Fear & Loathing in the Valley
A series of killings in former Ikhwani territory as the LeT moves in
Past midnight on April 4, two armed men, their faces masked, entered Abdul Gaffar Bhat’s home in Bonikhan village near Hajin town. Ordering him and his 23-year-old shepherd son Manzoor to accompany them, they bolted the rest of the family from outside and left. Half an hour later, gunshots rang out. Moments later, Abdul staggered home bleeding profusely from bullet wounds. Two days later, Manzoor’s decapitated, tortured body was found in an apple orchard just a kilometre from the house.
A municipal employee, Bhat had once been associated with the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen, a vigilante group responsible for killing scores of militants in the 1990s under the leadership of Mohammad Yusuf Parray aka Kuka Parray.
Not far away from Bonikhan, residents of Preng village have been mounting nightly vigils. This after a local butcher, Mohammad Yaqoob Wagay, 32, was hacked to death by unidentified killers inside his home on May 25. Two men held down his wife and minor son, while three others slit Wagay’s throat. They watched him bleed to death before fleeing. “The killers were talking in Urdu,” says Shanu, Wagay’s widow.
Wagay is the sixth civilian to be killed since April
ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS HAVE LED TO DRYING UP OF INTELLIGENCE AND HENCE FEWER ANTI-INSURGENCY OPS
in and around Hajin. On April 2, 27-year-old Naseer Ahmad Sheikh, a local driver also popular as a cricketer, was abducted from his in-laws’ house in a village not far from Hajin. A day later, his bullet-riddled body was found in an orchard. Eight months earlier, in August 2017, Sheikh’s 24-year-old brother-in-law Muzaffar Ahmad Parray had been beheaded.
Jammu & Kashmir police officials are certain these are reprisal killings carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants, though the outfit itself has denied involvement. There have been other incidents, which went unreported. Last month, militants forced a woman in Hajin town to apologise for her ‘mistake’ from a local mosque on the loudspeaker.
The fear shows. Hajin shuts down before dusk and villagers undertake night patrols. Many have fled the area, especially those associated with the Ikhwanis or mainstream parties. Parray’s son Imtiyaz, now with the Congress, moved out six months ago, after his family home was attacked in November.
Once an Ikhwani haunt, Hajin is now a transit point and base camp for LeT militants headed toward central and south Kashmir. The past two years thus have seen many antiinsurgency operations, including the two in January and November 2017, in which two nephews of the supreme commander of LeT’s Kashmir operations, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, were killed. Six LeT militants were also gunned down in November in an encounter.
The senior superintendent of police at Bandipore, Sheikh Zulfkar, says civilian killings in Hajin are designed to instil fear in people. Information channels to police and security forces have dried up, resulting in fewer antiinsurgency operations in recent months. Some police officers, however, say it’s not just fear of the LeT. The people of Hajin are also desperate to shed the Ikhwani tag.