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Kashmiri Militants Joining Hands With Al-Qaeda In Waziristan
Following the last week’s U.S. missile strike that killed British militant Rashid Rauf, it has emerged that the Kashmiri militants are joining the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal districts of South and North Waziristan.
Rashid Rauf and four other Al-Qaeda militants were killed in a U.S. missile strike in North Waziristan on Friday. Rauf was a close relative of Maulana Masood Azhar, the Pakistan-based chief of Kashmiri militant outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). The others killed along with Rauf were Al-Qaeda leaders Abu Nasr Al-Misri and Abu Zubair Al-Masri.
Masood Azhar, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar (the head of Al-Omar Mujahideen militant group who was born in Srinagar, Indian Kashmir), and Sheikh Omar Saeed, are the three militants released by the Indian government in exchange for the passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC-814 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1999. Saeed later went on to kill U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl.
Unidentified officials in Islamabad say that Pakistan’s change in its policy on Kashmir has forced many of the Kashmiri militant groups to shift their fighters to the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan.
These Kashmiri militant groups include Harkat-ul Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) led by Maulana Ilyas Kashmiri, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) led by Maulana Masood Azhar, Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) led by Syed Salahuddin and the Jamatul Furqaan (JuF) led by Maulana Abdul Jabbar.
Source: The Asian Age, India, November 26, 2008
Posted at: 2008-11-26
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