the outskirts of Srinagar. One of them was known simply as 'Idrees Bhai'. The encounter was forgotten for the most part, until investigators came upon a mangled phone that had been destroyed by Idrees Bhai. When the Samsung smartphone began to reveal its secrets, investigators realized they had hit upon a motherlode. For, Idrees Bhai was none other than Umar Farooq Alvi, the mastermind of the Pulwama suicide attack of February 2019 which had killed forty CRPF personnel, the deadliest terror attack on Indian security forces since 1989.

Now, for the first time, serving IPS officer Danesh Rana meticulously pieces together the conspiracy behind the attack. Based upon personal interviews with the protagonists, police chargesheets and other evidence, Rana breaks down the modern face of militancy in Kashmir, fuelled by highly motivated young Kashmiris who have taken on the mantle of bringing down the Indian state.

This is the story of a state in conflict, told through the story of a single terror attack. Piecing together the stories of several actors - from Umar the boy-wonder insurgent to Insha, the love of his life; from Adil Dar, the man who rammed a van full of explosives into the CRPF bus to Head Constable Jaimal Singh, the driver of that ill-fated bus - As Far as the Saffron Fields is by far the most definitive book on the Pulwama attack, going where no book on the Kashmir conflict has gone before. This is war at its worst, tearing apart families and dreams, leaving only mangled bodies and phones behind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Mar 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9789354895432

Danesh Rana

Danesh Rana is a servingIndian Police Service (IPS) officer of the Jammu and Kashmir cadre. He iscurrently ADGP – Coordination, PHQ, Jammu and Kashmir. He is the author of Red Maize (2015), which was awarded theTata Literature Live First Book Award, Fiction.

Book preview

1

A Dead Phone Rings

29 March 2019

Had the investigators not recovered a mangled phone from a house in Nowgam, on the outskirts of Srinagar, they would perhaps not have known much about the Lethpora bombing, now known as the Pulwama attack that killed forty CRPF personnel and nearly sent India and Pakistan to war.

Nowgam, or ‘new village’, is a large settlement of clustered hamlets between Budgam and Srinagar districts that sprawls on both sides of the road connecting Srinagar with Baramulla. The majority of its residents settled here in the 1990s, after the spike in armed insurgency—especially in the restive north Kashmir region—necessitated migration from rural areas. In later years, people from south Kashmir too began to shift here. This is why we can see a mix of incongruous distinctive social and economic classes in Nowgam today, the red or green sloping roofs of the richer residents’ palatial houses sitting alongside the modest dwellings of the not-so-wealthy.

The hamlet of Suthsoo Kalan sits at the far end of Nowgam. This settlement is primarily inhabited by Shia Muslims, and has more or less remained indifferent to the long conflict that has lingered all around. Only in the month of Muharram, when the men of the village, both old and young, gather at the Imambara to mourn Hussein ibn Ali and his family, does it come into prominence. During this time, young men roll up their trousers and walk briskly across a pitch of burning coals in a ritual known as Naar Matam, or ‘mourning of the fire’, to beg forgiveness for the martyrs of Karbala.¹ The village’s narrow alleys are dotted with grocery shops, bakeries, small pharmacies and barber shops.

One night, forty-three days after the Lethpora blast, security forces began to lay siege to Suthsoo Kalan.

The late Ghulam Ahmad Ganie’s family was among the few Sunni families living in Suthsoo Kalan. A farmer by profession, Ganie had toiled hard to raise his four children. His two-storey house stood by itself, as if it had been ostracized. It was secured by a wall on three sides, the back wall partially consisting of conjoined tin sheets. The house had not been painted from the outside, and the plastered walls gave the impression it was still under construction. The ground floor stood on a concrete plinth and opened up to a lawn with an arborvitae plant right at the centre. The lawn extended towards the street. To its left was a kitchen garden, which seemed part of the mustard field behind the house. White flowers blossomed on the almond trees behind the mustard field.

Ganie’s eldest son, who worked in the state Public Health Engineering Department, lived on the first floor with his wife and children. Another son worked as a labourer in the paddy fields and fruit orchards. The youngest, twenty-six-year-old Fayaz Ahmad Ganie, had dropped out of school and worked as a labourer, like his elder brother. In due course, he saved some money and, aided by a bank loan, bought a freight carrier. But Fayaz had another side to him.

By virtue of being on the highway, Nowgam is easily accessible to terrorists who come in from the districts of north Kashmir. To the west of Nowgam is a maze of roads coming in from Pulwama and Budgam districts, therefore rendering the place approachable from both north and south Kashmir. This makes it one of the safe pads from which to launch attacks on the highway and Srinagar city. The militants find support from some of the locals, which is ideological, coercive and influenced by monetary considerations, all in equal measure.

One of these Nowgam locals was Fayaz, who came in contact with operatives of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM)², ‘the Party of the Holy Warriors’. He was slowly motivated to work for the proscribed organization as an overground worker (OGW), collectively referred to as ‘uppers’ by militants.

In Kashmir, drivers, cleaners, truck owners and taxi operators are considered to be high-quality assets that militants look to recruit and induct into their organizations. One of the reasons the conflict has sustained itself for so long is the formidable network of OGWs, who extend logistical support to insurgents. Though fully involved in furthering the conflict, these OGWs remain in public and deceptively indulge in subversive activities by sheltering, aiding and providing information to militants about the movement of security forces.

After his initiation into the organization, Fayaz started running small errands for HM and soon found himself getting sucked deeper into the quagmire. He was tasked with sheltering terrorists in his house from time to time. On one such night, three terrorists came to his house unannounced.

The stillness of the night was occasionally broken by dogs barking when security forces quietly laid a cordon around Fayaz’s house, plugging the outer lanes and approach roads to prevent anyone from escaping.

Perhaps the hiding terrorists had got an inkling of the siege, or perhaps they simply surrendered to their fate once they knew about the security forces, but they hurriedly got up from their blankets and prepared to escape. It is not clear whether one of the three, Sameer Dar from Gundibagh, Pulwama, was on lookout duty. Nonetheless, Sameer ran to the right of the house, from where he hurled a grenade into the backstreet, scaled up the wall, landed in the mustard field and disappeared among the almond trees.

One of the remaining two terrorists called up Bahawalpur in Pakistan several times, but at that hour no one answered. ‘Allah protect us. We have been found out,’ he murmured, fear dripping from his face. ‘Try to break the cordon and don’t stay put in the house,’ he told his mate. ‘And break that damn phone of yours. Do it now,’ he said, repeating, ‘Destroy your phone.’ Both of them fished out their phones and smashed them on the floor several times. The OLED display, batteries and phone sets were destroyed. Gone with them were photographs, numerous selfies, text messages, saved YouTube videos and voice notes.

The two then tried to break through the front of the house, immediately coming under the shooting arc of the security forces, who had already taken up positions on the house’s three sides. The first round of gunfire felled one of the terrorists who sprinted out into the street. The bullet pierced his head, and he dropped dead near a drain. The other hid behind the arborvitae shrub, looking for a chance to scamper through the bushes and flower beds to safety. Fayaz, meanwhile, peered out from a window and saw the second terrorist cowering behind the shrub. As the man crawled away, he tossed a grenade into the street, but was pinned down by machine-gun fire that strafed the house from three sides. Shot in the arm and stomach, the terrorist lay dead. ‘Khodoyah,’ Fayaz gasped, then murmured a prayer, ‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un (Indeed, to Allah we belong and to Allah we shall return).’

The gunfight lasted barely a few minutes. When the firing stopped, the fearful silence was broken by para bombs that illuminated the night and lit up Fayaz’s house, as well as the mustard fields and almond trees. A few minutes later, a searchlight’s powerful beam scanned the surroundings and fell on the bodies of the two dead men, their weapons glinting. The outer cordon was tightened and the wait for first light began.

The muezzin’s fading call for the fajr namaz, the first prayer of the day, signalled a new dawn. The two bodies were now clearly visible. The second militant, the one who had hidden behind the arborvitae shrub, wore blue jeans and a brown leather belt. Blood and dirt now covered his blue sports jacket as he lay prone on the ground. His right arm had been completely blown off under the elbow. The first militant, who lay near the drain, had been hit on the forehead, leaving his sparsely bearded face bloodied. His black tracksuit was now soiled with dust. His clothes and shoes, like his companion’s, were dishevelled.

Initial investigations identified the two dead terrorists as Ali Bhai and Idrees Bhai, both Pakistani nationals. The real identities of insurgents often remain shrouded behind their kunyahs—their adopted battle names, aliases or noms de guerre—such as Hamza, Qari, Ghazi, Huzaifah, Musa and Saifullah.

Further investigations revealed the identity of Ali Bhai—who had hidden behind the shrub—as Mohammad Kamran Ali, a dreaded terrorist on the most-wanted lists of Pulwama district police. In a photograph available with security forces, he wore a black fez, spectacles and a pheran, the Kashmiri cloak that falls well below the knees. He looked leaner in the picture, and now, with his life snuffed out, his body had grown stiffer and more fragile. His face was gaunt and his beard sucked up in his cheeks.

The Indian security forces were so elated to have discovered they had got Kamran that they did not even try to uncover the real identity of Idrees Bhai. It would be another nine months before the precious discovery of the mangled phone divulged the story of the twenty-three-year-old, whose real name was Muhammad Umar Farooq Alvi.³

The Last Week of December 1999

Umar would have been around three years old when his father, Mohammad Ibrahim Ather Alvi, masterminded the hijacking of IC-814, the Indian Airlines flight bringing the holidaying crowd from Kathmandu to Delhi. Code-named ‘Chief’, Alvi had led a module of four other terrorists, who carried the aliases of Burger, Doctor, Shankar and Bhola, the latter two named after the Hindu god Shiva.⁴ These operatives of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM)⁵, ‘the Order of Holy Warriors’, had entered Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu with concealed guns and sharp-edged weapons and boarded the aircraft before hijacking it mid-air.

After hopping among the Amritsar, Lahore and Dubai airports, the flight was finally diverted to Kandahar province in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The Indian government was well aware of how serious the crisis was after the aircraft took off from Amritsar airport without refuelling. After all, aircraft are most vulnerable in air and safest on land. When the plane was refused permission to land at Lahore, the flight was diverted to Dubai, where twenty-seven hostages—mostly older passengers, children and those taken ill—were released. The hijackers also released the body of Rupin Katyal from Gurgaon, Haryana, who was returning from his honeymoon in Kathmandu. Katyal had been taken to the executive section, tied to a seat and stabbed several times while his wife waited anxiously for his return to economy class.

The world was getting ready to welcome the new millennium when the plane landed at Kandahar. The small airport had just two rooms and a toilet, and departures and arrivals were conducted from the same terminal. Overlooking the rugged Sulaiman range, the Kandahar airport had been built by the Americans in the 1960s as a base for their sorties to thwart the growing influence of the Soviet Union in the region. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they took over the airport. The military crisis, therefore, wasn’t a new occurrence at the airport, which had witnessed operations from the time of the Americans and the Russians, all the way to the upheaval of Najibullah’s communist regime, that of a few local warlords and now the Taliban.

Soon, pictures of the hijacked aircraft were all over the world, with its vertical orange stabilizer looking pale in the harsh Afghan sun. Gun-wielding Taliban cadres, wearing black turbans and traditional perahans, circled the aircraft in their Toyota pickup trucks. The Taliban had ostensibly bargained hard for a deal between Indian authorities and the hijackers, but as the talks panned out, they seemed to be part of the plan. For the safety of her citizens held hostage, India agreed to release three terrorists, one each from Central Jail, Srinagar, Kot Bhalwal Jail, Jammu, and Tihar Jail, New Delhi. The next day, the three were flown to Kandahar on an Indian plane.

One of the three released prisoners was Ather Alvi’s younger brother, Maulana Masood Azhar Alvi, Islamic scholar, firebrand speaker and fundraiser for HuM, and the chief editor of a magazine. He came from Kausar Colony, Model Town, in Bahawalpur district of Punjab province in Pakistan.

Situated on the banks of the Sutlej, the rugged old town of Bahawalpur was once famous for its cotton and silk, the quality of which, locals said, matched up to that of the famed Benares silk. After British colonialism ended, this princely state, once ruled by the Abbassis, acceded to Pakistan. Surviving the displaced chaos of the bloody Partition, most Hindu and Sikh residents migrated to India, while many Muslim refugees from India settled here. As a result, the town’s demography turned predominantly Sunni Muslim, and was fuelled by the conservative Deobandi school of Islamic thought. Bahawalpur soon had numerous mosques and madrasas—Islamic religious schools—and now it was set to become the biggest seminary of terror. Maulana Masood Azhar Alvi would become its chief, emir, high priest and pontiff.

Masood Azhar was the most prodigious among Master Allahbaksh Sabir Alvi’s twelve children. Master Alvi was a religious teacher of great repute who had retired as headmaster of a government school. He also owned tracts of land and a poultry farm. Azhar studied in a government school in Bahawalpur till the seventh standard, and thereafter was sent to his maternal uncle in Rahim Yar Khan in Punjab province, where he studied for a year. He then enrolled in Jamia Islamia, Karachi, from where he acquired a degree in Alima, the equivalent of a master’s in Islamic studies. Jamia Islamia was a place of great debate and learning, with a rich confluence of students from Zambia, Sudan, the Middle East, South Africa and Bangladesh, as well as Pakistanis drawn from various cities and towns. After finishing his studies, Azhar taught there for three years. It was at this time that he came in contact with Maulana Fazal-ul-Rehman-Khalil, a resident of Dera Ismail Khan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, who was also the chief of HuM, which at the time was engaged in jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Maulana Fazal invited Azhar to join HuM, and sent him for a forty-day military training to a camp in Yawar, Afghanistan, where he met Sajjad Afghani, a militant from Rawalakot in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Sajjad had been named ‘Afghani’ because of his ‘military laurels’ in Afghanistan. Destiny would reunite them in 1994, when they would meet in Kashmir to galvanize jihad against India.

Masood Azhar was a man of short stature with a protruding belly. Due to his girth and lack of motivation, he was a misfit at the training camp and quit it after a week. Some have said he was a coward and did not have the courage to hold a gun. But Maulana Fazal would not let go of him easily. Impressed by his knowledge of Islam, he asked Azhar to start a monthly magazine to expand the influence of HuM. As the chief editor of Sada i Mujahid, or ‘Voice of Mujahid’, with its offices near Bilal Masjid in Karachi, Azhar extensively extolled the virtues of a brand of Islam that eventually led to the final path of jihad, which in this case meant waging an armed holy war. His magazine also became a mouthpiece to collect funds to strengthen and equip HuM with weaponry and train its cadres. Copies of it were initially distributed free of cost in various mosques around Karachi after Friday prayers.

In 1991, Masood Azhar accompanied Maulana Fazal to Zambia, where they met the ulema and delivered sermons at the main mosque in the capital city of Lusaka. In the years that followed, Azhar travelled extensively to the UAE, Sudan, Kenya, Somalia, Albania and the UK to spread the reach of HuM and collect funds. Finally, in 1994, he was tasked with travelling to Kashmir to invigorate the cadres and unite various militant outfits under the umbrella of Harkat-ul-Ansar. But his Pakistani passport would have been an impediment in travelling to India, and so, with the help of a few Muslim clerics in the UK, Azhar managed to acquire a fake Portuguese passport and an identity under the name of Wali Adam Issa.

On a cold day in January 1994, attired in a Western-style suit, Masood Azhar landed in Delhi from Dhaka, Bangladesh. The immigration officer on duty looked at him for a long time and said, ‘You don’t look Portuguese.’ Azhar replied, ‘I am a Gujarati Muslim, and am currently doing business in Lisbon.’

The officer stamped his passport. Masood Azhar then hailed a taxi and checked into Hotel Ashoka in Chanakyapuri, the hub of India’s political, bureaucratic, military and diplomatic elite. He got in touch with Ashraf Dar, a Kashmiri carpet trader, who came to meet him at the hotel. The next day, Azhar accompanied Dar to the Deoband headquarters in Saharanpur, where they met the local ulema and then drove to Jalalabad, near Muzaffarnagar, to pay obeisance at the grave of the great Deobandi scholar Maulana Massihullah Khan. After spending the night in a khanqha⁶ (a kind of rest house attached to a shrine) in Jalalabad, they returned to Delhi and checked into Janpath Hotel. Azhar then met some religious leaders and had detailed discussions with them over the next few days. Dar then took him to Hotel Usman in the Jama Masjid area, where he met some Pakistani militants who had secretly come to Delhi from Kashmir for medical treatment. From Nizamuddin market, Azhar bought a dozen compasses he intended to gift to the mujahideen in Kashmir. Perhaps he thought even the mujahid needed to follow the right direction. On 7 February, he took a night bus for Lucknow to meet some clerics who often travelled to Karachi and were known to him.

On the afternoon of 9 February, Masood Azhar and Ashraf Dar landed in dreary Srinagar, which still trembled in the winter chill. They were driven to the Qasmia Madrasa in Lal Bazar, where a room had been booked for Azhar. That evening, Sajjad Afghani, along with his deputy, came to meet him. About a year ago, Azhar had accompanied Afghani to Dhaka and facilitated his infiltration into India from Jessore in south-west Bangladesh. In the Srinagar meeting, Azhar learnt that the purpose of his visit had already been accomplished, as two warring factions of Pakistani militants operating in Kashmir had come together as Harkat-ul-Ansar, with Afghani as its head.

The next day, Afghani drove Azhar to Anantnag. On the way, a local militant named Farooq, who carried a wireless set and a gun, boarded the car. They reached the remote village of Matigund, high above Anantnag, and camped at a house. Later that evening, about twenty Pakistani militants who were camping in a nearby jungle came to the Matigund house to meet Azhar. In a fiery speech, Azhar explained the need for unity among the mujahideen, since everyone was fighting for the same goal of Kashmir’s liberation. He promised them more weapons and other logistics, and enquired about their welfare. He noted down their addresses back home and asked them to write letters to their families so that he could deliver their messages when he returned.⁷

But Azhar didn’t know he was not going home anytime soon. The next day, on the way back to Srinagar, their car ran out of fuel. Together with Afghani and Farooq, the militant who had hitched a ride with them, the trio got into an autorickshaw to bring back fuel from Khanabal, the location of the nearest petrol pump. When a passing army patrol waved at the autorickshaw, Farooq panicked and fired a few shots before escaping into the nearby alleyways. But Azhar and Afghani were both arrested and put under sustained interrogation. Subsequently, Ashraf Dar was also arrested in another raid in Srinagar and Azhar’s suitcase was seized. In it was his Portuguese passport, a pair of shoes, some clothes, a pair of spectacles, a diary, some American dollars and the twelve compasses he had bought as gifts.

Azhar and Afghani were finally lodged in Kot Bhalwal Jail on the outskirts of Jammu, where they would spend about five years. The jail is situated on an elevated ridge in the lopsided topography of Jammu. Pakistani prisoners here do not reconcile to their detention very easily because the border in Kanhachak sector is but a few kilometres away as the crow flies. In fact, at night, one can see the lit-up fence running straight along the border from the terrace of the administrative block. The distance, despite being so short, is in fact unsurmountable. ‘Nazran tu neede, kadma tu door’—so close to the eyes, but far from one’s reach, as the Pakistani poet Qateel Shifaai wrote about the border.

Inside the jail, Azhar was given a solitary cubicle with an Indian-style toilet and a cement platform to be used as a bed. During his imprisonment, he did not mingle much with other prisoners and remained confined to his cell, spending much of his time praying, reading newspapers and listening to a transistor. However, he became quite popular due to his scholarly leanings, oratory skills and his persona of a ‘maulana’. Muslims looked up to him for spiritual guidance and his understanding of Islam. He delivered Friday sermons in the jail mosque and even started to distribute amulets. And he would boast to his fellow prisoners and jail staff with arrogance, ‘I came to India on a plane. And one day, your government will send me back on a plane.’⁸

In July 1999, the foreign militants, led by Sajjad Afghani, planned a jailbreak. A 23-foot-deep tunnel was detected in one of the barracks, and, following a clash with the jail guards, a few prisoners, including Sajjad Afghani, were killed. Afghani is believed to be buried in a graveyard at Gujjar Nagar, Jammu.⁹ At the start of negotiations in the IC-814 hijacking, the terrorists had initially demanded the release of thirty-five inmates in different Indian jails, $200 million and the body of Sajjad Afghani.

The news of Masood Azhar’s release ushered pompous celebrations in his house, with his six sisters and five brothers bowing down in benediction to Allah, while the HuM cadres rejoiced by firing guns in the air. Once back in Pakistan, and with generous funding from Al Qaeda, Masood Azhar formed the jihadi organization Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), or ‘the Army of Mohammad’, in 2002. A majority of HuM members followed Azhar to JeM. The patronage of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the association with HuM, gave JeM ready access to training camps and other logistics.

After his release, Masood Azhar was everywhere. With his craggy beard, oval spectacles, a shawl thrown over his shoulders and his trademark black-and-white headgear, he became the new poster boy for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Pakistani Army. He was showcased in a victory tour through many parts of Pakistan. Resorting to his firebrand speeches, which were punctuated with Arabic quotations and invoked religious sentiments, he often mesmerized his followers and swayed them towards the ideology of jihad. The victory tour generated ample funds for the ‘tehreek-e-Kashmir’, or ‘the Movement of Kashmir’.¹⁰

In the following years, the JeM headquarters at Bahawalpur turned into a university for religious fundamentalism. Spread over 8 acres and located just a few kilometres from the Pakistani Army’s 31 Corps headquarters, the walled complex housed a training camp that also had a swimming pool and stables for its horses. Hundreds of children were enrolled in the imposing madrasa inside, where they were given religious education.

When it was conceived, JeM was a decentralized organization with Masood Azhar enjoying only nominal powers because of the presence of other top HuM commanders. However, by 2008, JeM had turned into a family enterprise, and Masood Azhar’s brothers, Abdul Rouf Asgar Alvi and Ammar Alvi, both held important positions and became his most trusted acolytes.

Muhammad Umar Farooq Alvi, who died beside the drain in Suthsoo Kalan, grew up in an environment where guns were displayed with pride and terror was manufactured as duty. He studied in a madrasa in Bahawalpur and mastered Islamic teachings. He wrote and spoke fluent Urdu and could converse in Multani, a dialect of Punjabi, and a bit of Pashto too.

In April 2016, his uncle, Ammar Alvi, sent Umar to train at an Al Qaeda camp in Sangin, in the deserts of Helmand in southern Afghanistan. The camp, funded by opium production, was established after the withdrawal of American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops from the restive Helmand province in mid-2013 after handing over power to Afghan forces. The camp was one of the most sophisticated in its training methodology, and catered to selective cadres belonging to the Taliban, the Al Qaeda and the Haqqani network.

A photograph available on the internet is believed to have been clicked at the camp. In it, Umar wears a dark brown Pathan suit and a half-sleeve camouflage jacket, and poses with an M-4 carbine mounted on a bipod. His hair is long, flowing on the sides of his shoulders; and he sports a beard and a well-twirled moustache that is as sharp as a dagger. He wears a maroon ajrak cap with intricate embroidery that is embedded with small mirrors, while its front arch just about exposes his forehead. The cap was perhaps gifted to him at the camp by a fellow mujahid, either from Sindh or Baluchistan.

In Sangin, Umar immersed himself further in Islamic studies. His resolve for jihad grew stronger. During his military training, he chose to master the study of explosives, the making of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and assembling vehicle-bound bombs. After watching a number of videos of Al Qaeda bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, he got interested in vehicle-bound IED (VBIED) blasts. He had closely followed the Taliban-sponsored car bomb in the highly secured diplomatic enclave in the Wazir Akbar Khan area of Kabul that housed the embassies of various countries.

The attack had been carried out in May 2017 during the holy month of Ramadan, a time marked by goodness, blessings and prayers. Around 9.30 a.m., Kabul was rattled by a loud explosion that threw plumes of black smoke in the air. The street was strewn with dead bodies and limbs, mangled metal and the charred remains of parked vehicles, their tyres totally burnt. The fortified Indian mission about a hundred metres away fortunately did not suffer any casualties in this attack, but its windowpanes lay shattered, just like at the embassies of Germany, Japan, Pakistan and a few other countries. The mayhem and shrieks following the blast fascinated Umar. Perhaps he promised himself he would replicate such carnage someday. In less than a year, he would unleash his learnings in their goriest form in Lethpora.

After completing his training and returning to Pakistan, Ammar Alvi took Umar to various trainings camps outside Bahawalpur to enable him to impart his bomb-making skills to other recruits.

5 February 2017

Pakistan observes 5 February as Kashmir Solidarity Day, a practice started in 1991 by the Jamaat-e-Islami, a socio-political-religious organization, which the government later endorsed by declaring it a national holiday. The day is marked by rallies, protests and processions in support of the ‘Kashmir Movement’ and pays homage to those killed in the uprising in different parts of the country in general, and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in particular. The day is pompously observed in Muzaffarabad, Bhimber, Rawalakot, Mirpur, Pallandari, Kahuta, etc. Fundraising exercises are organized and a clarion call for the ‘freedom’ of Kashmir resonates loudly: ‘Kashmir banega Pakistan (Kashmir will become part of Pakistan).’ The slogan is repeated to invigorate the people.

In 2017, a grand function was organized by JeM in a big compound in Karachi on Kashmir Solidarity Day. Several speakers gave provocative speeches, eulogizing the so-called bravery of Kashmiris for resisting what they called the ‘tyranny of an occupational force’, in front of a huge audience frenetically waving JeM flags and raising high-pitched slogans. One of the speakers was Masood Azhar, who, in his trademark black-and-white headgear, gave a fiery speech to justify jihad and enforce Allah’s providence of peace,