The terrorists’ acts of targeting locals and policemen in the Valley have boomeranged big time on them. Instead of serving as a major deterrent for the locals to stop cooperating with the security forces, the terrorists’ move has only led to faster and precise flow of information about them leading to major successes for the forces.
In fact, a terrorist a day — that's how the statistics about militants neutralised by security forces jacked up in the last two months. The number of militants killed this year has already surpassed the 2017 figures. Compared to 217 killed last year, the figures in 2018 till November stand at 226. In the last 60 days itself, the security forces have killed 60 militants including some of the top commanders and most wanted.
The successes, one after another, including at least three major encounters last week, came about due to improved intelligence flow about the movement of militant leadership. "This, after the ultras started terrorising locals by executing them and the videos of these killings went viral on the social media. In addition, the targeting of policemen and security men from Kashmir valley in the last few months also contributed to intelligence pouring in about militants," sources said.
An instance of one such operation on Sunday in Shopian saw three district commanders of Hizbul Mujahideen getting killed in the firefight. The dead included Mohammad Abbas, who was wanted for the murder of Lt Omar Fayaz earlier the year, killing of four policemen and 19-year-old youth some days back in Shopian. The other top leader was Umar Majid alias Hanzla. As per police records, he was involved in the killing of four policemen and two bank guards in a bank robbery attempt.
Elaborating upon the better of flow of intelligence, especially from the local police, officials in the security establishment said here on Monday the trend started particularly after the militants started terrorizing the locals. Besides abducting and executing youths in the last couple of days, the militants also tried to paralyse the local police by killing police officers. It resulted in the anti-insurgency grid getting real time information about the movement of militant commanders almost on daily basis as efforts to deter policemen by killing them did not work.
Explaining this phenomenon, they said earlier the information about top leadership of militants used to be patchy and not frequent. However, the last few months saw the security forces getting almost precise intelligence about the gathering of militants in a hideout resulting in quick joint operations by the Army, Central Reserve Police Force(CRPF) and the local police.
Officials also stressed that at present all anti-terrorist operations in the towns and villages of Kashmir were conducted jointly by all the forces deployed there. However, the Army was conducting operations on its own in the higher and inaccessible reaches of mountainous terrain of North and South Kashmir, they said.
Giving the break up for the last six months, they said 32 militants were killed till November 25, 28 in October, 29 in September, 28 in August and 11 in July.
The fight against terror, however, came a cost with 60 security personnel including 56 Army men and four Jammu & Kashmir policemen dying in various encounters in the hinterland and at the Line of Control(LOC) so far this year. The figure stood at 83 for the entire last year including casualties suffered by the army, para-military forces and the local police.