‘Musa will have no impact as head of Al Qaeda’s affiliate’

Zakir Musa, the breakaway Hizbul Mujahideen commander, was on Wednesday named the leader of “Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind”, which is a propaganda organisation linked to Al Qaeda. The Jammu and Kashmir Police has, however, described Musa as a “dead man walking” with no arms supply and men. Musa was thrown out of Hizbul after he publicly announced that he would kill all separatist leaders in Kashmir. Musa, who wants to wage a war against India in the name of jihad, was enraged with the separatists who maintain that the Kashmir struggle is political, rather than Islamic in nature.

Jammu and Kashmir DGP S.P. Vaid on Friday told the media that they will assess the situation after the announcement. He said that there was no visible presence of the ISIS or Al Qaeda in Kashmir.

The Al Qaeda has been desperate to establish some footprints in India. They had announced their wing for India in September 2014, but could not garner any support from the country’s Muslim youths. The move to announce Zakir Musa as the new head of a global terror outfit is being seen by the police and the intelligence agencies as an attempt to incite young Kashmiri boys into joining their ranks through the Internet.

The police and security forces, who are closely monitoring the perceived “ideological shift” in the new phase of militancy in Kashmir, maintain that there is no support for such outfits in Kashmir currently. The separatist leadership in Kashmir has rejected the role of Al Qaeda, ISIS and other global terror outfits, clarifying that the struggle of the Kashmiris is indigenous in nature.

In a joint statement, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik said that the people of Jammu and Kashmir were fighting for their political rights and that they do not have any global agenda based on religion. They said that Al Qaeda and ISIS were “very dangerous” for the Kashmiri struggle as some agencies were at work to misrepresent this struggle as being a part of a global agenda of some terror organisations. The separatist leadership has described the Al Qaeda and ISIS as pure terrorist organisations.

Zakir Musa is representing a fringe group of Kashmir’s militant outfits. He had earlier described the Kashmir issue as an Islamic issue. The separatist leadership, United Jehad Council chief Syed Salah-ud-Din and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba had reacted at the time, saying militants like Musa were playing into the hands of the Indian agencies.