The United Jihad Council, also known as the Muttahida Jihad Council (MJC), is an Islamist Jihadist organisation formed by the Pakistan Army for unified command and control over the anti-Indian militant groups operating in Jammu and Kashmir. [1] [2] It was formed in the summer of 1994 and is currently[ when? ] headed by Syed Salahuddin, the leader of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. The organisation was created to unify and focus efforts of various armed militant groups fighting against Indian rule in Kashmir. This made distribution of resources like arms, ammunition, propaganda materials and communications more streamlined. It also made it easier to coordinate and pool resources of various militant groups to collect information, plan operations and strike at targets of military importance inside Indian administered Kashmir.[ citation needed ]
The militant group has 13 affiliates. [3] Some of the group members are: Harakat-ul-Ansar, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, Al-Jihad, Al-Barq, Al-Badr, Ikhwan-ul-Mussalmin, and Tehrik-ul-Mujahideen. By early 1999, as many as fifteen organisations were affiliated with the Council, though of these only five were considered influential: Lashkar-e-Toiba, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Al-Badr, and Tehrik-i-Jihad. Many of these organisations are recognised as terrorist organisations by the United States and the UN. [4]
In June 2012 in an interview, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin accepted that Pakistan had been backing Hizbul Mujahideen for fighting in Kashmir. [5] He had threatened to start attacking Pakistan if the latter stopped backing the separatist militants in Jammu and Kashmir. He claimed the militants were fighting "Pakistan's war". [5] [6]
We are fighting Pakistan's war in Kashmir and if it withdraws its support, the war would be fought inside Pakistan
The group claimed responsibility for the 2016 Pathankot attack, carried out on Pathankot Air Base administered by the Indian Air Force on 3 January 2016. [7] The incident claimed 14 casualties, including 7 security personnel, 1 civilian, and 6 attackers.
Lashkar-e-Taiba is a Pakistan-based militant Islamist Salafi jihadist organisation. Described as one of Pakistan's "most powerful jihadi groups", it is most infamous outside Pakistan. The organisation's primary stated objective is to merge the whole of Kashmir with Pakistan. It was founded in 1985–86 by Hafiz Saeed, Zafar Iqbal Shehbaz Abdullah Azzam and several other Islamist mujahideen with funding from Osama bin Laden during the Soviet–Afghan War. It has been designated a terrorist group by numerous countries.
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen- al-Islami is a Pakistan-based Islamic jihadist group operating primarily in Kashmir. The group have been considered as having links to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
Jaish-e-Mohammed is a Pakistan-based Deobandi Jihadist terrorist group active in Kashmir. The group's primary motive is to separate Kashmir from India and merge it into Pakistan.
Hizbul Mujahideen, also spelled Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, is a Pakistan-affiliated Islamist militant organisation that has been engaged in the Kashmir insurgency since 1989. It aims to separate Kashmir from India and merge it with Pakistan, and is thus one of the most important players in the region as it evolved the narrative of the Kashmir conflict by steering the struggle away from nationalism and towards jihadism.
The insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, also known as the Kashmir insurgency, is an ongoing separatist militant insurgency against the Indian administration in Jammu and Kashmir, a territory constituting the southwestern portion of the larger geographical region of Kashmir, which has been the subject of a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan since 1947.
The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) is a formerly armed, political separatist organisation active in both the Indian-administered and Pakistani-administered territories of Kashmir. It was founded by Amanullah Khan, with Maqbool Bhat also credited as a co-founder. Originally a militant wing of the Azad Kashmir Plebiscite Front, the organization officially changed its name to the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front in Birmingham, England on 29 May 1977; from then until 1994 it was an active Kashmiri militant organization. The JKLF first established branches in several cities and towns of the United Kingdom and other countries in Europe, as well as in the United States and across the Middle East. In 1982, it established a branch in the Pakistani-administered territory of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and by 1987, it had established a branch in the Indian-administered Kashmir Valley.
The Kashmir conflict is a territorial conflict over the Kashmir region, primarily between India and Pakistan, and also between China and India in the northeastern portion of the region. The conflict started after the partition of India in 1947 as both India and Pakistan claimed the entirety of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. It is a dispute over the region that escalated into three wars between India and Pakistan and several other armed skirmishes. India controls approximately 55% of the land area of the region that includes Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, most of Ladakh, the Siachen Glacier, and 70% of its population; Pakistan controls approximately 30% of the land area that includes Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan; and China controls the remaining 15% of the land area that includes the Aksai Chin region, the mostly uninhabited Trans-Karakoram Tract, and part of the Demchok sector.
Mohammad Masood Azhar Alvi is a radical Islamist and terrorist, being the founder and leader of the Pakistan-based terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed, active mainly in the Pakistani-administered portion of the Kashmir region. His actions are not limited to the South Asian region; for instance, BBC News described him as "the man who brought jihad to Britain." On 1 May 2019, Masood Azhar was listed as an international terrorist by the United Nations Security Council.
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami is a Pakistani Islamist extremist, fundamentalist and terrorist organisation affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Mohammad Yusuf Shah, commonly known as Syed Salahuddin, is the head of Hizbul Mujahideen, an organization operating in Kashmir. He also heads the United Jihad Council, a Pakistan-based conglomeration of jihadist militant groups sponsored by the ISI, with the goal of merging Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan.
Al-Badr is an Islamist militant group operating in the Kashmir region. The group was allegedly formed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in June 1998. It is believed the group was encouraged by the ISI to operate independently from their previous umbrella group, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM). Prior to the group's separation from HM, they participated in the fighting in Afghanistan in 1990 as part of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-l-Islami (HIG) alongside other anti-Soviet Afghan mujihadeen. India and the United States have declared it a terrorist organisation and banned it. Pakistan has long been a difficult and disruptive neighbor of Afghanistan, increasing Afghanistan's instability by providing intelligence, weapons and security to the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network. But now Pakistan is facing strong backlash both domestically and internationally against its policy of militant sponsorship.
Mujahideen, or Mujahidin, is the plural form of mujahid, an Arabic term that broadly refers to people who engage in jihad, interpreted in a jurisprudence of Islam as the fight on behalf of God, religion or the community (ummah).
Muhammad Ahsan Dar is a Kashmiri Islamist militant separatist leader from Jammu and Kashmir. He was the founder of an Islamist militant group called Ansarul Islam in mid-1980s, which later became the core of Hizbul Mujahideen. Formed in September 1989, Hizbul Mujahideen was an umbrella group of a dozen Islamist groups in the Kashmir Valley and was sponsored by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and Jamaat-e-Islami. Ahsan Dar served as the head of the united group for a few years, but was marginalised the Jamaat-e-Islami patron Syed Salahuddin. He later founded a new group called Muslim Mujahideen in 1992, which operated for a few years. It was eventually neutralised by Hizbul Mujahideen and Indian security forces, and Ahsan Dar retired from militancy.
Abdul Rauf is a Pakistani Deobandi fundamentalist Islamist militant commander of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a Deobandi Islamist militant organization which has carried out Islamist militant activities in India & Afghanistan under the support of Pakistan's main intelligence agency.
Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent usually abbreviated as AQIS, is a branch of the Islamist militant organization Al-Qaeda which aims to fight the governments of Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Myanmar and Bangladesh in order to establish an Islamic state and seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate in Indian Subcontinent.
Abdul Majeed Dar was a former chief commander of the militant group Hizbul Mujahideen in Jammu & Kashmir till 2001. He later gave up violence and sought to restore peace in Kashmir.
Zakir Rashid Bhat was a Kashmiri separatist who became the commander of Hizbul Mujahideen after the killing of Burhan Wani and Sabzar Bhat, who were the former commanders of the same outfit. He later became the chief of Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind.
Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind is an Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militant group active in Kashmir. The group's stated objective is to create Kashmir as an independent Islamic state under Sharia law and jihad against India.
Riyaz Ahmad Naikoo was one of the top ten most wanted militant commander of Jammu and Kashmir. He was a top commander of Hizbul Mujahideen, an Islamist Pro-Pakistan militant organization active in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Islamic State in Jammu and Kashmir is a group affiliated with the Islamic State, operating in Kashmir, specifically the Kashmir Valley of Jammu and Kashmir. It is not an official wilayah of the Islamic State.