Terror HQ, Pakistan: Why taking out Muridke and Bahalwalpur is key to India's war on terror

Indian Express

10-05-2025

THE NINE targets inside Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) that India attacked as part of Operation Sindoor in the early hours of May 7 isn't merely a hit on the neighbour's terror infrastructure; it has substantial symbolic value for India's war on terror. Of the nine camps, at least two of them – the Muridke headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Bahawalpur base of the Jaish-e-Mohammed — have been on the radar of Indian security agencies for their role in planning and coordinating a series of attacks on Indian soil over the years. This is the first time that India has targeted the Muridke headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Bahawalpur base of the Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Markaz Taiba, Muridke
An hour's drive from Lahore is Muridke, a tehsil headquarters in Pakistan's Punjab province. A small city with a population of less than three lakh, Muridke, in Sheikhpura district, got noticed after the Markaz-e-Taiba (or the Taiba Centre) came up in 2000 as the headquarters of the Markaz-e-Dawa Wal Irshad (MDI), the parent organisation of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
Spread across a sprawling campus of over 200 acres, Muridke's Taiba Centre was Lashkar's command and control centre, a recruitment and training centre and a school of indoctrination. The campus housed schools, mosques, medical facilities and residential quarters.
For India, the choice of Muridke as a target was especially important because it represented the most heinous of terror attacks directed at India – from the suicide attack in Kashmir during the Kargil war to the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. Ajmal Kasab, the gunman in the 26/11 attacks, and David Headley, the scout, have admitted that they received training inside this facility in Muridke. In fact, The Resistance Front (TRF), the outfit that has claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam terror attack, too, is a front for the Lashkar.
And so, on May 7, when India struck deep inside Pakistan for the first time since the 1971 war, the Markaz Taiba was an obvious target.
A senior counter insurgency officer said that the Markaz-e-Taiba was a city in itself. 'The Lashkar headquarters had everything the terror operatives and their families needed. It was as organised as a military headquarters would be and that's not possible without state support.'
Calling the Taiba centre the 'root of evil' in Pakistan, he said, 'Muridke has been exporting terror not just to Kashmir, but many other parts of the world. All the top Lashkar commanders operated from there.'
The Taiba Centre was set up in 2000 by Hafiz Saeed, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-Jordanian known as the ideological father of global jihad. Funding for the project came from Abdul Rahman Al Surayhi, an Arab who fought against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
In his book Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Stephen Tankel says Surayhi was the brother-in-law of Lakhvi, Saeed's close aide and one of the founding members of the Markaz-e-Dawa Wal Irshad that was first set up as a loose structure in Kunar province of Afghanistan in 1986-87 before being formally launched in 1990 in Pakistan.
In 1986, Saeed, a professor in the Islamic Studies Department of Lahore University of Engineering & Technology, went to Saudi Arabia on a two-year fellowship at King Saud University in Riyadh. It was here that he met Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, a radical preacher and the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia who counted Osama bin Laden among his students. While in Saudi Arabia, Saeed also established a connection with Azzam, the Palestinian who was then an ideologue of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. Soon after his return from Saudi Arabia, Saeed and two others set up the Markaz-e-DawaWal Irshad in Muridke.
A year later, the Lashkar-e-Taiba was born, as the militant wing of the Markaz-e-DawaWal Irshad, with an aim to join the Afghan Mujahideen in the US-sponsored war against the Soviets. But as the war reached its end, the group shifted its attention to Kashmir.
According to security agencies, the Lashkar's Valley operations began in 1993. For years, the group kept a low profile, so much so that government agencies had few details about its ideology and cadre. The first big terror attack carried out by the outfit was in July 1999, soon after the Kargil war, when it struck a camp of the Border Security Force in Bhootu, a village in Bandipora deep inside dense pine forests.
The attack left six BSF personnel, including Deputy Inspector General S K Chakravarty and two other officers, dead. After a 30-hour-long operation by the elite National Security Guards and paratroopers of the Army, the terrorists, holed up in a house in the village, were killed.
The Lashkar followed up the Bandipora attack with more incidents of terror. On November 3, 1999, the outfit targeted the Army's 15 Corps headquarters and killed Defence PRO Major Purshottam inside his office along with several other Army men. In March 2000, coinciding with the visit of then US President Bill Clinton to New Delhi, the Lashkar carried out the Chittisinghpura massacre that saw 36 members of the Sikh community being lined up and shot dead.
In August 2000, when the Hizbul Mujahideen — the biggest Kashmiri militant group — declared a ceasefire and joined the first-ever direct talks with the Vajpayee government, the Lashkar carried out several terror attacks across J&K, killing around 100 people in two days. Subsequently, the talks failed.
More attacks followed — the December 22, 2000 attack on the Red Fort and the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.
Meanwhile in Pakistan, the Lashkar, which is based on the Salafi thought of Islam — which forbids anyone from going against a Muslim ruler even if he is not a 'true' Muslim — earned state support since it managed to largely stay away from Pakistan's domestic politics and focused on Kashmir and beyond. The Lashkar further endeared itself to the Pakistan government as its razakar (volunteers) pitched in with relief measures during earthquakes and floods in Pakistan and PoK. In fact, several Pakistani politicians have in the past visited Muridke and offered financial assistance for the Jamat-ud-Dawa's 'social work'.
The situation took a turn after 9/11. Under severe US pressure, then President Musharraf started to act against the Lashkar. However, on December 24, 2001, almost a month ahead of Pakistan's ban on the Lashkar, Saeed called a press conference and officially distanced himself from the Lashkar, closed down its parent organisation Markaz-e-Dawa-wal-Irshad, and instead set up the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. It was a measure to escape international scrutiny and stay afloat.
But, as is evident from the Pahalgam attack, the Lashkar had never gone out of business.
Markaz Subhanallah, Bahawalpur
In the spring of 2000, Afaq Ahmad, a 17-year-old schoolboy from downtown Srinagar, blew up an explosives-laden Maruti car at the gate of the 15 Corps HQ in the city. The first human bomb in the Valley marked a new phase in Kashmir's violence-stricken history.
This attack was carried out by the Jaish-e-Mohammad, a terror outfit that had been formed weeks earlier by Masood Azhar, one of the terrorists released in Kandahar on December 31, 1999 in exchange for the passengers and crew of the hijacked IC-814.
On December 24, 2000, a 24-year-old British cadre of the Jaish blew up another explosives-laden Maruti, again at the gates of the 15 Corps HQ. The bomber was subsequently profiled in the official Jaish publication, Zarb-e-Momin, thus putting Kashmir on the map of international jihad.
So on May 7, when Indian missiles struck deep inside Pakistan, the farthest target was a mosque in Punjab's Bahawalpur, some 100 km from the International Border. The Jamia Masjid Subhanallah had been on the radar of Indian security agencies since it was set up as a new Markaz (central headquarters) of the Masood Azhar-led Jaish-e-Mohammed.
The decision to target the vast Usman Ali complex, which houses the Jamia Masjid Subhanallah, is of significant symbolic value for counter-terror operations in India. It's from here that Masood Azhar coordinated some of the most heinous attacks on India as chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Situated at a distance of over 400 kilometres from the Lashkar's Muridke headquarters, Bahawalpur falls in the southern part of Pakistan's Punjab province. Here, in Model Town-B, a densely populated industrial area, stood the Jamia Masjid Subhanallah.
Immediately after the 2019 Pulwama car bombing that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war, Pakistan claimed to have taken over Masjid Subhanallah and the Al-Sabir seminary on the outskirts of Bahawalpur city. But senior counter insurgency officers say that it continued to be Jaish's command centre, controlled by Azhar.
Azhar's designs on India, however, preceded the Jaish. In January 1994, Azhar, then the general secretary of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (earlier Harkat-ul-Ansar), the military wing of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI), had flown into New Delhi from Dhaka on a fake identity as a Gujarat-born Portuguese national, Wali Adam Issa. He subsequently went to Srinagar and took over Harkat activities in Kashmir before he was arrested in 1995 with Harkat chief Sajad Afghani. The Harkat made several unsuccessful attempts to get Azhar out of jail, including planning a jailbreak that was foiled. Azhar was finally released along with Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar in Kandahar in exchange for the passengers of the hijacked IC-814. Soon after, he returned to Pakistan and, in April 2000, launched the Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Unlike the Lashkar, however, the Jaish shared an umbilical cord with the Taliban, and went against the Pakistani Army after the 9/11 attacks in the US changed the narrative in the region.
Subsequent Jaish terror attacks in India were so brazen that they threatened to push the two countries to war several times, and repeatedly put Islamabad in a spot. In 2001, Jaish attacked the Indian Parliament, pushing the two countries close to a full-scale war.
The group was even blamed for attempting to assassinate President Pervez Musharaf twice in 2003.