Jaish-e-Mohammed

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

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

The main aim of Harakat ul-Mujahideen, 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-Mujahideen and other terrorist groups in their operations in Kashmir. Azhar was arrested by the 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 kidnapping of U.S. and British nationals in New Delhi and the July 1995 kidnapping of Westerners in Kashmir. In 1999, members of Harakat ul-Mujahideen 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-Mujahideen joined the new group. The JEM is based primarily in Peshawar and Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, but members are active primarily in Kashmir. Until the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the JEM also maintained training camps in that country and was heavily supported by the Taliban and pro-Taliban groups in Pakistan.

In July 2000 the 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.

The 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, the group announced that it had renamed itself Tehrik al Furqan, and it 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 and a suicide attack on the Indian parliament by the JEM and another [Page 312]militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, in late 2001, Pakistani government support for the JEM temporarily evaporated. Pakistani officials put Azhar under house arrest in December 2001 and banned the JEM and other extremist groups the following month.

Declaring the Pakistani government to be in thrall to the West, the JEM then turned against the government of Pakistan. The group is suspected of having been involved in the January 2002 kidnapping and murder, in Pakistan, of the American journalist Daniel Pearl. Ahmad Omar Sheikh, charged with masterminding the abduction and murder, is a close friend and associate of Azhar. Nonetheless, Azhar was released from detention that December, indicating the ambivalent relationship the Pakistani government has with the militant Islamic groups that operate in Kashmir. Despite the putative ban, the JEM has operated openly in some parts of Pakistan, and it has continued to attack targets in Kashmir and India.

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