Saleem Rehmani, alias Abu Saad, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Nawabshah, Sindh, in January 2022. At the time, Pakistani police treated the incident as a routine armed robbery gone wrong at a commercial mart in the Taj Colony neighborhood. Local media reported three armed men entering the premises, a brief exchange of fire, and two bodies carried to the Peoples Medical Hospital. Rehmani’s name appeared on India’s list of wanted individuals accused of conspiracy to radicalize, motivate, and recruit youth in Jammu and Kashmir for violence against the Indian state. His killing was one of the first data points in what would become a recognizable pattern of targeted eliminations of India-wanted individuals on Pakistani soil, a systematic campaign that has now claimed dozens of lives across multiple Pakistani cities and provinces.

Rehmani’s death attracted almost no international attention when it occurred. Pakistani media covered the Nawabshah incident as a local crime story, a brief dispatch buried among reports of street robberies and property disputes in Sindh’s interior. Indian media did not cover the event at all. No government claimed credit. No investigation produced results. The killing dissolved into the background noise of urban violence in Pakistan’s Sindh province, unremarkable in a country where armed encounters between shopkeepers and robbers barely register as news. Only later, after Zahoor Mistry was shot dead in Karachi by motorcycle-borne assailants two months later in March 2022, and after the pace of similar killings accelerated through 2023 and into 2024, did analysts begin tracing the pattern backward to its earliest instances. Rehmani’s January 2022 killing emerged in that retrospective analysis as one of the opening moves in a covert campaign that had been invisible while it was happening. That retrospective invisibility is itself analytically significant. The Rehmani case reveals how the campaign’s architects designed their operations to be individually unremarkable while collectively unmistakable, a hallmark of intelligence doctrine refined through practice.

This article reconstructs the Rehmani killing from available open-source reporting, examines his biography and role in cross-border recruitment networks, analyzes the early-campaign target selection criteria his case reveals, and argues that the Nawabshah incident in January 2022 was not a random act of local violence but a proof-of-concept operation whose lessons were applied to every subsequent elimination in the shadow war. Rehmani’s chronological position near the beginning of the complete timeline makes his case indispensable for understanding how the campaign started, how it learned, and how it scaled.

The Killing

Three armed men entered a commercial mart located at a petrol pump in Taj Colony, Nawabshah, in the Shaheed Benazirabad district of Sindh, on a Sunday in early January 2022. According to Dawn’s contemporaneous reporting, the men demanded cash from the mart’s owner, Saleem Rehmani. Rehmani and his brother Waseem resisted. The armed men opened fire, killing Saleem and wounding Waseem. Workers inside the mart who possessed weapons returned fire, and one of the three suspects was killed in the exchange. Officials from the Bullo Ja Qaba police station transported the bodies and the wounded to Peoples Medical Hospital, Nawabshah.

Eyewitnesses reported to Dawn that they were sitting at a hotel adjacent to the petrol pump and observed the three armed men entering the mart. Nawabshah’s SSP, Amir Saud Magsi, told reporters that the incident was linked to personal enmity rather than robbery. This characterization, attributing a violent death to a private dispute rather than to organized operational activity, would become a recurring element in subsequent Pakistani police responses to similar killings across the country. When Mullah Sardar Hussain Arain was shot dead in the same Nawabshah district in August 2023, local police initially pursued similar explanations before the pattern became too consistent to dismiss.

Several elements of the Rehmani killing in Nawabshah distinguish it from ordinary criminal violence. Three armed men entered the premises together, a coordinated approach that suggests planning rather than opportunistic robbery. The primary target was Rehmani himself, not the cash register or merchandise. The violence escalated immediately to lethal force rather than following the progressive escalation typical of robbery encounters. Rehmani was killed while his brother survived, suggesting targeted intent rather than indiscriminate firing. The SSP’s own statement undercuts the robbery narrative, as his invocation of personal enmity acknowledges that Rehmani specifically, not the mart generically, was the target.

The forensic distinction between targeted killings and ordinary criminal violence in Pakistan’s Sindh province is analytically important because Pakistan experiences substantial levels of both. Karachi alone, the provincial capital approximately 275 kilometers southwest of Nawabshah, has recorded thousands of targeted killings over the past two decades, driven by political violence between MQM, PPP, ANP, and religious parties, by extortion and land-grabbing operations conducted by criminal gangs with political connections, and by ethnic and sectarian tensions that periodically erupt into armed conflict. In this environment, a targeted killing can be attributed to any number of local factors without invoking international intelligence operations. The analytical challenge is distinguishing between killings that belong to the local ecosystem of political and criminal violence and killings that belong to the covert campaign. The criteria that support the latter attribution for Rehmani’s case include his designation by India as a wanted individual, the timing between the car bomb and the Mistry killing, the subsequent accumulation of similar cases targeting other India-designated individuals, and the SSP’s own acknowledgment that the killing was motivated by personal enmity (i.e., targeted) rather than random robbery.

Whether the killing was carried out by the same operational network responsible for subsequent shootings remains analytically debatable. The modus operandi differed from the motorcycle-borne assassin pattern that would define the campaign from Zahoor Mistry’s March 2022 killing onward. The Nawabshah operation involved three men entering an enclosed space, an armed confrontation with collateral engagement (the mart workers’ return fire), and the death of one attacker, a messier operational outcome than the precision hits that characterized later strikes. Walter Ladwig III, a senior lecturer in War Studies at King’s College London who has extensively analyzed India’s evolving counter-terror posture, frames the broader campaign as a shift from diplomatic response to direct action. If his framework is applied to the initiation phase, the Rehmani killing fits as an early operational iteration where the tactical methodology had not yet been refined into the clean, repeatable pattern that later operations would achieve.

The geographic context matters. Nawabshah sits approximately 275 kilometers northeast of Karachi, deep inside Sindh’s agricultural interior. It is not a city associated with international intrigue or intelligence activity. The town’s primary economic significance derives from sugarcane farming and small-scale commerce. An armed killing at a petrol pump mart in this setting would not attract the attention of intelligence analysts, foreign correspondents, or counter-terrorism researchers, which may have been precisely the point. If the Rehmani operation was a test of the campaign’s ability to locate, reach, and eliminate a designated target inside Pakistan, Nawabshah offered the advantage of minimal scrutiny. A killing in Karachi or Lahore, cities where foreign journalists maintain bureaus and intelligence agencies maintain surveillance networks, would have generated investigation from the start. A killing in Nawabshah generated a three-paragraph crime report in Dawn and nothing else.

The timing is equally significant. January 2022 places the Rehmani killing seven months after the June 2021 car bomb near Hafiz Saeed’s Lahore residence, an event analyzed in the Lahore car bomb article as the campaign’s declaration of intent. It places the killing two months before the March 2022 assassination of Zahoor Mistry in Karachi’s Akhtar Colony. If the car bomb was the signal, the Rehmani operation was the first confirmed lethal test. The campaign’s internal logic appears to have followed a declaration-test-confirmation sequence: the Lahore car bomb demonstrated the willingness and capability to strike inside Pakistan’s cities, the Rehmani killing demonstrated the ability to identify and eliminate a specific designated target, and the Mistry operation demonstrated the refined motorcycle-based tactical methodology that would become the campaign’s signature.

This three-phase initiation sequence, declaration-test-confirmation, corresponds to established models of covert campaign design documented in intelligence literature. Ronen Bergman, whose comprehensive history of Mossad’s targeted killing operations (“Rise and Kill First”) provides the most detailed public account of how a state intelligence agency develops and operationalizes a campaign of targeted eliminations, describes Israel’s post-Munich campaign as following a similar initiation logic. Mossad’s first operations after Munich targeted relatively accessible individuals in Western European cities where the operational environment was permissive, before escalating to higher-value targets in more challenging environments. The operational learning from those early strikes, including the catastrophic Lillehammer affair where Mossad operatives killed an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway, shaped the methodology that later operations would employ with greater precision. Rehmani’s Nawabshah killing, with its messy outcome and imperfect execution, may occupy the same position in India’s campaign trajectory: a necessary early test whose imperfections generated the lessons that produced the refined methodology visible from Mistry onward.

The relationship between the car bomb and the Rehmani operation also raises the question of operational command structure. If both events belong to the same campaign, they suggest a command authority capable of directing two fundamentally different types of operations (explosive device targeting infrastructure versus armed team targeting an individual) in two different provinces (Punjab versus Sindh) separated by seven months. This command authority would need to maintain target lists, allocate operational resources, manage distinct operational teams (bomb-makers versus gunmen), and integrate the intelligence products generated by each operation into the planning of subsequent ones. The existence of such a command structure, if confirmed, would represent a significant organizational capability within India’s external intelligence architecture, a capability that subsequent operations in Karachi, Sialkot, Rawalakot, Bajaur, Lahore, and North Waziristan would further demonstrate and refine.

Pakistani authorities made no public connection between Rehmani’s killing and any international dimension at the time. The police filed the case as a criminal matter. No FIR was publicly disclosed linking the incident to intelligence activities. When Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi held his January 2024 press conference formally alleging Indian involvement in targeted killings on Pakistani soil, he specifically named the murders of Muhammad Riaz (killed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in September 2023) and Shahid Latif (killed in Sialkot in October 2023). He did not name Rehmani explicitly, though he acknowledged additional cases at various stages of investigation.

The absence of Rehmani’s name from the formal Pakistani diplomatic position is itself instructive. Pakistan’s government appears to have constructed its case around the highest-profile, most recent, and most clearly documented instances, leaving earlier cases like Rehmani’s in an analytical gray zone where the official position neither confirms nor denies their connection to the broader pattern. This selective acknowledgment allows Pakistan to maintain the rhetorical force of its allegations against India while avoiding the forensic burden of accounting for every killing that might or might not belong to the same campaign. For the analytical purpose of this profile, the relevant question is not whether Pakistan has formally attributed Rehmani’s killing to India, but whether the target selection logic, the timing, and the operational context are consistent with the pattern that subsequent events would establish.

Who Was Saleem Rehmani

Saleem Rehmani, operating under the alias Abu Saad, was a Pakistani national based in Nawab Shah (the administrative designation for the Shaheed Benazirabad district of Sindh). His significance in the broader conflict between India and Pakistan stems not from organizational seniority or headline-generating attacks but from his documented role in the recruitment and logistics pipeline that moved motivated fighters from Pakistani territory toward the Line of Control and into Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.

India’s National Investigation Agency placed Rehmani on its wanted list and subsequently issued posters seeking information about him. In December 2022, approximately eleven months after his death, the NIA put up public posters identifying four individuals connected to a conspiracy to radicalize, motivate, and recruit youth in Jammu and Kashmir. Rehmani was named alongside Saifullah Sajid Jatt, a Pakistani national from Shangamanga in Punjab’s Kasur district, and two Kashmiri associates: Sajjad Gul of Srinagar and Basit Ahmad Dar of Redwani Payeen in south Kashmir’s Kulgam district. The NIA offered cash rewards for information and provided phone numbers, WhatsApp contacts, and Telegram channels through which informants could communicate.

The NIA’s characterization of Rehmani places him within a specific functional category in the cross-border ecosystem. Rehmani was not a field commander who led armed incursions. He was not a bomb-maker or a weapons specialist. His documented role involved the human infrastructure of the pipeline: identifying potential recruits, facilitating communication between Pakistani handlers and Kashmiri contacts, and providing logistical support for infiltration across the heavily militarized border. This functional role, while less dramatic than the roles played by individuals like Shahid Latif (the Pathankot attack mastermind) or Zahoor Mistry (the IC-814 hijacker), represents a critical vulnerability in the pipeline’s architecture. The ISI-built network that channels recruits toward Kashmir depends on mid-level facilitators like Rehmani to connect the upstream supply of radicalized young men with the downstream operational infrastructure that deploys them.

Rehmani’s alias, Abu Saad, follows the kunya naming convention common across South Asian and Middle Eastern militant organizations, where operatives adopt honorific pseudonyms (Abu meaning “father of”) to obscure their legal identities and signal their affiliation with jihadist networks. The use of a kunya suggests integration into organized militant structures rather than freelance criminal activity. It indicates that Rehmani was known within the network by this operational name, that handlers and associates referred to him by this identifier, and that his recruitment and facilitation activities were embedded within an organizational framework that tracked and managed its personnel through standardized nomenclature.

The geographic distribution of the four individuals named in the NIA posters traces the recruitment pipeline’s operational footprint. Rehmani was based in Nawab Shah, Sindh, approximately 1,400 kilometers from the Line of Control by road. Saifullah Sajid Jatt was based in Kasur, Punjab, closer to the Indian border but still hundreds of kilometers from Kashmir. Sajjad Gul operated in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, on the receiving end of the pipeline. Basit Ahmad Dar was based in Kulgam, a district in south Kashmir with a documented history of militant activity. This four-point geography describes a complete network: two Pakistani-based facilitators providing upstream support, and two Kashmir-based operatives providing downstream activation. Rehmani’s position in Sindh, far from the border, suggests a role focused on recruitment, communication, or financial logistics rather than physical facilitation of border crossings.

Nawab Shah, where Rehmani was based and killed, has a complicated relationship with militant activity in Pakistan. The city is the heartland of Sindh’s Bhutto political dynasty and hosts the provincial headquarters of the Pakistan Peoples Party. It is not traditionally associated with Kashmiri jihad in the way that Lahore, Rawalpindi, Bahawalpur, or Muzaffarabad are. Rehmani’s presence in Nawab Shah raises the question of whether militant recruitment networks have extended their geographic reach further into Pakistan’s interior than previously assumed, or whether specific individuals like Rehmani serve as nodes connecting otherwise disconnected regions to the broader pipeline. The fact that Mullah Sardar Hussain Arain, a Jamat-ud-Dawah figure, was later shot dead in the same Nawab Shah district in August 2023 suggests that the area’s apparent disconnection from the Kashmir conflict infrastructure may be more appearance than reality.

Rehmani’s biographical details remain thin in open-source reporting. Pakistani media did not identify him as anything other than a mart owner at the time of his killing. Indian media reports compiled in April 2024, when The Guardian’s investigation brought the targeted killing pattern into international spotlight, mentioned Rehmani only in passing as one name on a growing list. This scarcity of biographical detail is itself characteristic of the thin-information targets that populate the campaign’s early phase. High-value, high-profile targets like Zahoor Mistry (whose decades-long operational history stretches back to the IC-814 hijacking of 1999) or Shahid Latif (whose role in the 2016 Pathankot airbase attack generated extensive documentation) produce rich archival trails. Mid-level facilitators like Rehmani leave smaller footprints, known to the intelligence agencies that tracked them but invisible to the journalists and analysts who would later attempt to reconstruct their stories.

What can be reconstructed from available evidence is a profile of a man embedded in the human infrastructure of cross-border terrorism, designated by the Indian government as a threat, identified by name and alias in NIA investigative materials, and operating from a location in Sindh’s interior that suggests either a hub function in the recruitment pipeline or a deliberate effort to position key facilitators away from the border regions where security scrutiny is highest. The NIA’s decision to continue publicizing Rehmani’s photograph and seeking information about him in December 2022, eleven months after his death, may reflect either a bureaucratic lag in updating wanted lists or a deliberate strategy to maintain pressure on the surviving members of his network by demonstrating that India’s investigative apparatus continued to track and publicize the identities of those involved in the conspiracy.

The question of Rehmani’s personal radicalization trajectory, while impossible to answer from available open-source materials, invites broader observation about how individuals in Pakistan’s Sindh province become integrated into Kashmir-focused militant networks. Sindh’s political and cultural traditions differ markedly from Punjab, where Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed maintain their deepest social roots. The Sindhi political tradition, shaped by Sufi Islam’s syncretic practices, the PPP’s secular nationalism, and a historically pragmatic relationship with the Pakistani state, does not produce the same ideological pipeline that Punjab’s Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith seminary networks generate. Rehmani’s integration into a Kashmir-focused recruitment network operating from Nawab Shah therefore requires either individual radicalization through personal contacts, exposure to online propaganda, or institutional recruitment rather than the community-level pipeline that operates in Punjab’s seminary belt. This distinction matters because it suggests that the recruitment networks have diversified their geographic sourcing beyond their traditional strongholds, recruiting facilitators in regions where their presence is less expected and therefore less surveilled.

The cover identity question is equally significant. Dawn’s reporting describes Rehmani as the owner of a commercial mart at a petrol pump, a legitimate commercial occupation that would explain his presence in Nawabshah and provide cover for his actual activities. The use of commercial cover identities is standard practice across militant networks globally, from Hezbollah’s business fronts in West Africa to the LeT front organizations that operate charitable enterprises across Pakistan. For Rehmani, the mart provided three essential elements: a plausible explanation for his presence in Nawab Shah, a source of income that did not require external financial support that might attract banking or tax scrutiny, and a physical location where meetings, transfers, and communications could occur without arousing the suspicion that a residential location might generate. The fact that the mart was located at a petrol pump adds a logistical dimension: petrol stations in Pakistan serve as informal social hubs where travelers, truck drivers, and locals converge, creating a natural flow of visitors that would mask any unusual foot traffic associated with Rehmani’s facilitation activities.

The Attacks Rehmani Enabled

Rehmani’s documented role centers on the recruitment and facilitation infrastructure rather than specific named terror attacks. The NIA’s characterization, connecting him to a conspiracy to radicalize, motivate, and recruit youth of Jammu and Kashmir, frames his contribution to the cross-border threat as systemic rather than episodic. He was not accused of planning a single spectacular assault. His alleged activities contributed to the continuous pipeline that has sustained decades of armed violence in the Kashmir valley.

Understanding what this systemic role means in practice requires examining the recruitment pipeline itself. Jammu and Kashmir has experienced continuous armed violence since the late 1980s, when a popular insurrection against Indian governance evolved into a Pakistan-supported armed insurgency. The insurgency has sustained itself across four decades because the supply of motivated fighters has never been permanently interrupted. Every generation of casualties on the Indian side, whether from ambushes on security convoys, attacks on military camps, or targeted assassinations of police and intelligence personnel, traces back to a recruitment and deployment system that identifies candidates, trains them, arms them, and infiltrates them across the Line of Control.

This pipeline has multiple tiers. At the top, organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed provide the organizational framework, the ideological justification, the training camps, and the command structure. Below them, a layer of recruiters, facilitators, and logistics coordinators handles the practical mechanics of identifying potential recruits, radicalization through madrassa networks and online propaganda, communication between Pakistani handlers and Kashmiri contacts, financial transfers to support operations in the valley, and the physical facilitation of border crossings. Rehmani, according to the NIA’s characterization, operated in this facilitator tier.

The attacks this tier enables are diffuse rather than concentrated. A single high-profile attack like the January 2023 Dhangri massacre in Rajouri district, which killed approximately seven civilians, or the April 2025 Pahalgam massacre that precipitated Operation Sindoor, represents the visible endpoint of a chain that stretches through training camps, weapons caches, safe houses, communication nodes, and recruiters. Rehmani’s alleged contribution, motivating and recruiting youth for violence, sits near the beginning of that chain. Every youth successfully recruited and deployed toward the LoC represents the output of work performed by facilitators like him. The aggregate impact of such facilitation, measured across years and dozens of individual recruits, may exceed the casualties produced by any single spectacular attack, though it never generates the concentrated media attention that a Pathankot or a Pulwama commands.

The 2023 Dhangri massacre in Jammu’s Rajouri district offers a concrete case study of how recruitment facilitation translates into operational violence. On January 1, 2023, armed assailants entered Dhangri village and fired indiscriminately, killing approximately seven civilians. The attack was subsequently attributed to militant infrastructure that operated across the LoC with support from handlers in Pakistan. While no direct link between Rehmani and the Dhangri attack has been publicly established, the type of cross-border recruitment and radicalization that Rehmani allegedly facilitated is precisely the mechanism that produces the fighters who execute such assaults. Every attack in Kashmir traces back through an infiltration event to a training camp to a recruitment node. Rehmani’s alleged role in the recruitment phase places him at the beginning of chains that terminate in civilian casualties.

The scale of this recruitment infrastructure deserves quantitative contextualization. Indian Army estimates have periodically placed the number of active militants in the Kashmir valley at between 100 and 300 at any given time. These figures represent the operational end-state of a pipeline that processes many more individuals than it ultimately deploys. For every fighter who successfully infiltrates across the LoC and survives long enough to conduct operations, multiple candidates fail at various pipeline stages: some are intercepted at the border, some drop out during training, some are arrested before deployment, and some never advance beyond the radicalization stage. The pipeline’s conversion rate, from initial recruitment contact to deployed operative, is almost certainly well below fifty percent, meaning that the recruitment effort must process several multiples of the number of active fighters to maintain the insurgency’s manpower.

Facilitators like Rehmani serve as the pipeline’s intake mechanism. Their effectiveness is measured not by the number of fighters they personally send across the LoC but by the number of potential recruits they identify, contact, and begin processing through the radicalization and logistics chain. Each successful contact represents a potential future combatant. Each unsuccessful contact still expands the recruitment network’s reach and intelligence about potential sympathizers. Even failed recruitment attempts provide organizational intelligence: which communities are receptive, which mosques produce candidates, which social media channels reach vulnerable demographics, which financial incentives overcome resistance. Rehmani’s alleged activities generated this intelligence as a byproduct of his recruitment efforts, intelligence that the organizational hierarchy could exploit even after Rehmani himself was eliminated.

Sajjad Gul, one of the four individuals named alongside Rehmani in the NIA’s December 2022 posters, provides a concrete illustration of what the recruitment pipeline produces. Gul, operating from Srinagar, served as a handler and recruiter on the Indian side of the LoC. His activities included radicalizing local youth, providing them with contacts and instructions from Pakistani handlers, and facilitating the operational deployment of new recruits within the valley. Gul’s Srinagar operations were the downstream end of a pipeline whose upstream end included facilitators like Rehmani in Pakistan’s interior. The NIA’s decision to name both men in the same set of posters reflects an investigative assessment that their activities were connected, that Rehmani in Nawab Shah and Gul in Srinagar were nodes in the same network rather than independent actors pursuing separate objectives.

Basit Ahmad Dar, the fourth named individual from Kulgam, represents yet another node. Kulgam district in south Kashmir has been a persistent hotbed of militant activity, with multiple encounters between security forces and armed fighters documented across the past decade. Dar’s alleged role in the conspiracy connects the Kulgam theater of operations back to the Pakistani side of the pipeline through exactly the kind of mid-level facilitation that Rehmani is alleged to have provided.

The geographic logic of this network deserves careful examination. Rehmani in Nawab Shah, Sindh, is approximately 1,400 kilometers by road from the nearest crossing point on the LoC. Jatt in Kasur, Punjab, is approximately 400 kilometers from Jammu. The physical distance between the Pakistani facilitators and the Kashmiri operatives means that the pipeline’s communication and coordination functions depend on remote contact, through encrypted messaging applications, satellite phones, hawala transfers, and intermediary couriers, rather than direct physical interaction. Rehmani’s value to the network lay not in his proximity to the conflict zone but in his ability to function as a remote node, recruiting, motivating, and facilitating from a location far enough from the border to avoid the concentrated security surveillance that India and Pakistan jointly maintain along the LoC.

The pipeline analogy is imperfect because it suggests a linear flow from recruitment to deployment. The actual structure more closely resembles a distributed network with redundant nodes, where the loss of any single facilitator can be absorbed by reassigning his functions to surviving members. This architectural resilience is precisely what makes the campaign’s targeting of mid-level facilitators analytically interesting. Christine Fair, the Georgetown University scholar whose work on Pakistan’s military culture (“Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War”) provides the theoretical framework for understanding why safe havens persist, argues that Pakistan’s support for militant proxies is structurally embedded in the state’s strategic culture rather than dependent on individual leaders. If Fair’s assessment is correct, then eliminating Rehmani disrupts the network temporarily but does not destroy the institutional incentive to rebuild. If, on the other hand, the network’s mid-level human capital is more difficult to replace than its leadership assumes, then systematically targeting facilitators like Rehmani imposes cumulative degradation that compounds with each additional loss.

The campaign’s architects appear to have recognized this second possibility. Rehmani’s killing was not an isolated event aimed at a single facilitator. It was the first in a sequence that would include Mistry in March 2022, followed by a dramatic acceleration in 2023 that targeted individuals across the organizational spectrum from field operatives to co-founders. The decision to begin with mid-level facilitators rather than headline-grabbing senior leaders suggests a strategic logic focused on degrading operational capacity rather than generating deterrent spectacle. Rehmani’s death would not make news in Delhi or Washington, but it would send a signal through the network’s internal communication channels that its members were not safe even in remote, ostensibly anonymous locations in Sindh’s interior.

Network Connections

Rehmani’s network position, as reconstructed from the NIA poster and open-source reporting, connects him to at least three distinct functional tiers of the cross-border recruitment and deployment infrastructure.

At the operational level, his documented association with Sajjad Gul in Srinagar and Basit Ahmad Dar in Kulgam establishes a direct link between Rehmani’s Sindh-based activities and active operations in the Kashmir valley. Gul’s Srinagar cell represented the terminal node of whatever recruitment and facilitation pipeline Rehmani fed into, meaning that every individual motivated or recruited through Rehmani’s efforts was potentially directed toward Gul’s handling and deployment operations. The NIA’s grouping of these four individuals in a single investigative frame implies that the agency possessed evidence, from intercepted communications, arrested network members, or confiscated devices, demonstrating coordination between them.

At the organizational level, the NIA’s description of the conspiracy (“to radicalize, motivate and recruit youths of Jammu and Kashmir to carry out violence in India”) places Rehmani within the broad ecosystem of Pakistan-based groups that sustain the Kashmir insurgency. The NIA’s posters did not specify which particular organization Rehmani belonged to. This omission may reflect a genuinely complex affiliation picture in which mid-level facilitators serve multiple organizations simultaneously, or it may reflect an investigative strategy that focused on the network’s functional activities rather than its organizational labels. Either way, Rehmani’s activities align with the recruitment functions performed by Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Jamaat-ud-Dawah charitable front, by Jaish-e-Mohammed’s madrassa network, and by Hizbul Mujahideen’s Kashmir-focused recruitment operations.

At the geographic level, Rehmani’s Nawab Shah base connects him to a broader Sindh-based militant presence that subsequent eliminations would expose. Mullah Sardar Hussain Arain, a Jamat-ud-Dawah figure shot dead in Nawab Shah district in August 2023, approximately twenty months after Rehmani’s killing, represents a second data point in the same geographic theater. The appearance of two separate targets within the same district suggests either a localized cluster of militant-affiliated individuals operating under cover identities in Sindh’s interior, or a systematic campaign that worked through its target list district by district. Nawab Shah’s transformation from a city with no known counter-terrorism significance into a theater where two India-designated individuals were killed within twenty months merits dedicated analysis in the context of the campaign’s geographic expansion across Pakistan’s safe haven network.

Rehmani’s association with Saifullah Sajid Jatt introduces a cross-provincial dimension. Jatt, based in Kasur in Punjab province, operated approximately 800 kilometers from Rehmani’s Nawab Shah location. The distance implies that their coordination was remote rather than personal, mediated through the communication infrastructure that connects Pakistan’s dispersed militant support nodes. Kasur, located near the Indian border south of Lahore, has periodically appeared in reports of militant activity linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Punjab operations. Jatt’s geographic position, closer to the border than Rehmani’s, suggests a possible division of labor where Rehmani handled upstream recruitment and motivation while Jatt managed logistics closer to the deployment corridor.

The network analysis extends beyond the four NIA-named individuals to the organizational ecosystem that sustained them. Rehmani did not operate in a vacuum. His recruitment and facilitation activities required access to a supply of potential recruits (young men vulnerable to radicalization), a communication channel to Pakistani intelligence handlers or militant commanders who directed the pipeline, a financial mechanism to support the costs of recruitment and deployment, and a degree of local protection, whether from sympathetic community members, corrupt local officials, or organizational safe houses, that allowed him to operate without interference from Pakistani law enforcement. Each of these support functions implicates additional individuals and institutions whose identities may never appear in public reporting but whose existence is necessary for the pipeline to function.

Toby Dalton, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies escalation dynamics between nuclear states, has examined how covert action operates in the India-Pakistan context. Dalton’s framework suggests that the escalatory risk of targeted killings on foreign soil depends partly on the symbolic value of the targets. A mid-level facilitator like Rehmani, killed in a remote Sindh town under cover of apparent criminal violence, presents a fundamentally different escalatory profile than a senior organizational leader killed in a high-visibility operation in Lahore or Islamabad. The campaign’s decision to begin with low-visibility targets in peripheral locations, which Rehmani’s case exemplifies, is consistent with a strategy that tests operational capability and gauges the adversary’s detection and response threshold before escalating to higher-value, higher-risk targets. Each successful low-visibility operation provides intelligence about Pakistani law enforcement response times, forensic capabilities, media attention patterns, and diplomatic sensitivity, information that informs the planning of subsequent operations at higher risk levels.

Understanding Rehmani’s network position requires situating him within the broader institutional architecture that Pakistan’s military establishment has constructed over four decades to project proxy power into Indian-administered Kashmir. This architecture, which the ISI-terror nexus analysis documents comprehensively, operates through multiple organizational layers that insulate the state from direct attribution while maintaining functional control over armed proxy groups that execute operations. At the apex sits the ISI’s S-Wing, the directorate responsible for external covert operations. Below S-Wing, organizational commanders in LeT, JeM, and HM provide the strategic direction and operational planning. Below the commanders, a tier of mid-level facilitators, recruiters, trainers, and logistics coordinators handles the practical mechanics that convert strategic intent into operational capability. Rehmani operated in this middle tier.

The mid-tier’s functional significance is often underestimated in journalistic and analytical coverage that focuses on headline-grabbing senior leaders. Hafiz Saeed generates diplomatic communiques; Masood Azhar generates UN sanctions committee debates; Syed Salahuddin generates cable news segments. Mid-level facilitators like Rehmani generate none of these things, but they generate the operational output that keeps the pipeline functional. Without recruiters who can identify and radicalize potential fighters in Pakistan’s towns and cities, without logistics coordinators who can move money and materials, without communication intermediaries who can connect Pakistani handlers with Kashmiri assets, the organizational superstructure built by Saeed and Azhar produces speeches and sermons but not armed fighters crossing the LoC.

This structural analysis has direct implications for the campaign’s targeting logic. If the objective is to degrade the pipeline’s operational capacity rather than to generate deterrent spectacle, targeting mid-level facilitators offers a higher return on operational investment than targeting senior leaders who have already been publicly neutralized through imprisonment (Saeed), political isolation (Azhar), or diplomatic marginalization (Salahuddin). Saeed sits in a Pakistani jail cell; his imprisonment has not prevented LeT’s operational infrastructure from functioning. Targeting the Rehmanis of the network, the facilitators who convert organizational intent into operational capability, attacks the mechanism that makes the pipeline function rather than the figurehead who claims credit for its output.

The Sindh dimension of Rehmani’s network position also connects to a broader geographic pattern that the campaign has progressively exposed. Prior to the campaign’s initiation, analytical assessments of Pakistan’s militant infrastructure focused predominantly on three geographic centers: Punjab (home to LeT and JeM headquarters, training camps, and leadership), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas (operational base for the Taliban and affiliated groups), and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (staging ground for infiltration across the LoC). Sindh, with its secular political traditions and PPP-dominated governance, was largely absent from these assessments. Rehmani’s Nawab Shah base, followed by Mullah Sardar Hussain Arain’s presence in the same district, and by other Sindh-based operations that would follow, challenged this geographic assumption by demonstrating that armed support infrastructure extends further into Pakistan’s interior than previously documented.

Ayesha Siddiqa, the Pakistani defense analyst whose seminal work “Military Inc.” documents the Pakistan Army’s economic empire and institutional culture, provides a framework for understanding how militant-support networks embed themselves in Pakistan’s civilian infrastructure. Siddiqa’s analysis argues that the military establishment’s penetration of Pakistani civilian society creates zones of impunity where military-connected activities, including those related to militant proxy management, operate without interference from civilian law enforcement. In Nawab Shah, where the military’s direct presence is less visible than in garrison cities like Rawalpindi or Sialkot, this zone of impunity may operate through indirect channels: sympathetic local politicians, cooperative police officials, or religious institutions that provide cover for individuals whose activities extend beyond their stated occupations. Rehmani’s ability to maintain a mart at a petrol pump while simultaneously engaging in recruitment and facilitation activities reflects this dual-identity pattern that characterizes militant operatives across Pakistan’s urban and semi-urban landscape.

The Hunt

Reconstructing the intelligence preparation that preceded Rehmani’s killing requires inference from the operational outcome, since no government has disclosed details of the targeting process. Several elements of the Nawabshah operation imply intelligence capabilities that extend significantly beyond the visible facts of the killing itself.

Locating Rehmani in Nawab Shah required either human intelligence assets within the Sindh-based militant support network or signals intelligence capability that intercepted communications linking Rehmani’s real identity to his operational alias Abu Saad and his physical location. The NIA’s ability to name him in its wanted posters, complete with his alias, his city of origin, and his role in the conspiracy, demonstrates that Indian intelligence possessed detailed biographical information about Rehmani. The question is whether this information was obtained through the NIA’s domestic investigation of the Kashmir recruitment network (working backward from arrested Kashmiri operatives who revealed their Pakistani handlers’ identities) or through external intelligence operations conducted inside Pakistan by the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

If the identification came from the NIA’s domestic investigative work, the process likely involved the arrest and interrogation of network members on the Indian side, the extraction of communication records from confiscated devices, the identification of Pakistani-based contacts through phone numbers, email addresses, or messaging application identifiers, and the cross-referencing of those identifiers with available intelligence databases to establish real-name identities and locations. This investigative process, familiar to counter-terrorism practitioners globally, could produce the information needed to identify Rehmani without requiring any operational presence inside Pakistan.

If the identification came from RAW’s external intelligence operations, the process may have involved assets within Pakistan’s militant ecosystem who could confirm identities and locations in real time. The distinction matters because the second scenario implies an existing intelligence infrastructure inside Pakistan that predates the killing campaign, a network of sources, handlers, and communication channels already in place and capable of providing actionable targeting information. Christine Fair’s analysis of India’s intelligence capabilities argues that India has historically maintained a significantly more limited external intelligence infrastructure compared to peer agencies like Mossad or the CIA. If the targeting of Rehmani required real-time location intelligence from assets inside Sindh, it would represent either a significant expansion of India’s intelligence footprint inside Pakistan or the activation of pre-existing networks that had been maintained for contingency purposes.

The operational execution in Nawabshah reveals additional intelligence dimensions. Three armed men who knew Rehmani’s precise location, his daily routine (present at the mart on a Sunday), and the physical layout of the premises entered with sufficient confidence to initiate an armed confrontation. This knowledge implies either prolonged surveillance of the target or a highly placed informant within Rehmani’s social circle who could provide real-time information about his movements and schedule. Surveillance in a small city like Nawabshah, where outsiders attract attention and unfamiliar faces are noticed, requires either local assets who can conduct surveillance without arousing suspicion or technological capabilities (satellite imagery, mobile phone tracking, network analysis) that can substitute for physical presence.

The messier outcome of the Nawabshah operation, with Rehmani’s brother wounded and one attacker killed by return fire from mart workers, may indicate that the intelligence preparation was incomplete or that the operational execution encountered unexpected variables. Later operations in the campaign, such as the motorcycle-borne precision hits documented in the pattern analysis, achieved cleaner outcomes: target killed, attacker escaped, no collateral casualties. The improvement in operational outcomes from Rehmani (January 2022) through Mistry (March 2022) and onward through the 2023 acceleration wave may reflect a learning curve, where each operation generated lessons that were incorporated into the planning and execution of subsequent ones.

The loss of an attacker in the Nawabshah operation presents a particular intelligence risk for the campaign’s architects. A dead attacker leaves forensic evidence: fingerprints, DNA, clothing, weapons, and potentially documents or devices that could be traced to handlers. Pakistani investigators, if they pursued the case with determination, would have had access to this physical evidence. Whether they did pursue it, and what they found, has never been publicly disclosed. The absence of any public Pakistani investigation connecting the dead attacker to a foreign intelligence operation suggests either that the investigation was suppressed (consistent with Pakistan’s selective approach to acknowledging the killings), that the attacker’s identity led to domestic criminal networks rather than foreign intelligence services (consistent with a contract-killer model where the operational network recruits local criminal talent for specific jobs), or that the forensic trail was insufficient to establish any connection beyond the immediate crime scene.

The contract-killer hypothesis deserves serious examination in the context of the Rehmani case. If India’s intelligence apparatus is responsible for the broader campaign, the operational model that achieves deniability while maintaining target selectivity most likely involves a chain of intermediaries between the intelligence principals who identify targets and the local criminal operatives who carry out the killings. Saikat Datta, a veteran Indian defense journalist who has reported extensively on India’s intelligence establishment, has noted that intelligence agencies historically prefer operational models that insulate the principal from the executor, creating layers of deniability that protect the sponsoring state even if individual operatives are caught. In this model, the three men who entered Rehmani’s mart were probably not intelligence professionals. They were likely local criminal talent recruited and directed by intermediaries who themselves maintained contact with the intelligence network that provided the target identification and operational approval. This layered structure explains both the campaign’s deniability and its occasional operational imperfections.

The distinction between this layered model and a direct-action model (where trained intelligence operatives personally execute the killing) has significant implications for understanding the campaign’s scalability and its vulnerability to compromise. A direct-action model using a small team of trained operatives limits the number of operations that can be conducted simultaneously but offers greater control over operational quality and security. A contract-killer model using locally recruited criminal operatives enables greater operational volume (multiple operations across geographically dispersed locations within compressed timeframes) but accepts greater variability in execution quality and higher risk that an arrested operative could reveal the intermediary chain. The evidence from the campaign’s operational history suggests a contract-killer model: the geographic dispersion of killings across multiple provinces within short timeframes (three killings in the first two weeks of November 2023, for instance, spanning Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, and Sindh) would be difficult to achieve with a single direct-action team, while the occasional operational imperfections (Rehmani’s messy outcome, the rare instances of target survival) are consistent with locally recruited operatives whose training and professionalism vary.

Rehmani’s Nawabshah killing may represent the contract model at its earliest and most unrefined stage. The three-man team’s decision to enter an enclosed space where the target had access to armed employees suggests either inadequate surveillance of the target’s environment or a reliance on operatives who lacked the tactical discipline to control the encounter. Later operations, where motorcycle-borne assailants approach targets in semi-public outdoor settings (leaving mosques after prayers, walking on streets, sitting at shops), minimize the variables that can produce the kind of chaotic armed exchange that occurred in Nawabshah. The tactical evolution from enclosed-space confrontation to open-environment precision targeting likely reflects both lessons learned from early operations and the recruitment of operatives with better tactical instincts.

The forensic trail left by the dead attacker in Nawabshah represents the campaign’s most significant early-phase vulnerability. In a well-resourced investigation, the attacker’s identity could lead to his associates, his associates to their handlers, and their handlers to the intermediary network connecting the operational executors to the intelligence principals. This chain of discovery is precisely what the layered operational model is designed to prevent: each link in the chain is meant to know only the link above and the link below, ensuring that the compromise of any single node does not expose the entire network. Whether Pakistani investigators followed this chain, and what they found if they did, remains undisclosed. The ISI’s own capabilities in forensic investigation and network analysis are substantial. If the ISI chose to investigate the Nawabshah killing thoroughly, it likely possessed the technical capability to trace the dead attacker’s identity, communications, and financial transactions. The absence of publicly announced results may indicate that the investigation was suppressed at the institutional level, that the results were too sensitive to disclose (perhaps implicating elements within Pakistan’s own security apparatus that had been co-opted or compromised), or that the operational security of the layered model successfully prevented the forensic trail from reaching its principals.

The intelligence preparation for the Rehmani operation, whatever its specific form, required solving a problem that every subsequent operation in the campaign would also face: how to locate and reach a designated target inside a sovereign nation that has not consented to the operation, where the operating environment is unfamiliar and potentially hostile, and where the consequences of failure or attribution could escalate to a bilateral crisis between nuclear-armed states. Rehmani’s killing in January 2022 demonstrated that this problem was solvable. The March 2022 Mistry killing in Karachi demonstrated that the solution was repeatable. The 2023 acceleration demonstrated that it was scalable. Each of these conclusions was available to the campaign’s architects only because the Nawabshah operation had been executed first.

Pakistan’s Response

Pakistan’s official response to the Rehmani killing in January 2022 was characterized by localization and minimization. Nawabshah’s SSP attributed the incident to personal enmity. Local police filed the case as a criminal matter. No Pakistani official connected the killing to international intelligence activity, cross-border tensions, or the broader India-Pakistan conflict. Rehmani’s death was processed through the ordinary criminal justice system of Sindh province, where it joined the long roster of unsolved violent crimes that Pakistani police departments manage with limited investigative resources and competing institutional priorities.

This localization strategy, whether deliberate or reflexive, served Pakistan’s institutional interests at the time. Acknowledging that a person designated by India as a wanted individual had been assassinated inside Pakistan by operatives potentially connected to Indian intelligence would have created multiple problems for Islamabad. It would have confirmed India’s allegation that Pakistan harbored designated individuals on its soil, validating the very accusation that Pakistani diplomats had spent decades denying. It would have exposed Pakistan’s security apparatus as incapable of protecting individuals living within its borders, undermining the state’s claim to sovereign control over its territory. It would have created pressure for a retaliatory response, escalating a covert confrontation into a potential diplomatic or military crisis. By treating the killing as a local crime, Pakistan’s security establishment avoided all three consequences simultaneously.

The cost of this strategy became apparent only as the pattern accumulated. Each individual killing that Pakistani authorities attributed to robbery, personal enmity, tribal feuds, or internal militant rivalries added another data point to a sequence that, viewed collectively, pointed overwhelmingly toward a systematic campaign. By the time Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Qazi held his January 2024 press conference formally alleging Indian involvement, the accumulation of cases had made the localization strategy unsustainable. But the damage was done: by failing to investigate and publicize the early cases like Rehmani’s, Pakistan had surrendered the initiative in the attribution debate, allowing the campaign to operate for nearly two years before official acknowledgment.

The Indian government’s response to Rehmani’s killing was silence. No Indian official commented on the Nawabshah incident. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs made no statement. Indian media did not report on the death of a man whose name appeared on NIA wanted lists. This silence is consistent with India’s categorical denial of involvement in extraterritorial killings. When Pakistani allegations eventually surfaced, the MEA described them as attempts at “peddling false propaganda,” stating that Pakistan would “reap what it sows” and reminding the international community that Pakistan has long been “the epicentre of terrorism, organized crime, and illegal transnational activities.” India’s rhetorical strategy combines categorical denial with implicit justification, simultaneously claiming no involvement while noting that Pakistan’s harboring of designated individuals creates the conditions for consequences.

The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation, which brought the targeted killing pattern into international attention by citing unnamed Indian and Pakistani intelligence officials, mentioned the broader pattern without focusing on the Rehmani case specifically. The investigation’s unnamed Indian intelligence sources reportedly acknowledged India’s role in multiple killings on Pakistani soil, while Indian government officials maintained formal denials. Al Jazeera’s subsequent reporting in April 2024 included Rehmani among the cases that Pakistani security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, attributed to a “hostile intelligence agency,” the Pakistani intelligence community’s euphemism for RAW.

Pakistan’s investigation of the Rehmani case, to the extent that one occurred, has produced no publicly disclosed results. No arrests have been announced. No suspects beyond the dead attacker have been identified in public reporting. The investigation’s apparent dormancy matches the pattern observed across the campaign’s other cases. Praveen Swami, the Indian Express counter-terrorism analyst who has tracked the elimination pattern with considerable detail, notes that Pakistan’s investigative response to the killings has been consistent in its inconsistency, sometimes alleging Indian involvement at the diplomatic level while failing to produce the forensic evidence, witness testimony, or investigative conclusions that would substantiate those allegations in any legal or evidentiary forum. This gap between diplomatic accusation and investigative substance is not necessarily evidence that Pakistan lacks the evidence. It may reflect a strategic calculation that public disclosure of detailed evidence would reveal the extent to which Pakistan’s intelligence agencies were monitoring, protecting, or benefiting from the designated individuals who were killed, exposure that would be diplomatically more damaging than the killings themselves.

Al Jazeera’s Abid Hussain, who conducted one of the most thorough journalistic investigations into the targeted killing pattern, reported in April 2024 that Pakistani security officials speaking on condition of anonymity had identified at least eight killings they believed were carried out by a “hostile intelligence agency.” Those officials acknowledged six killings in 2023 and two in the preceding years, a count that would encompass the 2022 period when Rehmani was killed. Their use of “hostile intelligence agency” rather than “RAW” or “India” represents a diplomatic calibration: acknowledging the foreign-intelligence dimension while maintaining a degree of ambiguity that preserves Pakistan’s options for escalation or de-escalation depending on the political context. This calibration mirrors the approach taken by Pakistani officials in the Lahore car bomb case, where NSA Moeed Yusuf blamed India publicly in July 2021 without providing detailed forensic evidence to support the attribution.

Pakistan’s domestic political dynamics in early 2022 also shaped the institutional response. The country’s political establishment was consumed by the constitutional crisis surrounding the ouster of Prime Minister Imran Khan, which would culminate in the parliamentary vote of no confidence in April 2022. The intelligence and security establishment’s attention was divided between the external threat represented by the targeted killings and the internal turbulence of a political transition. In this environment, a single killing in Nawabshah, even if connected to foreign intelligence activity, could not compete for institutional bandwidth with the existential questions consuming Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership.

The military establishment’s response to the broader campaign has evolved over time from denial through deflection to formal accusation, a trajectory that the Rehmani case, as an early data point, helps illuminate. In the immediate aftermath of individual early killings, the military’s posture was one of non-acknowledgment: the kills did not officially exist as a pattern, and local police explanations sufficed. By mid-2023, as the pace accelerated and the MO’s consistency became undeniable, the military shifted to deflection, attributing individual cases to internal rivalries, criminal violence, or tribal feuds while avoiding the systemic acknowledgment that would demand a strategic response. By January 2024, with Foreign Secretary Qazi’s press conference, the shift to formal accusation was complete, though the accusation remained selective (naming only two specific cases publicly) and the forensic evidentiary basis remained undisclosed.

This evolutionary trajectory has strategic implications for both sides. For the campaign’s architects, the two-year window between Rehmani’s January 2022 killing and Pakistan’s January 2024 formal accusation represents a period of uncontested operational freedom, during which the campaign could develop, refine, and scale its methodology without meaningful diplomatic or military pushback. For Pakistan, the belated accusation carries the disadvantage of retrospective framing: having allowed two years to pass without formal protest, Pakistan’s diplomatic position is weakened by the implied admission that its security agencies were either unaware of the killings (suggesting incompetence) or aware but unable to prevent or respond (suggesting strategic impotence).

The international community’s response to the Rehmani case, and to the early phase of the campaign generally, was nonexistent. In January 2022, the world’s attention was focused on the Russian military buildup around Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic’s evolving trajectory, and domestic political dynamics in the United States, Europe, and China. A killing at a petrol pump in Nawabshah, Sindh, registered nowhere on the global agenda. This international inattention, combined with Pakistan’s localization strategy and India’s silence, created a permissive operational environment in which the campaign could develop its methodology, expand its geographic reach, and accelerate its tempo without external scrutiny. By the time international media organizations began investigating the pattern in 2024, the campaign had been operating for nearly three years and had eliminated numerous designated targets across multiple Pakistani provinces.

What This Elimination Reveals

Saleem Rehmani’s killing in Nawabshah in January 2022 is chronologically one of the earliest confirmed data points in what would become the most extensive covert counter-terrorism campaign in India’s history. Its analytical significance derives not from Rehmani’s organizational seniority, which was modest, or from his operational profile, which was that of a mid-level facilitator rather than a headline-generating commander, but from what the case reveals about the campaign’s design, initiation logic, and learning trajectory.

The first revelation concerns target selection criteria in the campaign’s initiation phase. The decision to begin with a mid-level facilitator in a remote Sindh town rather than a high-value organizational leader in Lahore or Rawalpindi suggests a calibrated approach to risk management. A high-profile early operation, targeting a figure like Hafiz Saeed or Masood Azhar, would have generated immediate international attention, forced Pakistan into a public response, and created escalatory dynamics that could have shut down the campaign before it developed operational momentum. Rehmani was valuable precisely because his elimination would not trigger these consequences. His designation status confirmed that targeting him served India’s counter-terrorism objectives. His obscurity ensured that targeting him would not trigger the diplomatic and military escalation that more prominent targets would provoke.

This initiation-phase logic mirrors patterns observed in other state-directed covert campaigns. Israel’s Mossad operations following the 1972 Munich massacre began with lower-priority targets in accessible European locations before escalating to higher-value targets in more challenging operational environments. The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan’s tribal areas during the early 2000s began with strikes against mid-level commanders before escalating to high-value targets like Baitullah Mehsud and eventually Osama bin Laden. Toby Dalton’s Carnegie framework for analyzing covert action between nuclear states identifies a common pattern of graduated escalation in which early operations test capabilities, gauge adversary responses, and build institutional confidence before the campaign moves to operations that carry higher risk and higher strategic returns.

The second revelation concerns the campaign’s learning curve. The Rehmani operation’s imperfect execution, three men entering an enclosed space, an armed confrontation with collateral engagement, and the death of one attacker, contrasts sharply with the clean motorcycle-borne precision hits that characterized the campaign from mid-2022 onward. This improvement was not accidental. It represents systematic operational learning: the analysis of what went wrong or could be improved in each operation, the incorporation of those lessons into subsequent planning, and the progressive refinement of a tactical methodology until it achieved the consistency and deniability that the campaign required for sustained operations. Rehmani’s case was, in this reading, the test from which the mature methodology was developed.

The third revelation concerns geographic calibration. Nawabshah in January 2022, Karachi in March 2022, Nawabshah again in August 2023, Rawalakot in September 2023, Sialkot in October 2023, Bajaur in 2023, Lahore in 2024, North Waziristan in subsequent operations, and so forth: the campaign’s geographic trajectory describes a progressive expansion from Sindh’s interior to Pakistan’s major urban centers to the tribal periphery. Starting in Nawabshah, a low-scrutiny environment where operational mistakes would attract minimal attention, and then moving to higher-scrutiny environments as the methodology matured, is consistent with a deliberate calibration strategy that matched operational ambition to demonstrated capability.

The fourth revelation concerns the relationship between the covert campaign and the conventional military operations that would follow. When India launched Operation Sindoor in May 2025, striking what New Delhi characterized as terrorist-linked infrastructure inside Pakistani territory with airpower, it was not starting from zero. The intelligence infrastructure required for precision airstrikes, target identification, location confirmation, collateral-damage estimation, and bomb-damage assessment, shares foundational capabilities with the intelligence infrastructure required for targeted killings. The campaign that began with Rehmani in Nawabshah in January 2022 and that expanded through dozens of subsequent operations generated, tested, and refined an intelligence architecture inside Pakistan that proved its value when the conflict escalated from covert targeted killings to open military action. Walter Ladwig’s assessment that Operation Sindoor represents a new baseline for India’s counter-terrorism response gains additional depth when viewed against this three-year preparatory phase. Sindoor was not a bolt from the blue. It was the culmination of a covert infrastructure-building effort whose earliest visible manifestation was a killing at a petrol pump in Nawabshah.

Ladwig’s analysis, published through RUSI after the May 2025 operations, emphasizes the doctrinal shift that Sindoor represents: a move from assembling evidentiary dossiers to direct military action, from treating Pakistan’s failure to control its territory as a diplomatic grievance to treating it as a sufficient justification for military response. This doctrinal shift did not emerge overnight. It developed through the covert campaign’s progressive demonstration that India possessed the intelligence capability to identify and reach targets inside Pakistan, the operational capability to execute precision strikes, and the institutional willingness to accept the risks of acting on Pakistani soil without consent. Rehmani’s case is important in this context not because his killing directly contributed to the Sindoor decision, but because the intelligence infrastructure that located him in Nawab Shah in January 2022 is a precursor, in capability terms, to the intelligence infrastructure that identified strike targets in May 2025.

The escalation ladder that connects Rehmani to Sindoor passes through intermediate rungs that merit enumeration. Rehmani (January 2022): designated facilitator, remote Sindh location, three-man team, messy outcome. Mistry (March 2022): designated hijacker, major city (Karachi), motorcycle-borne pair, clean outcome. Panjwar (May 2023): designated Khalistan separatist leader, high-profile city (Lahore), motorcycle-borne pair, clean outcome. Abu Qasim (September 2023): designated LeT commander, sensitive location (Pakistan-occupied Kashmir), mosque environment, clean outcome. Shahid Latif (October 2023): designated Pathankot mastermind, garrison city (Sialkot), mosque environment, clean outcome. Amir Hamza (2024): LeT co-founder, target survived with injuries, Lahore. Each step on this ladder increased the profile of the target, the sensitivity of the location, or both. Each step required greater operational confidence, better intelligence, and higher tolerance for risk. Rehmani sits at the bottom of this ladder because he was a mid-level facilitator in a remote town. Sindoor sits at the top because it involved conventional military forces striking military-adjacent targets. The ladder exists because each rung was climbed successfully, and no rung could have been attempted without the confidence generated by the preceding one.

The fifth revelation concerns the House Thesis that connects every article in this series: every eliminated target is simultaneously the closing chapter of one story and the opening chapter of another. Rehmani’s story closes a chapter in the recruitment pipeline that sustained the Kashmir insurgency. His death removed a node from the network, disrupted communication channels, and signaled to his associates that their identities and locations were known. His story opens a chapter in the campaign’s institutional development, providing the proof-of-concept data that the architects needed to justify, expand, and sustain the operational infrastructure that would go on to reach into Pakistan’s major cities and most sensitive locations. Rehmani’s killing is not important because Rehmani was important. It is important because it was first.

The early-campaign target selection criteria analysis that emerges from comparing Rehmani, Mistry, and the 2023 acceleration wave reveals a coherent strategic logic. Rehmani: designated target, mid-level facilitator, remote location, low visibility. Mistry: designated target, high-profile operational history (IC-814 hijacking), urban location (Karachi), higher visibility. Shahid Latif: designated target, high-profile operational history (Pathankot airbase attack), sensitive location (Sialkot, a military garrison city), maximum visibility. The progression from Rehmani to Mistry to Latif traces an escalation ladder from minimum to maximum risk, from minimum to maximum visibility, and from minimum to maximum deterrent signaling. Each step on this ladder was possible only because the preceding step had been executed successfully. Rehmani made Mistry possible. Mistry made the 2023 acceleration possible. The 2023 acceleration made Sindoor possible. The chain runs in one direction, from the petrol pump in Nawabshah to the airstrikes over Pakistan’s military installations, and every link in it carries the fingerprints of the one before.

The sixth revelation concerns the campaign’s relationship to the broader history of Indian strategic restraint. For decades following its independence, India absorbed cross-border provocations, from the proxy war in Kashmir that began in 1989 to the Parliament attack of 2001 to the 26/11 Mumbai massacre of 2008, with diplomatic protest, military mobilization, and occasional limited-objective operations (the 2016 surgical strikes across the LoC), but never with the sustained covert operational campaign that the Rehmani killing inaugurated. This restraint was not passive acceptance. It was a strategic choice shaped by nuclear deterrence (Pakistan’s arsenal made full-scale conventional warfare prohibitively risky), diplomatic calculation (India’s growing international stature depended on maintaining a reputation for measured behavior), and institutional caution (India’s intelligence and security establishments historically preferred defensive counter-intelligence and domestic law enforcement over offensive covert action abroad). Rehmani’s killing marks the point at which this calculus changed.

What changed, and why the shift occurred precisely when it did, involves multiple converging factors. The August 2019 revocation of Article 370, which removed Kashmir’s special status within the Indian constitution, represented a political determination that India would no longer treat Kashmir as a negotiable issue requiring Pakistani consent. The February 2019 Balakot airstrike, which crossed a significant escalatory threshold by striking inside Pakistani territory (as opposed to PoK) with airpower, had already demonstrated that India’s political leadership was willing to accept the risks of cross-border military action. The COVID-19 pandemic, which consumed international diplomatic bandwidth through 2020 and 2021, created a permissive environment in which a covert campaign could be initiated without the level of international scrutiny that might have constrained it in normal diplomatic conditions. Rehmani’s killing in January 2022 occurred at the intersection of these converging factors: a political leadership committed to changing the Kashmir status quo, a military establishment that had demonstrated willingness for cross-border action, and an international environment distracted by pandemic recovery and the emerging Ukraine crisis.

The seventh and final revelation concerns information warfare and narrative control. Pakistan’s inability to construct a coherent counter-narrative about the targeted killings stems partly from the dilemma that honest acknowledgment creates. If Pakistan officially and publicly identifies Rehmani, Mistry, Latif, Abu Qasim, and the dozens of other victims as individuals who were designated by India as threats to its national security, Pakistan implicitly confirms that these individuals were indeed living on Pakistani soil and that Pakistan was either harboring them deliberately (validating India’s accusation of state sponsorship of terrorism) or unable to control their presence (validating India’s claim that Pakistan’s ungoverned spaces constitute a threat). Either admission is diplomatically catastrophic for Pakistan, which explains why the official response has oscillated between denial, deflection, and selective acknowledgment without ever committing to a comprehensive accounting of who these individuals were and why they were on Pakistani soil.

India’s narrative strategy has been equally deliberate. By maintaining categorical denial of involvement while allowing unnamed officials to provide background confirmation to journalists like those at The Guardian, India achieves a dual objective: formal deniability that insulates the government from legal and diplomatic liability, combined with informal acknowledgment that serves the deterrent function. PM Modi’s public statement that “today’s India enters your home and strikes” (Aaj Ka Bharat Ghar Mein Ghus Ke Marta Hai) captures this dual strategy in a single rhetorical move. The statement does not name specific operations or claim specific kills. It asserts a capability and a willingness that the audience, both domestic and international, can interpret through the lens of reported events. Rehmani’s killing is never mentioned in Modi’s rhetoric. It does not need to be. The aggregate pattern speaks louder than any individual case.

The complication that this analysis must acknowledge is the attribution question. Rehmani’s killing in January 2022, unlike later cases that fit a clearly defined motorcycle-borne assassination pattern, does not conform to the MO that analysts would subsequently identify as the campaign’s signature. The three-man entry team, the enclosed-space confrontation, and the death of an attacker distinguish the Nawabshah operation from the clean two-person motorcycle hits that characterized Mistry’s, Latif’s, and Abu Qasim’s eliminations. This divergence raises a genuine analytical question: was Rehmani’s killing part of the same campaign, or was it a coincidence that only appears connected in retrospect?

The answer cannot be definitive on available evidence. What can be said is that the target-selection logic (India-designated individual, facilitator role, Sindh-based) is entirely consistent with the campaign’s demonstrated criteria, that the timing (between the June 2021 Lahore car bomb and the March 2022 Mistry killing) positions Rehmani precisely in the campaign’s initiation window, and that the MO divergence is consistent with a campaign that was still developing its tactical methodology in January 2022 and had not yet settled on the refined approach that later operations would employ. An early operation that differs methodologically from mature operations is not evidence of disconnection from the campaign. It is evidence of evolution within the campaign. Every systematic campaign in the history of intelligence operations has displayed methodological evolution from its earliest iterations to its mature form. The CIA’s drone program evolved from its first strike in Yemen in 2002 to the sustained campaign in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Mossad’s post-Munich operations evolved from sloppy early hits in Rome and Paris to the precision of later operations in Beirut and Damascus. If India’s campaign followed the same trajectory, Rehmani’s killing is exactly where the rough-edged beginning would appear.

The Nawabshah petrol pump, where Saleem Rehmani died on a Sunday in January 2022, is an unremarkable place. Its significance is entirely retrospective, conferred by the events that followed rather than by the event itself. Rehmani’s killing mattered not because of who Rehmani was but because of what the operation proved: that India’s intelligence architecture could locate a designated target inside Pakistan, reach him with armed operatives, and eliminate him without triggering the diplomatic or military consequences that would shut down the campaign before it could develop. That proof-of-concept, validated in an obscure Sindh town and subsequently replicated across Pakistan’s major cities and most sensitive locations, is the foundation on which the most consequential covert counter-terrorism campaign of this century has been built.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who was Saleem Rehmani?

Saleem Rehmani, alias Abu Saad, was a Pakistani national based in Nawab Shah (Shaheed Benazirabad district) in Sindh province. India’s National Investigation Agency identified him as wanted in connection with a conspiracy to radicalize, motivate, and recruit youth of Jammu and Kashmir for violence against the Indian state. He was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in January 2022 at a commercial mart in Nawabshah’s Taj Colony neighborhood. The Indian government placed his name on its most-wanted list, and the NIA issued public posters seeking information about him and three associated individuals in December 2022, approximately eleven months after his death. His role in the cross-border recruitment pipeline, while less prominent than senior organizational commanders, made him a functional node in the infrastructure that sustained armed violence in the Kashmir valley.

Q: When and where was Saleem Rehmani killed?

Rehmani was killed in early January 2022 in Taj Colony, Nawabshah, in the Shaheed Benazirabad district of Sindh province, Pakistan. The killing occurred at a commercial mart located at a petrol pump. Dawn, the Pakistani English-language newspaper, reported the incident on January 3, 2022, describing it as an armed clash between robbery suspects and the mart owner.

Q: Was Rehmani’s killing part of the shadow war campaign?

The attribution remains analytically debatable. The timing (January 2022, between the June 2021 Lahore car bomb and the March 2022 Mistry killing) positions Rehmani’s killing squarely within the campaign’s initiation phase. His status as an India-designated individual is consistent with the target-selection criteria that defined every subsequent confirmed case. The MO, however, differed from the motorcycle-borne precision hits that became the campaign’s signature from March 2022 onward. The most credible interpretation is that the Rehmani operation was an early iteration of the campaign, executed before the tactical methodology had been refined into the standardized approach visible in later operations.

Q: Why was Rehmani on India’s most-wanted list?

The NIA identified Rehmani as part of a conspiracy to radicalize, motivate, and recruit youth in Jammu and Kashmir for violence in India. He was named alongside Saifullah Sajid Jatt (from Kasur, Punjab), Sajjad Gul (from Srinagar, Kashmir), and Basit Ahmad Dar (from Kulgam, south Kashmir) in NIA posters issued in December 2022. His designation reflected his role in the cross-border recruitment pipeline rather than involvement in a specific, named terror attack.

Q: What organization was Rehmani affiliated with?

The NIA’s public materials did not specify a particular organizational affiliation for Rehmani. His recruitment and facilitation role could have served Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, or multiple organizations simultaneously. Mid-level facilitators in the Pakistan-to-Kashmir pipeline frequently operate across organizational boundaries, serving the recruitment and logistics needs of whichever group their handlers direct them to support.

Q: How does Rehmani’s killing fit the broader pattern of targeted eliminations?

Rehmani’s January 2022 killing is one of the earliest confirmed cases in a pattern that includes Zahoor Mistry (Karachi, March 2022), Mullah Sardar Hussain Arain (Nawabshah, August 2023), Abu Qasim (Rawalakot, September 2023), Shahid Latif (Sialkot, October 2023), Paramjit Singh Panjwar (Lahore, May 2023), and dozens of additional cases through 2024, 2025, and 2026. All targets were individuals designated by India as threats to national security, all were killed by unidentified gunmen, and no group claimed responsibility for any of the killings.

Q: Was January 2022 the beginning of the shadow war?

If the June 2021 car bomb near Hafiz Saeed’s Lahore residence is considered the campaign’s declaration of intent, then January 2022 marks the beginning of confirmed lethal operations. The Rehmani killing represents the proof-of-concept phase, followed by the March 2022 Mistry killing that established the campaign’s signature methodology, and the 2023 acceleration that demonstrated scaling capability.

Q: What happened in the aftermath of Rehmani’s killing?

Pakistani police from the Bullo Ja Qaba station filed the case as a criminal matter. Nawabshah’s SSP attributed the incident to personal enmity rather than robbery. No arrests were publicly announced. No investigation linked the killing to international intelligence activity at the time. Only retrospective analysis, conducted after subsequent killings established the broader pattern, identified Rehmani’s case as a potential early instance of the campaign.

Q: Why did Pakistani police call it personal enmity rather than terrorism?

The personal enmity characterization served Pakistan’s institutional interests by localizing the incident and preventing it from becoming an international news story. Acknowledging that an India-designated individual had been assassinated on Pakistani soil would have confirmed India’s claims about Pakistan harboring designated individuals, exposed Pakistan’s security apparatus as penetrated, and created pressure for diplomatic or military escalation. Attributing the killing to personal enmity avoided all three consequences.

Q: What does the NIA poster about Rehmani reveal?

The December 2022 NIA poster reveals several important facts: that Indian intelligence possessed detailed biographical information about Rehmani (including his alias Abu Saad and his Nawab Shah location), that the NIA connected him to specific Kashmiri associates (Gul and Dar), that the investigation was cross-provincial in scope (Sindh, Punjab, and Kashmir), and that the NIA continued seeking information about him nearly a year after his death, suggesting ongoing investigative interest in the surviving members of his network.

Q: How did Rehmani’s killing differ from later targeted eliminations?

The Rehmani killing involved three armed men entering an enclosed commercial space, an armed confrontation with collateral engagement (Rehmani’s brother wounded, mart workers returning fire), and the death of one attacker. Later operations in the campaign typically involved two motorcycle-borne assailants approaching a target in a semi-public location (outside a mosque, at a shop, during a morning walk), firing at close range, and escaping on the motorcycle before bystanders or police could respond. The cleaner methodology of later operations likely reflects tactical lessons learned from the Nawabshah operation’s messier outcome.

Q: What was Rehmani’s role in the Kashmir recruitment pipeline?

Rehmani’s documented role centered on the upstream functions of the cross-border recruitment pipeline: motivating and recruiting individuals for violence in Jammu and Kashmir, facilitating communication between Pakistani handlers and Kashmiri operatives, and providing logistical support for the movement of radicalized youth toward the Line of Control. His Nawab Shah location, deep inside Sindh’s interior and approximately 1,400 kilometers from the LoC, suggests a remote coordination role rather than physical border-crossing facilitation.

Q: Why was Rehmani based in Nawabshah, far from the Kashmir conflict zone?

Remote basing provides multiple operational advantages for recruitment and facilitation networks. Nawab Shah, deep inside agricultural Sindh, is far from the border regions where Indian and Pakistani intelligence services maintain concentrated surveillance. Operating from a peripheral location reduces the probability of detection by security agencies, allows the facilitator to maintain a legitimate cover identity (in Rehmani’s case, as a mart owner), and disperses the network geographically so that the compromise of any single node does not expose the entire system.

Q: Did India officially acknowledge Rehmani’s killing?

India has made no official statement about Rehmani’s death. India has categorically denied involvement in targeted killings on foreign soil. When Pakistan formally alleged Indian involvement in killings during Foreign Secretary Qazi’s January 2024 press conference, the MEA described the allegations as “false propaganda” and stated that Pakistan has “long been the epicentre of terrorism.” India’s silence on the specific case is consistent with its broader strategy of categorical denial combined with implied justification.

Q: What intelligence capability does Rehmani’s killing suggest?

Locating and reaching Rehmani in Nawabshah required either human intelligence assets within the Sindh-based militant support ecosystem or signals intelligence capability sufficient to connect his real identity to his alias and physical location. The operational execution required knowledge of his daily routine, his presence at the mart, and the physical layout of the premises. This intelligence preparation implies a significant investment in target development that preceded the actual operation by weeks or months.

Q: How does Rehmani’s case compare to Zahoor Mistry’s killing two months later?

Mistry’s March 2022 killing in Karachi’s Akhtar Colony represented a significant methodological refinement compared to Rehmani’s Nawabshah killing. Mistry was killed by two motorcycle-borne assailants who fired at close range and escaped, the clean methodology that would become the campaign’s standard operating procedure. Mistry was a higher-value target (IC-814 hijacker) in a higher-profile location (Karachi). The progression from Rehmani to Mistry demonstrates both tactical learning (cleaner methodology) and strategic escalation (higher-value target, higher-visibility location).

Q: Was Rehmani designated as a terrorist under Indian law?

Indian media and the NIA described Rehmani as “wanted by India as a terrorist.” The NIA’s December 2022 poster sought information about him in connection with an active investigation into cross-border conspiracy. The Indian government had the authority to designate individuals as “individual terrorists” under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), and Rehmani appears to have fallen within this framework based on his documented role in the recruitment and facilitation pipeline.

Q: Could Rehmani’s killing have been an internal Pakistani affair unrelated to India?

This possibility cannot be categorically excluded. Pakistan experiences significant levels of armed violence from internal criminal, political, and militant disputes. However, several factors weigh against a purely domestic explanation: Rehmani’s specific status as an India-designated individual (making his targeting consistent with the campaign’s demonstrated criteria), the timing between the Lahore car bomb and the Mistry killing, the subsequent repetition of similar killings targeting India-designated individuals across Pakistan, and the SSP’s own statement suggesting the killing was targeted rather than random criminal violence. The balance of analytical evidence favors inclusion within the campaign rather than coincidence, while acknowledging that certainty is unavailable.

Q: What does the death of an attacker at the Nawabshah site reveal?

The death of one of the three armed men during the operation provides a rare forensic opportunity for Pakistani investigators. The dead attacker’s identity, possessions, weapons, and any associated devices or documents could potentially trace back to handlers, intermediaries, or operational networks. Whether Pakistani investigators exploited this opportunity has never been publicly disclosed. The absence of any publicly announced investigative breakthrough from this forensic evidence suggests either suppression, insufficient evidence, or a determination that the dead attacker was a locally recruited criminal operative with no traceable connection to foreign intelligence principals, consistent with a layered operational model designed to insulate sponsors from executors.

Q: Why is Rehmani’s case important if his organizational role was relatively modest?

Rehmani’s importance derives from chronology rather than hierarchy. As one of the earliest confirmed cases in the campaign, his killing provides unique insight into the campaign’s initiation-phase logic: how targets were selected when the campaign was being tested, how operations were executed before the methodology was refined, and how the campaign calibrated its geographic and visibility profile during the period when it could least afford detection. Every subsequent operation, including those targeting far more senior figures, built on the operational foundation that the Rehmani case helped establish.

Q: How many people have been killed in similar circumstances since Rehmani?

The number of confirmed and suspected targeted killings of India-designated individuals on Pakistani soil has grown dramatically since Rehmani’s January 2022 death. By mid-2026, estimates from various sources place the total above thirty, with victims spanning Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, Jamat-ud-Dawah, and Khalistan-linked organizations. The acceleration from two suspected cases in 2022 to multiple cases per month by 2025 and 2026 represents an exponential scaling of the campaign that Rehmani’s Nawabshah killing foreshadowed.

Q: What was the significance of the Nawabshah location for the campaign?

Nawabshah, a mid-sized city in Sindh’s agricultural interior, provided the campaign’s architects with a low-risk testing environment. Foreign journalists do not maintain bureaus there. International intelligence agencies do not prioritize surveillance of the area. Pakistani security forces maintain a lower profile in Sindh’s interior than in Punjab’s border cities or KPK’s tribal areas. An operation that failed or generated unwanted attention in Nawabshah would produce local consequences but not national or international ones. This geographic calculus, matching operational risk to environmental exposure, is consistent with the calibrated escalation that characterized the campaign’s trajectory from Nawabshah to Karachi to Sialkot to Lahore and beyond.

Q: Did Rehmani have any connection to the Pahalgam massacre or Operation Sindoor?

No direct connection exists between Rehmani and the April 2025 Pahalgam massacre or the May 2025 Operation Sindoor military strikes. Rehmani was killed more than three years before those events. His significance to the campaign’s trajectory is structural rather than direct: his elimination was an early proof-of-concept operation whose success contributed to the operational confidence and intelligence infrastructure that ultimately enabled the campaign’s escalation through conventional military operations. The chain from Rehmani to Sindoor runs through dozens of intermediate operations, each building on the capabilities and intelligence developed by its predecessors.

Q: What does Rehmani’s case tell us about India’s intelligence capabilities inside Pakistan?

Rehmani’s case suggests that by early 2022, India possessed the intelligence capability to identify specific designated individuals by alias and location inside Pakistan’s Sindh province, to develop targeting information sufficient for operational execution, and to recruit or direct armed operatives capable of reaching and eliminating the target. Whether this capability was developed specifically for the campaign or represents the activation of pre-existing intelligence infrastructure is unknown. The subsequent demonstration of similar capability across multiple Pakistani provinces and cities, from Karachi to Lahore to Sialkot to Rawalakot to Bajaur to North Waziristan, suggests a nationally scaled intelligence footprint rather than localized ad hoc operations.

Q: How does Rehmani’s case relate to the India-Canada diplomatic crisis over Hardeep Singh Nijjar?

The June 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the Khalistan Tiger Force leader shot dead outside a Sikh gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia, and the subsequent allegations by Canadian authorities that Indian government agents were involved, created an international context that intensified scrutiny of India’s alleged extraterritorial operations. While Nijjar’s killing occurred on Canadian soil rather than Pakistani soil, and involved the Khalistan separatist dimension rather than the Kashmir-focused recruitment networks that Rehmani was connected to, the two cases share a common analytical thread: both involve India-designated individuals killed by unidentified gunmen in circumstances that their host governments attributed to Indian intelligence. Rehmani’s case, occurring eighteen months before Nijjar’s, demonstrates that the targeting of designated individuals abroad was already operational before the Canada case brought international attention. The India-Canada diplomatic crisis, and the parallel US allegations regarding an assassination plot against Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun on American soil, elevated the global profile of India’s alleged extraterritorial operations and created the diplomatic backdrop against which the Guardian’s April 2024 investigation into the Pakistan killings was received. Rehmani’s obscure Nawabshah killing thus exists in a diplomatic ecosystem that stretches from Sindh to British Columbia, connected not by operational linkage but by the common pattern of designated individuals dying in circumstances that implicate Indian intelligence.

Q: What role do encrypted communications play in recruitment networks like Rehmani’s?

The NIA’s ability to identify Rehmani’s network, connecting him to Jatt in Punjab, Gul in Srinagar, and Dar in Kulgam, almost certainly depended on intercepted or recovered communications data. Modern recruitment networks have migrated from physical couriers and landline telephone calls to encrypted messaging applications (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal), voice-over-IP calls, and social media platforms that enable cross-border communication without the traditional vulnerabilities of physical border crossings or monitored telephone exchanges. Rehmani’s remote location in Nawab Shah, 1,400 kilometers from the LoC, would have been operationally impractical without digital communication tools enabling real-time coordination with Kashmiri contacts. The NIA’s investigation likely exploited vulnerabilities in these communication channels, whether through device seizures during arrests of network members on the Indian side (Gul’s or Dar’s confiscated phones could contain contact records, message histories, and metadata pointing to Rehmani), through cooperation with technology companies under legal process, or through India’s own signals intelligence capabilities. Each arrested network member on the Indian side potentially compromises the communication security of the entire network, exposing Pakistani-based facilitators like Rehmani to identification even if those facilitators never physically entered Indian territory.

Q: Could Pakistan have protected Rehmani if it had recognized the threat?

Pakistan’s security establishment possesses significant capabilities for protecting individuals it considers valuable. Hafiz Saeed lived under armed guard in Lahore for years. Senior military and intelligence figures receive convoy protection, surveillance countermeasures, and safe-house infrastructure. If Pakistan had identified Rehmani as a target before his killing, it could have provided police protection, relocated him to a more secure environment, or placed him under the protective custody of a military installation. The fact that none of these measures were taken suggests either that Pakistan did not consider Rehmani a likely target (his mid-level status and remote location may have placed him below the threshold for protective attention), that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies did not detect the threat indicators that preceded the operation, or that Pakistan’s security architecture, stretched across multiple simultaneous threats from TTP, Baloch separatists, internal political violence, and the post-Afghanistan regional dynamics, simply did not have the bandwidth to protect every individual on India’s designated lists. The campaign’s subsequent operations against higher-profile targets in more heavily protected environments suggest that even enhanced Pakistani security measures may not have been sufficient to prevent the killing, but the absence of any protective effort in Rehmani’s case indicates that the threat was not anticipated.