1. Omar Khalid Khorasani
Khorasani, who heads the
Mohmand tribal agency branch of the Pakistani Taliban, may be the most dangerous Taliban leader in the country.
Even by the Pakistani Taliban’s barbaric standards, Khorasani is uncompromisingly brutal. In recent months, while his organization was attempting negotiations with Islamabad, the former journalist was implicated in several high-profile attacks. In February,
he ordered the execution of 23 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers held in captivity since 2010. Pakistani officials believe he was also responsible for the bombing of an Islamabad marketplace in April, and suggest he also may have had a hand in an assault on an Islamabad courthouse in March.
2. Asim Umar
Umar is an al-Qaeda propagandist (he is also affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban).
Umar’s ideology is classic al-Qaeda. He spouts the requisite anti-Americanism (
he has published a book on Blackwater called The Army of Anti Christ)
3. Masood Azhar
Azhar is the head of Jaish-e-Mohammad, an anti-India terrorist group thought by New Delhi—and many other capitals—to have received support from the ISI, Pakistan’s main spy agency. Azhar spent time in Indian prisons in the 1990s, before being released in 1999 as part of a deal to end a hijacking crisis involving an Indian airliner.
Since resurfacing,
Azhar has boasted of having 300 suicide bombers at his disposal ready to attack India, and threatened to kill Narendra Modi if he becomes India’s next prime minister.
Terrorist & anti-national elements in the Indian sub-continent just have one agenda
With most international troops leaving Afghanistan this year, many militant groups operating in that country—particularly those like Lashkar-e-Taiba that are anti-India to the core—will likely redirect their attention to, and expand their operations in, India.
Azhar’s reemergence (possibly with the connivance of Pakistan’s security establishment) may be telegraphing this strategic shift, and particularly if seen in the context of
Asim Umar’s recent exhortations. Umar has explicitly called on Indian Muslims to mobilize for jihad: “How can you remain in your slumber when the Muslims of the world are awakening?”
Ominously, if Pakistani militants like Azhar are indeed taking their fight back to India, they could find numerous willing accomplices there. In recent weeks,
Indian security experts have warned of new Islamist militant cells popping up across the country.
4. Ahmed Ludhianvi
Khorasani and Azhar are militant leaders, while Umar is a jihadist propagandist.
Ludhianvi is a sectarian extremist who, for a brief period this month, was a member of Pakistan’s Parliament.
Ludhianvi leads the
Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, a front for (and effectively the new name of) Sipah-e-Sahaba—a terrorist organization that sponsors violence against Pakistan’s Shia Muslim minority (one of its spinoffs, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, is arguably Pakistan’s most vicious sectarian group). Though he insists he has never used violence, Ludhianvi’s views are far from peaceful—and legions of his sectarian militant followers gladly enforce his rabidly anti-Shia dictates through force of arms.
5. Mast Gul
This mysterious man’s career is a chilling example of what can happen when Pakistani militants turn on their sponsors.
In the 1990s, Gul was a Kashmir freedom fighter, and Indian and Pakistani observers alike assert he enjoyed a close relationship with Pakistani intelligence.
A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by Wikileaks in 2011 even described him as a former major in the Pakistani army.
Gul isn’t the first of these creatures to emerge
(Ilyas Kashmiri, a one-time anti-India fighter and ISI asset who became an al-Qaeda commander after the 9/11 attacks, is a prominent earlier example, as is
Asmatullah Muawiya, a Jaish-e-Mohammed leader who became a Punjab-based Pakistani Taliban commander in 2007), and he certainly won’t be the last