With the proscribed terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) flexing its muscles in Jammu & Kashmir in the past few months and carrying out suicide attack in Pulwama on February 14 killing 44
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the security forces are going all out to neutralise the fighting capabilities of this group.
The determined action has seen at least 17 JeM cadres killed in encounters since Pulwama incident. The overall figure of terrorists killed since then stands at 21.
The main objective of the concerted anti-terrorist operations against JeM comprising mostly foreign terrorists is to reduce the fighting capabilities of the group and force them to either lie low or flee.
Moreover, all the encounters took place based on hard intelligence thereby indicating vastly improved information flow about the ultras by the local police and intelligence agencies and efforts are on to further increase the tempo of anti-terrorist operations.
Elaborating upon this aspect, sources in the security establishment said here on Saturday the operations are taking place all over Kashmir, including South, Central and North Kashmir thereby indicating that the JeM is trying to having its footprints in all the districts instead of only South Kashmir. This district, so far, is the most restive and the JeM is desperate to increase its reach to other two districts.
Given this fact, the anti-terrorist grid including the Army, para-military forces and police are refining their strategy to deny space and time to the JeM to fan out. In fact, last week at least seven JeM ultras were killed in three operations in all the three districts indicating the effectiveness of intelligence inflow and timely response by the security force, they said.
Moreover, the focus is now people friendly operations in order to cause minimum inconvenience to innocent and also avoid collateral damage during firefight with terrorists, they said. In fact, the last encounters have taken place within first 20 to 30 minutes of receiving hard intelligence about the presence of terrorists in particular vicinity.
Also, in an effort to retain the element of surprise, the security forces are avoiding cordon and search drive and surround the particular house where the terrorists are hiding with small teams instead of encircling the entire hamlet thereby alerting the holed up militants, they said.
This change in tactics resulted in terrorists opening fire and making it easier for the security forces to pin point the location of the ultras hide-out and then take him out. However, the first volley fired by terrorists result in casualties as it happened in Shopian on Friday wherein five soldiers were injured. Fortunately, there were no fatal fatalities, they added. Incidentally, 13 Army men have so far died in Kashmir this year as compared to 61 in 2018.
Coupled with this change in tactics, the Central Armed police forces have fanned out in urban and semi urban pockets in all the sensitive districts of South, Central and North Kashmir with the aim of restricting the movement of terrorists, they said.
Continuous pressure has now forced the terrorists to commit mistakes by coming out and timely hard intelligence helped the anti-terrorist units to zero in and either capture or neutralise the ultras, they said.
The other objective of increasing the strength of para-military forces in sensitive areas is to provide collective security to peace loving people and let the law of land prevail, officials said.
As regards the situation on the Line of Control (LOC), they said the Army has adopted a pro-active approach as the Pakistan Army continues to violate ceasefire. At least 660 violations have taken place to far this year as compared to 1,630 for the entire last year and the Indian Army is retaliating with effective fire assaults.
The other aim of this robust stance is to maintain pressure on terrorist launch pads located in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir(POK) located close to the LOC on the other side. Most the launch pads are located close to the army posts there and Pakistan pushes in terrorists into Kashmir by firing at Indian posts to provide covering fire to the ultras.
With the summer about to commence and infiltration likely to pick up as the ingress routes open up after snow melts, the Army does not want to take any chances and has strengthened its counter-infiltration grid all along the 750-km long LOC, they said.