Jaish-E-Mohammed

Jaish-e-Mohammed (Mohammed's Army; JEM) is a militant Islamist group based in Pakistan. JEM was founded in the late 1990s by Maulana Masood Azhar, a former leader of the ultra-fundamentalist Islamist group Harakat ul-Mujahidin.

Azhar was active in the Harakat ul-Mujahidin throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He spent time training with Al Qaeda and fighting in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and organized groups that fought alongside Al Qaeda against U.S. troops in Somalia and Yemen.

The main aim of Harakat ul-Mujahidin, however, was to reunite Kashmir with Pakistan, and the group was responsible for numerous attacks on Hindus and Indian Army troops in Kashmir. Pakistan's intelligence service is believed to have supported both Harakat ul-Mujahidin and other terrorist groups in their operations in Kashmir. Azhar was arrested by Indian authorities in 1994 in connection with several attacks and held in a Jammu jail.

Azhar's supporters made several attempts to free him, including the 1994 kidnappings of U.S. and British nationals in New Delhi and the July 1995 kidnappings of Westerners in Kashmir. In 1999, members of Harakat ul-Mujahidin hijacked an Indian Airlines jet and flew the plane to Afghanistan. They demanded the release of Azhar in exchange for the 155 passengers and crew. The Indian government agreed to their demands and flew Azhar to Afghanistan; all the hostages were then freed and returned to India.

On his release, Azhar announced the formation of the Jaish-e-Mohammed and organized recruitment drives throughout Pakistan. About three-quarters of the members of Harakat ul-Mujahidin joined the new group. The Harakat ul-Mujahidin and JEM are now thought to be at war with each other. JEM is based primarily in Peshawar and Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, but members are active primarily in Kashmir. Until the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, JEM also maintained training camps in that country and was heavily supported by the Taliban and pro-Taliban groups in Pakistan.

In July 2000, JEM launched a rocket grenade attack on the chief minister of Kashmir at his office in Srinagar. In December 2000, JEM militants threw grenades at a bus stop in Kupwara, India, injuring 24, and at a marketplace in Chadoura, India, injuring 16. JEM militants also planted two bombs that killed 21 people in Qamarwari and Srinagar.

JEM was responsible for the October 1, 2001, suicide bomb attack on the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly in Srinagar that left 31 people dead, including members of the Indian Parliament. On October 11, 2001, Britain, Pakistan, and the United States froze JEM's assets. The next day, JEM announced that it had renamed itself Tehrik-al-Firquan, and moved all of its assets into new accounts. Azhar remained in charge of the new organization, which declared “the opening of jihad against the United States.”

With the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, Pakistani government support for JEM and other extremist groups seemed to have evaporated. Declaring the Pakistani government to be in thrall to the West, JEM then turned against the government of Pakistan. [Page 190]Jaish-e-Mohammed is currently suspected of having been involved in the January 2002 kidnapping and murder, in Pakistan, of American journalist Daniel Pearl. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, convicted in July 2002 of the crimes, is a close friend and associate of Azhar.