Young commander leads new breed of Kashmiri militants

Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, July 20

A new breed of militants, who is growing in number and mainly operates in Kashmir’s southern districts, is being led by a young commander who had picked arms five years ago as a teenager.

Burhan Muzafar Wani, a resident of Tral town in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district and son of a school principal, has emerged as the face of Kashmir’s new militant generation whose growing number and audacity has shocked the security apparatus.

Police officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, identified the 21-year-old Wani as the commander of Hizbul Mujahideen outfit in south Kashmir’s four districts, where the number of militants in the recent months has increased from 35 to 80.

The militants under Wani’s command include Ishaq Ahmad Parray, a meritorious teenager who had scored 98.4 per cent marks in class 10th exam to secure ninth position in the Kashmir zone, earning the sobriquet of ‘Newton’, and Zakir Rashid, an engineering student who left studies midway in 2013 to join militant ranks.

The police confirmed that 100 youths had joined militant ranks in the past 18 months, an unusually high number in the recent years, which had witnessed their count shrinking at an increasing rate.

Nearly 150 militants, most of them locals, are operating in the region with 80 of them active in south Kashmir districts, said Inspector General of Police, Kashmir zone, SJM Gilani.

Militancy waned over the past decade in Kashmir as security forces launched crackdowns against ultras and strengthened the intelligence and counter-infiltration grid.

The figures related to militancy decreased sharply from a high of 3,860 incidents in 2002 to a low of 170 incidents in 2013, according to the data compiled by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

South Kashmir, however, emerged as the new focal point of militants in mid-2012 as security forces mounted an unrelenting counter-insurgency campaign in north Kashmir and succeeded in killing many top-ranking commanders.

Militants in south Kashmir operating under Wani’s command made a belligerent show of strength this month when 11 of them in camouflages and holding assault rifles posed for pictures, which went viral on social networking sites. Wani took to arms in October 2010 at the age of 16 when he was a class tenth student, said his family.

He grew within the ranks of militants, which included his cousin and commander Adil Mir, who was killed last year.

Since October 2010, Wani has survived at least three encounters with security forces, police sources said.

Wani’s elder brother, Khalid, was killed earlier this year in one of the encounters when he had gone into a jungle to meet him.

Over the past two years, Wani’s pictures have surfaced regularly on social networking sites after he was mistaken to have been killed in an ambush in a Tral forest, in which four soldiers and a militant had died.

In the latest picture, which was released on social networking sites this month, Wani posed with a group of 10 militants, most of whom had joined militancy this year. It included runaway policeman Naseer Pandith.

Pandith, part of the security escort of Public Works Minister Altaf Bukhari, joined militant ranks in March after he escaped with two assault rifles from Bukhari’s Srinagar residence.