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GENERAL ELECTIONS

announcement was made by Global Is- zon to entire India. The objective of our
lamic Media Front, a media wing of Al But as Kashmir’s Al Qaeda chief,
Qaeda. Musa was hardly heard again. His oth- struggle is only and
In a press release issued both in Eng- erwise frequent audio messages died
lish and Urdu, Al Qaeda said that “a new down. Fewer militants joined the outfit only the glory of Islam
movement of jihad has been founded over the past two years and all of them and the implementation
by the companions of martyr Burhan were killed.
Wani under the leadership of Mujahid Incidentally, Musa was killed weeks of Shariah,” Musa
Zakir Musa (May Allah Almighty pro- after the killing of Ishfaq Ahmad Sofi, had said in an audio
tect him)”. the purported last militant of Islamic
In Kashmir, threat was not seen as State (IS). But despite Sofi’s killing, the message. He warned
operational but ideological. It was an IS claimed to have established a new that the militants would
attempt to fit Kashmir struggle into a “province” in Kashmir.
pan-Islamist frame and widen its hori- However, security agencies have brook no deviation
from this goal.

downplayed the claim, saying the IS in
Kashmir has no connection with the
global jihadi outfit.
But with the killing of Musa and Sofi,
the two purported proponents of the
pan-Islamist ideology in Kashmir, it is
now only Kashmir-centric outfits like
Hizbul Mujahedeen, Lashker-i-Toiba
and Jaish-e-Mohammad who are active
in the state.
Security agencies, however, see Mu-
sa’s killing as a major setback to the mili-
tancy in the state.
“Zaki Musa had created a new con-
cept and cult of radical jihad and militan-
cy in Kashmir. He was the last militant
of such radicalised ideology,” Director
General of Police Dilbgah Singh said in a
statement. “With his killing, forces have
killed last such militant who was influ-
enced by ISIS ideology in Kashmir”.
However, Musa’s killing may have
signalled a potential end to Al Qaeda
militancy in Kashmir, but it, in no way, is
a blow to the armed separatist campaign
in the state. The Valley, according to a se-
curity estimate, still has around 200 mili-
tants and most of them make the ranks
of Hizbul Mujahedeen. What is more, the
local recruitment has continued unabat-
ed, with an estimate putting the number
of youth joining this year at 40 so far.
“We are working to ensure that the
local recruitment stops,” said a police
officer. “And once that happens, it won’t
take long for the militancy to wind
down”.
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