For decades, the Line of Control dividing Kashmir functioned as a one-way valve. Militants crossed eastward from Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir into Indian territory, staged attacks that killed soldiers and civilians, and retreated to sanctuaries where no Indian response could reach them. Rawalakot served as a launching pad. Muzaffarabad hosted the United Jihad Council’s headquarters. The Neelum Valley concealed training camps. Pakistan’s military apparatus in PoK existed not to prevent cross-border violence but to facilitate it, providing logistical support, weapons, and passage across mountain trails that Indian forces could monitor but never fully seal. Starting in September 2023, the valve reversed. Two targeted killings inside Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, separated by fewer than sixty days, signaled that the covert elimination campaign documented across India’s shadow war had crossed the Line of Control in the opposite direction, reaching into territory that Pakistan considers its most militarily controlled region outside Punjab proper.

Riyaz Ahmad, known by his operational alias Abu Qasim, was shot in the head at point-blank range during Fajr prayers inside Al-Quds mosque in Rawalakot on September 8, 2023. The attackers knew which mosque he attended, which prayer time offered the optimal window, and which row of the congregation he occupied. Fewer than two months later, Khwaja Shahid, an LeT commander linked to the 2018 Sunjuwan Army camp attack that killed seven people in Jammu, was kidnapped from the Neelum Valley, tortured, and found beheaded near the Line of Control itself. These two cases, radically different in method yet unified by geography, constitute the shadow war’s penetration into a theater that was supposed to be impenetrable. Every previous documented elimination had occurred in Pakistan’s urban centers: Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sialkot. PoK was different. It sits under direct Pakistani military administration, its mountain terrain restricts movement to a handful of monitored roads, and Army checkpoints control access to every population center of significance. Operating here required capabilities that Karachi and Lahore did not demand, and the fact that two operations succeeded within the same two-month window suggests that PoK had become a deliberate theater of expansion rather than an opportunistic target.

The analytical question this article addresses is precise: what does the campaign’s extension into Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir reveal about the operational architecture behind the unknown gunmen pattern, and what does it mean for the militants who believed PoK’s military cordon made them untouchable? The answer, reconstructed from Pakistani police reports, open-source media accounts, and the geographic evidence itself, is that the PoK operations represent the shadow war’s most significant geographic escalation. They demonstrate an intelligence penetration deep enough to operate inside a military zone, and they reverse a dynamic that defined the Kashmir conflict for thirty years.

The Pattern Emerges

Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir occupies a strip of mountainous territory running roughly 250 kilometers from the Poonch sector in the south to the Neelum Valley in the north, sandwiched between the Line of Control to its east and Pakistan’s Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces to its west. Muzaffarabad, the administrative capital, sits at the confluence of the Jhelum and Neelum rivers. Rawalakot, the second-largest town, lies approximately 80 kilometers southeast of Muzaffarabad in the Poonch division. The Neelum Valley extends northward from Muzaffarabad along the LoC for over 200 kilometers, a narrow corridor of villages wedged between steep ridgelines where the Pakistani military maintains a chain of posts and bunkers.

The Pakistan Army’s 12 Infantry Division, headquartered in Murree but operationally responsible for PoK sectors, maintains a heavy presence across the territory. Forward positions along the LoC are reinforced by rear-area garrisons. Civilian movement between PoK and the rest of Pakistan passes through military checkpoints at Kohala Bridge near Muzaffarabad, at the Bagh-Rawalpindi road, and at multiple points along the Rawalakot-Islamabad highway. Unlike Karachi, where the city’s sheer size and chaotic density provide anonymity, or Lahore, where civilian infrastructure absorbs outsiders without remark, PoK’s geography and military overlay mean that unfamiliar faces draw attention. Roads are narrow. Populations are small. The Pakistani military’s Forward Deployment Posture, maintained since the 1999 Kargil conflict, means soldiers and checkpoints are facts of daily life.

This security architecture is precisely why PoK had been considered a sanctuary. Organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen treated PoK as both a staging ground and a retirement home. Militants who had fought in Indian Kashmir crossed back to PoK when the operational environment became too dangerous, settling in towns like Rawalakot, Bagh, and villages along the Neelum Valley. The United Jihad Council, the umbrella organization chaired by Syed Salahuddin from his Muzaffarabad base, coordinated infiltration across the LoC from precisely these staging points. For three decades, the arrangement was stable: militants used PoK as a base, the Pakistani Army facilitated their operations, and India’s only response was defensive, trying to intercept infiltrators on the Indian side of the LoC.

The first disruption of this arrangement came not in PoK itself but in the broader pattern of targeted killings that began accelerating across Pakistan in 2022 and 2023. The elimination of Zahoor Mistry in Karachi in March 2022, followed by the killing of Bashir Ahmad Peer in Rawalpindi in February 2023, established that the campaign could reach into any Pakistani city. By mid-2023, the pace had intensified. Paramjit Singh Panjwar, the Khalistan Commando Force chief, was gunned down during a morning walk in Lahore in May 2023. Ziaur Rahman of LeT was killed in Karachi in September 2023. Each city that produced an elimination expanded the geographic envelope. PoK was the natural next step, not because it was easy but because it was where some of the highest-value remaining targets lived.

The pattern that emerged in PoK during September and November 2023 differed from the urban killings in three critical ways. First, the targets were located in militarily administered territory rather than civilian urban sprawl. Second, the methods diverged dramatically between the two cases, suggesting either different operational cells or deliberate variation to prevent pattern analysis. Third, the geographic proximity to the Line of Control itself raised questions about infiltration routes that had no parallel in the Karachi or Lahore operations.

Understanding why these differences matter requires examining PoK’s specific role in the architecture of India-targeted terrorism. Rawalakot, the town where Abu Qasim was killed, is not an arbitrary location on the map of Pakistan-administered territory. It is the administrative headquarters of the Poonch division in PoK, situated at an elevation of approximately 1,800 meters in a valley surrounded by forested hills. The Poonch sector of the LoC, directly to its east, has been one of the most active infiltration corridors since the inception of the Kashmir insurgency. Indian Army records from the 1990s and 2000s document thousands of infiltration attempts through this sector alone, with launch pads in villages within 20 to 30 kilometers of the Line of Control staging groups of ten to fifteen fighters who would cross during periods of poor visibility or heavy snowfall that degraded Indian surveillance capabilities.

Rawalakot’s road connections illustrate its strategic position. The Rawalakot-Hajira road runs eastward toward the LoC, connecting the town to forward staging areas. The Rawalakot-Islamabad highway, approximately 150 kilometers in length, links the town to Pakistan’s capital through the Kohala Bridge checkpoint near Muzaffarabad and the Murree hills. This dual connectivity, eastward to the LoC and westward to Pakistan’s heartland, made Rawalakot an ideal staging and coordination center for cross-border operations. Militant commanders who needed to maintain contact with ISI handlers in Rawalpindi while directing operations near the LoC could do both from Rawalakot. Abu Qasim’s choice to relocate there from Muridke reflected this operational logic.

The Neelum Valley, where Khwaja Shahid lived and was kidnapped, presents an even more specific geography. Stretching over 200 kilometers northward from Muzaffarabad along the eastern bank of the Neelum River, the valley follows the LoC so closely that in several stretches, the river itself forms the boundary between Indian and Pakistani administered territory. Villages on the Pakistani side sit within direct visual and, in some cases, audible range of Indian positions across the water. The Pakistan Army’s deployment in the Neelum Valley is correspondingly dense: observation posts, bunkers, and small-unit positions dot the ridgelines above the valley road, maintaining surveillance of both the Indian positions across the LoC and the movement of people and vehicles along the single road below.

Historically, the Neelum Valley has served as an auxiliary infiltration route, less trafficked than the Poonch and Rajouri corridors further south but valued precisely because of its relative obscurity. Militants from Hizbul Mujahideen and LeT used Neelum Valley staging areas for infiltrations directed toward the Gurez and Kupwara sectors of Indian Kashmir, crossing at points where the river narrowed or the terrain provided concealment from Indian surveillance posts. Khwaja Shahid’s residence in this valley was consistent with his organizational role: close enough to the LoC to direct operations, protected by the Army’s layered security presence, and sufficiently remote from Pakistan’s urban centers to avoid the attention that the shadow war had brought to Karachi and Lahore.

The acceleration of the shadow war through 2023 created conditions for the campaign’s geographic expansion into PoK. Between January and September 2023, the tempo of killings across Pakistan had intensified to a point where major urban centers were no longer exclusively hosting the campaign. Bashir Ahmad Peer of Hizbul Mujahideen was killed in Rawalpindi in February 2023. Panjwar was killed in Lahore in May 2023. Multiple LeT and JeM operatives fell in Karachi during the summer months. As the urban theaters accumulated casualties, the remaining high-value targets who had avoided detection in cities or who had never lived in cities became the campaign’s logical next priority. PoK, home to an entire class of Kashmiri exile militants who had never relocated to Pakistan’s urban centers, represented the largest untapped theater.

The September 2023 Abu Qasim killing and the November 2023 Khwaja Shahid beheading were therefore not opportunistic events but the product of a geographic expansion that followed a strategic logic: from Karachi outward to Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sialkot, and eventually into the territory that militants had considered their ultimate sanctuary.

Case-by-Case Breakdown

The Rawalakot Mosque Killing: Abu Qasim, September 8, 2023

Riyaz Ahmad, known across intelligence files as Abu Qasim or Abu Qasim Kashmiri, had spent over two decades in the orbit of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s operational infrastructure. Born in the Jammu region, he crossed the Line of Control into Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir in 1999, the same year that the Kargil conflict and the IC-814 hijacking redefined India-Pakistan hostility. His crossing was not unusual. Hundreds of young Kashmiris made the same journey during the late 1990s, drawn by a combination of radicalization, ISI recruitment networks, and the promise of training and purpose on the other side of the mountains.

What distinguished Abu Qasim from the hundreds of foot soldiers who crossed was his organizational trajectory. Rather than remaining a field operative, he rose through LeT’s command structure to become a senior commander with operational authority over a sector of PoK that included the Rajouri infiltration corridor. His primary base was LeT’s Muridke headquarters in Punjab, but he had recently relocated to Rawalakot, a move that Pakistani media later described as motivated by either operational assignments or personal security concerns. The relocation placed him in a town he apparently considered safer than Punjab’s cities, where the unknown gunmen had already struck multiple times.

Abu Qasim’s most significant attributed operation was the Dhangri village attack of January 1-2, 2023, a two-phase assault that devastated a Hindu-majority village in Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir. On the evening of January 1, two gunmen broke into residential homes in the village and opened fire indiscriminately. Deepak Kumar, twenty-three years old, was among the first killed. Satish Kumar, Pritam Lal, and Shishu Pal died alongside him. The next morning, an improvised explosive device that the attackers had planted during the previous night’s chaos detonated near the home of one of the victims, killing two children, four-year-old Vihan Kumar and sixteen-year-old Samiksha Devi. A seventh victim, injured in the initial firing, died in hospital on January 8. The Dhangri attack was particularly vicious in its targeting of a civilian Hindu community and its use of a secondary IED designed to kill mourners and first responders.

The NIA investigation into the Dhangri attack charged three Pakistan-based LeT handlers, accusing them of orchestrating the recruitment and dispatch of the attack team. Indian intelligence sources identified Abu Qasim as a principal coordinator of the Rajouri sector operations, the command chain that produced the Dhangri massacre. Whether his involvement was direct planning or supervisory authorization, his name entered the target list.

On the morning of September 8, 2023, Abu Qasim arrived at Al-Quds mosque in Rawalakot, located near Sabir Shaheed Stadium, for Fajr prayers. According to the FIR filed by Rawalakot police and reported by Dawn, he had stayed overnight at the mosque as a guest of the prayer leader, Qari Amjad Hashmi. He was scheduled to depart Rawalakot on Friday. As the congregation settled into the pre-dawn prayer, Abu Qasim took a position in the second row. A man wearing trousers, a shirt, and a motorcycle helmet entered the mosque. A second individual waited in the mosque’s veranda. The helmeted attacker fired four bullets into Abu Qasim at point-blank range. Death was instantaneous. The two attackers fled immediately.

The operational precision of this killing stands apart from every other documented case in the complete timeline of targeted killings. The attackers knew that Abu Qasim would be at Al-Quds mosque on that specific night, that he would attend Fajr prayers, and that he would be seated in the second row of the congregation. This level of detail implies surveillance over a period of at least days, possibly weeks. Someone had tracked Abu Qasim’s movements to Rawalakot, identified his accommodation arrangement, confirmed his prayer schedule, and relayed this information to the operational team. In a town with a population of approximately 50,000, where Pakistani military personnel are a visible part of the landscape, conducting surveillance without detection required either locally embedded assets or a technical intelligence capability that could track Abu Qasim’s communications and movements remotely.

The choice to strike inside a mosque during prayer is significant. It mirrors the prayer-time targeting pattern documented in Shahid Latif’s October 2023 killing in Sialkot, where another LeT operative was shot during mosque prayers. Prayer times are the one daily routine that observant Muslims maintain with clockwork regularity: the same mosque, the same time, the same position in the congregation. For an attacker, this predictability eliminates the uncertainty that characterizes other targeting windows. Abu Qasim could have changed his route to the market, altered his schedule for meetings, or varied his movement patterns. He could not vary Fajr prayers without abandoning the religious practice that defined his social identity.

Abu Qasim’s body was transported from Rawalakot to Chakswari town in Mirpur district, where his ten-member family lived in rented accommodation. His funeral and burial took place in Chakswari. The Pakistan Army went on high alert across PoK following the killing, a response that acknowledged both the security failure and the implications. A wanted LeT commander had been assassinated inside a mosque in a military-administered territory. Every assumption about PoK’s security had been punctured.

The Neelum Valley Beheading: Khwaja Shahid, November 2023

If Abu Qasim’s killing demonstrated surgical precision in a controlled environment, the Khwaja Shahid case demonstrated something rawer and more disturbing: the capacity to kidnap, interrogate, and execute a target in one of the most militarily saturated corridors in South Asia.

Khwaja Shahid, operating under the alias Mian Mujahid, was a Lashkar-e-Taiba commander resident in the Neelum Valley, the narrow strip of territory that runs along the LoC northward from Muzaffarabad. His operational history included a primary connection to the February 10, 2018, attack on the Sunjuwan Military Station in Jammu. That assault, launched at 4:10 a.m. by three Jaish-e-Mohammed fidayeen fighters, killed six Indian Army soldiers and one civilian while injuring twenty others, including fourteen soldiers and five women and children from military families. The battle lasted over twenty-four hours before all three attackers were killed. India’s defense minister at the time, Nirmala Sitharaman, publicly declared that Pakistan would pay for the attack.

Indian intelligence assessments linked Khwaja Shahid not to JeM but to LeT, identifying him as one of the planners who coordinated with JeM’s operational team for the Sunjuwan strike. Cross-organizational collaboration between LeT and JeM, facilitated by the ISI, is a recurring feature of major attacks against Indian military targets. The 2016 Pathankot airbase attack and the 2016 Uri assault both involved coordination between the two organizations, with ISI functioning as the bridge that linked their otherwise distinct command structures. Khwaja Shahid’s role in the Sunjuwan operation placed him firmly on India’s target list, particularly after Amir Hamza, another figure linked to major attacks, was killed in Jhelum in June 2024.

In late October or early November 2023, Khwaja Shahid was kidnapped by unknown assailants from the Neelum Valley. The kidnapping itself sent shockwaves through the ISI’s operational ranks, according to Indian media reports citing intelligence sources. A senior LeT commander had been seized from territory where the Pakistan Army maintains a continuous chain of outposts, where civilian movement is monitored, and where strangers are noticed. The logistics of a kidnapping in the Neelum Valley are formidable. The valley’s single road follows the river between mountain walls, with Army positions at intervals. Moving a captive along this corridor without detection implies either military complicity, an alternate route through the mountains, or a safe house within the valley where the captive could be held until conditions permitted movement.

On approximately November 5, 2023, Khwaja Shahid’s body was discovered near the Line of Control. He had been beheaded. His body bore evidence of severe torture preceding the execution. No organization claimed responsibility. Pakistani police launched an investigation that, as of the available reporting, has produced no public arrests.

The beheading represents a methodological departure from every other documented killing in the shadow war. The modus operandi analysis that characterizes the broader campaign identifies motorcycle-borne shooters, point-blank firearm executions, and rapid escape as the standard operational template. Beheading requires captivity, time, and a psychological intent that goes beyond elimination into the territory of messaging. Whether the beheading was intended to send a specific signal to PoK-based militants, to extract information during the torture phase, or to complicate attribution by mimicking the methods of groups like Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan is a question the available evidence does not definitively answer.

What the evidence does establish is that the Khwaja Shahid operation required an operational capability that no previous elimination in the series had demonstrated. Kidnapping a target, holding him for a period of days, extracting him to a location near the LoC, and executing him there implies a team with deep local knowledge, physical infrastructure for captivity, and the confidence to operate for an extended period in militarily patrolled territory. The Abu Qasim operation was a surgical strike: enter, shoot, exit. The Khwaja Shahid operation was an extended campaign within a single case.

Modus Operandi Analysis

The two PoK operations, examined side by side, present a paradox. They share a geographic theater but employ methods so different that they could plausibly be attributed to entirely separate operational architectures. Resolving this paradox requires examining what the two cases share beneath their surface differences and what those shared elements reveal about the intelligence capability operating in PoK.

Both operations targeted LeT-affiliated commanders with documented connections to specific terror attacks against Indian targets. Abu Qasim was linked to the January 2023 Dhangri massacre. Khwaja Shahid was linked to the February 2018 Sunjuwan attack. The target selection criterion, choosing operatives with attributable blood on their hands rather than administrative figures or ideologues, is consistent with the broader campaign’s pattern. Hafiz Saeed, the LeT founder, has not been targeted despite being India’s most prominent designated enemy. Instead, the campaign has systematically eliminated the operational layer: the commanders who plan infiltrations, coordinate attacks, and manage the logistics of cross-border violence. Abu Qasim and Khwaja Shahid fit this profile precisely.

Both operations required intelligence penetration into PoK’s social and geographic landscape. Someone had to know where Abu Qasim was sleeping on the night of September 7-8, 2023, which mosque he planned to attend for Fajr, and his position within the congregation. Someone had to know Khwaja Shahid’s location in the Neelum Valley, his movement patterns, and the optimal window for a kidnapping. This intelligence could have originated from human sources embedded within PoK’s militant community, from technical surveillance of communications, or from a combination of both. The level of detail in the Abu Qasim case, knowing the specific mosque and the specific row, strongly suggests a human source with direct proximity to the target.

The divergence in method, however, is striking. Firearms at point-blank range followed by immediate escape is the standard template, replicated in Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Sialkot with consistent efficiency. The Rawalakot mosque killing fits this template cleanly. Two operatives, one shooter and one lookout, a motorcycle-helmet disguise, and a rapid exit. The operation lasted seconds. The beheading in the Neelum Valley breaks every element of this template. It required sustained physical control of the target, a holding location, and an extended timeline measured in days rather than seconds.

One interpretation is that the methodological divergence reflects different operational cells with different capabilities and different instructions. The mosque killing may have been executed by the same type of contracted local assets that The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation described: criminals or impoverished locals recruited by intelligence handlers and paid through Dubai-routed hawala channels. The beheading may have been conducted by a different type of asset entirely, perhaps a team with cross-LoC infiltration capability who brought skills and methods honed in counter-insurgency environments where such tactics carry specific psychological weight.

An alternative interpretation is that the methodological divergence is itself the message. By employing two radically different approaches in the same theater within the same sixty-day period, the campaign demonstrated operational versatility. It communicated to PoK-based militants that no single security precaution could protect them. Avoiding mosques would not save them from kidnapping. Surrounding themselves with bodyguards would not save them from a point-blank ambush during prayer. The variety of methods, rather than indicating organizational fragmentation, could indicate a deliberate strategy of keeping targets uncertain about the nature of the threat they face.

The weapon used in the Abu Qasim case, a handgun fired at point-blank range, is consistent with the suppressed or unsuppressed pistols documented in other shadow war eliminations. The four bullets fired suggests a deliberate kill shot rather than a spray of automatic fire. The helmet worn by the attacker served the dual purpose of concealing identity and facilitating a motorcycle-based escape through Rawalakot’s streets. Pakistani media reports that the Pakistan Army went on high alert after the killing suggest that the military response was reactive rather than preventive, meaning that no prior intelligence about the operation had reached Pakistani security forces.

The Khwaja Shahid case, by contrast, leaves a heavier forensic footprint. Kidnapping requires physical confrontation. Captivity requires a location. Torture leaves evidence on the body. Beheading requires tools and proximity. Discovery near the Line of Control suggests either that the body was deposited there as a deliberate territorial statement or that the operational team moved toward the LoC after the execution, perhaps to cross back to the Indian side. If the latter, it would represent the most direct evidence yet of cross-LoC operational capability, an intelligence team moving westward into PoK, conducting an operation, and then moving eastward back across the Line of Control.

The Intelligence Architecture

Operating in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir demands an intelligence architecture fundamentally different from what the urban theaters of Karachi, Lahore, or Rawalpindi require. Understanding why requires examining PoK’s layered security environment and then reconstructing what kind of network could operate within it.

Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city with a population exceeding 15 million, offers operational anonymity by default. The city’s ethnic fragmentation, gang violence, criminal underworld, and sheer human density mean that outsiders can move through neighborhoods without attracting systematic attention. The targeted killings in Karachi, documented extensively in the Karachi elimination analysis, exploit this anonymity. Motorcycle-borne shooters blend into traffic. Safe houses can be rented without questions. Escape routes lead into a labyrinth of streets that no police force can seal in real time.

Lahore, while more ordered than Karachi, still offers the advantages of a metropolitan area with a population of over 11 million. The recent Lahore targeting surge demonstrated that even proximity to LeT’s Muridke headquarters and the Pakistan Army’s garrison infrastructure could not prevent killings when the intelligence preparation was sufficient. Lahore’s bazaars, residential neighborhoods, and transport networks provide enough cover for short-duration operations.

PoK offers none of these advantages. Rawalakot, the site of the Abu Qasim killing, has a population of approximately 50,000. The Neelum Valley, where Khwaja Shahid was kidnapped, contains scattered villages along a single road. Strangers are noticed. Accommodations are limited. The Pakistan Army’s presence is not the distant garrison model of Lahore or Rawalpindi but the forward-deployed checkpoint model that places soldiers on roads, bridges, and mountain passes. Operating in this environment, whether the operatives came from outside PoK or were locally recruited, requires a qualitatively different kind of intelligence preparation.

The first layer of that preparation is target location. Identifying that Abu Qasim had relocated from Muridke to Rawalakot required either signals intelligence capable of tracking his communications and movements or a human source within LeT’s command structure who knew about the relocation. Once located in Rawalakot, pinpointing his overnight stay at Al-Quds mosque required proximity surveillance: someone who could observe Abu Qasim’s movements within the town and report them to a handler in near-real time. The overnight stay was apparently arranged through the mosque’s prayer leader, Qari Amjad Hashmi, as a guest arrangement. Knowledge of this arrangement implies either penetration of Abu Qasim’s personal network or surveillance of the mosque itself.

The second layer is operational access. Getting a two-person team into Rawalakot, armed with a handgun and a motorcycle, required navigating the checkpoint architecture that controls access to PoK. The team either entered PoK from Pakistan proper, passing through military checkpoints on the Rawalakot-Islamabad highway, or they were already resident in PoK. If they entered from outside, they needed cover identities and a vehicle that would not attract attention. If they were local, their recruitment, training, and arming represent an intelligence investment in PoK-based assets that would have been built over months or years.

For the Khwaja Shahid operation, the intelligence architecture demands even more. Kidnapping a target in the Neelum Valley, holding him, torturing and executing him, and depositing his body near the LoC requires a team of at least three to five individuals with the physical capability to overpower a trained militant, a safe house or concealed location for the captivity phase, and a route to the LoC that avoids military detection. The Neelum Valley’s geography makes this extraordinarily difficult. The valley is narrow, with steep mountainsides rising from the river. The road that follows the river is the only significant transit route, and it passes through military positions. Moving a captive, alive or dead, along this road without interception implies either corrupt military cooperation, alternate mountain paths known only to locals, or a timing window when military attention was directed elsewhere.

The third layer is exfiltration. After the Abu Qasim mosque killing, the two attackers fled on what is believed to be a motorcycle. Their escape route from Rawalakot remains undocumented in available reporting. No arrests have been publicly announced. In a town of 50,000 with a heightened military presence, two men fleeing a mosque shooting on a motorcycle would be conspicuous unless they had a pre-planned route to a safe house or an exit from the town timed to precede the military alert. The Pakistan Army’s post-killing alert suggests the attackers had already cleared the immediate area before security forces responded.

What all of this points to is an intelligence architecture with multiple components: a signals or human intelligence capability for target location, locally embedded assets for surveillance and operational support, a logistics chain for weapons and transportation, and a planned extraction network. This architecture did not appear overnight. Building the capability to operate in PoK’s constrained environment would have required months of preparation, suggesting that the September 2023 Abu Qasim killing was not an opportunistic strike but the product of deliberate investment in PoK as an operational theater.

The question of whether human intelligence or signals intelligence provided the primary basis for the PoK operations carries significant analytical implications. If HUMINT, meaning locally recruited informants within PoK’s communities or within LeT and Hizbul structures themselves, then the intelligence infrastructure is deeply embedded and difficult for Pakistan to uproot without disrupting its own civilian population base. An informant network in Rawalakot or the Neelum Valley would consist of individuals with legitimate reasons to be present: shopkeepers who observe movement patterns, mosque attendees who notice visitors, neighbors who track arrivals and departures. Such a network operates within the fabric of daily life and cannot be eliminated through checkpoints or military sweeps.

If SIGINT, meaning interception of Abu Qasim’s phone calls, monitoring of messaging applications, or tracking of his device’s location data, then the intelligence capability is technological and potentially replicable across any target who uses electronic communications. LeT commanders in PoK relied on cellular networks and, in many cases, on messaging applications for organizational coordination. Pakistan’s telecommunications infrastructure in PoK routes through a limited number of towers and exchanges, creating choke points where signals can be intercepted. The challenge for SIGINT in PoK is not access to communications but rather converting intercepted data into the kind of precise, time-sensitive location intelligence needed for an assassination: knowing which mosque a target will attend on which night requires either real-time communication monitoring or a pattern established over weeks of historical analysis.

The most likely answer is a combination of both capabilities. SIGINT may have provided the initial identification that Abu Qasim had relocated to Rawalakot, through intercepted communications mentioning the move or through device-location tracking that placed his phone in the Rawalakot area. HUMINT would then have provided the ground-level detail: which mosque, which prayer times, which row. The Khwaja Shahid case may have followed a similar pattern, with SIGINT identifying his Neelum Valley location and HUMINT providing the proximity intelligence needed for a physical kidnapping operation. This combined-intelligence model is consistent with the approach described in The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation, where Indian intelligence operatives discussed using both technical surveillance and locally recruited assets to prepare operations inside Pakistan.

The institutional question is equally significant. Who within India’s intelligence apparatus possesses the authority and capability to plan and approve operations in PoK, territory that India claims as its own and that carries distinct political sensitivity compared to operations in Karachi or Lahore? PoK operations cross a boundary that is simultaneously strategic and symbolic. They occur in territory adjacent to the LoC, where India’s own military presence creates both opportunity and risk. A successful PoK operation validates India’s claim that its writ extends to territory it considers illegally occupied. A failed operation, particularly one resulting in captured Indian operatives, would create a diplomatic catastrophe that operations in Pakistan’s heartland would not.

Competing Theories

The question of attribution for the PoK killings mirrors the broader debate surrounding the entire shadow war campaign, with additional complexity introduced by PoK’s unique geographic and political characteristics.

The Indian Intelligence Operation Theory

The most widely circulated attribution, advanced by Indian media, intelligence-linked analysts, and The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation, holds that India’s Research and Analysis Wing has orchestrated a systematic campaign of targeted killings against India’s most-wanted terrorists on Pakistani soil. In this framework, the PoK operations represent a geographic extension of the same program that has produced eliminations in Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Sialkot. The target selection fits: both Abu Qasim and Khwaja Shahid were LeT commanders linked to specific attacks against Indian civilians and military personnel. The timing fits: the PoK killings occurred during the accelerated phase of eliminations in late 2023, when the campaign’s tempo increased across all theaters. And the operational signatures, while different from each other, share the common thread of detailed intelligence preparation that points to a state-level capability rather than freelance or criminal violence.

Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi explicitly named the Abu Qasim killing during a January 2024 press conference, citing it alongside the Shahid Latif killing in Sialkot as evidence of Indian intelligence operations on Pakistani soil. The Guardian’s subsequent reporting, citing unnamed Indian intelligence operatives, described a campaign triggered by the 2019 Pulwama attack, after which one operative stated that the approach changed to targeting elements outside India before they could launch attacks. The phrase “we had to get to the source” captured the operational logic.

For the PoK cases specifically, this theory requires accepting that RAW possesses the capability to operate inside militarily administered territory, recruiting or infiltrating assets past Army checkpoints and into communities where the military maintains active surveillance. This is a significant claim. If true, it represents a qualitative escalation beyond the urban killings, suggesting penetration of Pakistan’s security apparatus at a level that Islamabad would find deeply alarming.

The Internal Rivalry Theory

Pakistan’s alternative narrative, articulated through official channels and echoed by some Western analysts, holds that many of the killings attributed to Indian intelligence are actually the result of internal rivalries: turf wars between militant factions, criminal disputes, or ISI house-cleaning operations where Pakistan’s own intelligence agency eliminates assets that have become liabilities.

For the PoK cases, this theory faces significant challenges. Abu Qasim was an active LeT commander, not a retired or disgruntled operative. His recent relocation from Muridke to Rawalakot suggests organizational assignment rather than personal falling-out. No internal LeT rivalry has been documented that would explain his targeted killing inside a mosque during prayers. The method, a helmeted gunman entering a mosque with a backup lookout and executing a specific individual with four shots, does not match the profile of criminal or factional violence in PoK, which tends toward roadside ambushes or confrontations rather than precision assassination.

The Khwaja Shahid case presents a more ambiguous picture. His kidnapping, torture, and beheading resemble the methods employed by Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan in their operations against Pakistani military and intelligence targets. TTP has conducted kidnappings and beheadings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas, and their reach into PoK, while not extensively documented, cannot be ruled out. An internal rivalry within Pakistan’s armed groups, where TTP or an affiliated faction targeted an LeT commander for organizational or territorial reasons, is a theoretically possible alternative.

Against this interpretation, three factors weigh heavily. First, Khwaja Shahid was on India’s most-wanted list specifically for the Sunjuwan attack, placing him in the same target category as every other eliminated militant in the campaign. Second, the timing of his killing, within weeks of Abu Qasim’s assassination in the same PoK theater, suggests a connected campaign rather than coincidental internal violence. Third, no Pakistani faction, including TTP, claimed responsibility, and TTP’s standard practice is to publicize its operations for propaganda value. Silent, unclaimed killings are the signature of the shadow war, not of TTP.

The Adjudication

Analyst Christine Fair of Georgetown University has argued that the pattern of unclaimed targeted killings of India’s most-wanted terrorists, concentrated among LeT and JeM operatives with specific attack histories, represents circumstantial evidence of a state-directed campaign rather than random violence. The PoK cases strengthen this argument. The targets were selected from India’s priority list. The intelligence preparation required state-level resources. The methods, while different, both required capabilities beyond what criminal or factional actors in PoK possess. The internal-rivalry theory fails to explain why both victims were India-wanted operatives killed within the same sixty-day window in the same geographic theater.

The most analytically honest position is that the PoK operations represent an extension of the documented campaign into new territory, with the caveat that the beheading method introduces a methodological outlier that may indicate a different type of operational asset. Whether cross-LoC teams, locally recruited Kashmiri assets, or a combination of both conducted the operations remains genuinely uncertain. What is not uncertain is the strategic intent: the shadow war has demonstrated that PoK’s military cordon does not provide sanctuary.

The LoC Reversal: Thirty Years of One-Way Traffic Undone

For three decades, the Line of Control functioned as an asymmetric border. On one side, India maintained a defensive posture, attempting to prevent infiltration through fencing, electronic surveillance, and military patrols. On the other side, Pakistan facilitated the movement of trained militants eastward, through infiltration corridors that exploited gaps in the fence, seasonal vegetation cover, and the cooperation of Pakistan Army posts that provided suppressive fire during crossing attempts.

The numbers tell the story of this asymmetry. During the peak years of the Kashmir insurgency in the 1990s and early 2000s, Indian security forces estimated that hundreds of militants crossed the LoC annually. The Rajouri and Poonch sectors, which correspond to the PoK areas around Rawalakot where Abu Qasim operated, were primary infiltration corridors. Launch pads in Rawalakot and villages along the LoC in the Poonch division served as staging areas where groups of militants would assemble, receive final instructions, and wait for weather conditions and intelligence on Indian Army patrol patterns before attempting the crossing.

India’s responses to this infiltration were always defensive. The border fence, constructed starting in 2003, reduced infiltration volumes significantly but never eliminated them. Surveillance technology improved. Counter-infiltration operations killed many infiltrators during the crossing attempt or shortly after. Surgical strikes after the 2016 Uri attack crossed the LoC as a military response but targeted empty or low-value camps rather than specific individuals. Until 2023, no reported Indian operation had crossed the LoC to target a specific named individual in PoK.

The Abu Qasim and Khwaja Shahid killings reversed this dynamic. For the first time in the documented record, lethal operations crossed from the Indian direction into Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, not as military strikes against infrastructure but as intelligence-led precision operations against named individuals. The infiltration corridor became a two-way street. The launch pads that had sent militants eastward for three decades now harbored targets that could be reached from the east.

This reversal carries implications that extend beyond the two individual cases. If the shadow war can operate in PoK’s constrained, militarily patrolled environment, then no PoK-based militant can assume geographic protection. Syed Salahuddin, the United Jihad Council chairman based in Muzaffarabad, is the most prominent remaining target in PoK. His protection depends on Pakistani military security and his own precautions, but the Abu Qasim case demonstrated that military security in PoK can be penetrated, and the Khwaja Shahid case demonstrated that even kidnapping and extended operations are possible. The calculus of sanctuary has fundamentally shifted.

Myra MacDonald, whose work on the LoC as a geopolitical boundary examines decades of Indian and Pakistani military posturing along the line, has analyzed how the LoC’s function has evolved from a ceasefire line to an active operational corridor. The shadow war’s extension into PoK represents the latest transformation: the LoC is no longer a barrier that India defends and Pakistan exploits. It has become a permeable boundary that allows lethal operations in both directions.

The psychological impact of this reversal on the PoK-based Kashmiri exile community cannot be overstated. Shuja Nawaz, the defense analyst and author whose work on Pakistan’s military traces the institutional culture that governs PoK administration, has noted that the Army’s relationship with militant organizations in PoK operates through a layer of plausible deniability that serves both parties. The Army benefits from the militants’ operational utility against India while maintaining the fiction of PoK’s self-governance. Militants benefit from the Army’s security umbrella while maintaining the fiction of operating independently. The PoK killings stripped away both fictions simultaneously. The Army’s security umbrella had failed, and the militants’ claim to autonomous operational capability was revealed as dependence on protection that could be penetrated.

For the Kashmiri fighters who crossed the LoC in the 1990s and early 2000s, many of whom are now middle-aged men with families, the reversal carried personal implications as acute as any strategic calculation. These individuals had built lives in PoK on the assumption that the crossing they made decades ago had placed them beyond India’s reach. They had married, raised children, established routines that included regular mosque attendance, shopping at local markets, and visiting relatives across PoK’s scattered towns. The Abu Qasim killing demonstrated that these routines had been observed and catalogued by an intelligence apparatus that could exploit them lethally. The Khwaja Shahid kidnapping demonstrated that physical safety could be violated not only through a brief ambush but through extended captivity in territory where the Pakistan Army’s sentries were supposed to guarantee security. The documented behavioral changes among Kashmir-origin militants in Pakistan accelerated sharply after the PoK killings, with the PoK-based segment of the exile community experiencing the most dramatic shift toward operational concealment precisely because the PoK security environment had been their final assumption of safety.

PoK Versus Urban Pakistan: An Operational Comparison

Understanding the significance of the PoK operations requires comparing the operational challenges of the PoK theater against the urban theaters where the campaign has been most active.

In Karachi, the shadow war’s most productive theater by body count, the operational advantages include a population exceeding 15 million, ethnic diversity that allows outsiders to blend in, endemic criminal violence that provides cover for targeted killings, a weak and fragmented police force, and escape routes that lead into ethnic neighborhoods where pursuit becomes politically and physically impossible. The Karachi elimination analysis documents how the city’s chaos is itself an operational asset. Motorcycle-borne shooters in Karachi are invisible because motorcycle traffic is ubiquitous and shootings are not unusual.

In Lahore, the challenges increase. The city is more ordered, with a stronger police presence and Pakistan Army garrison infrastructure. LeT’s Muridke headquarters sits on the outskirts, and the organization’s political allies maintain influence within the city’s power structures. Conducting operations in Lahore requires more sophisticated cover, better intelligence, and faster exfiltration. The 2026 Lahore surge demonstrated that these challenges could be overcome, but each Lahore operation required more preparation than a comparable Karachi strike.

PoK represents a qualitative escalation beyond both cities. The population density is lower by orders of magnitude, meaning that surveillance and movement are more likely to be noticed. The Pakistani military presence is not a garrison presence but a forward-deployment presence, with soldiers, checkpoints, and communications infrastructure designed specifically to monitor movement in the territory. The geographic constraints of mountain valleys and limited road networks mean that operational teams have fewer escape routes and less room for maneuver. And the proximity to the Line of Control creates a double-edged dynamic: it may provide an insertion and extraction route for cross-LoC teams, but it also places operations near the most heavily monitored and defended boundary in South Asia.

Operating in PoK therefore required the campaign to solve problems that Karachi and Lahore did not pose. Cover identities had to withstand scrutiny at military checkpoints. Weapons had to be procured or smuggled past Army-controlled access points. Safe houses had to be established in communities where housing arrangements are known to neighbors. Surveillance of targets had to be conducted in small-town environments where an unfamiliar face outside a mosque or near a market would be remembered. Every element of the operational chain became more difficult in PoK, and the fact that two operations succeeded within sixty days suggests that the intelligence architecture had overcome these challenges through sustained investment rather than improvisation.

The comparison also extends to the escape phase, which defines the operational timeline’s most vulnerable moment. In Karachi, shooters on motorcycles disappear into traffic within seconds of a killing. The city’s traffic density, its labyrinthine street patterns, and the sheer number of motorcycles (estimated at over 3.5 million registered in the city) make pursuit functionally impossible. A shooter who crosses two or three blocks on a Karachi street merges into an anonymous flow of thousands of identical vehicles. In Lahore, the escape window is tighter but still manageable. The city’s road network, while more structured than Karachi’s, offers multiple routes from any given point to the city’s outskirts, where the surrounding agricultural areas and satellite towns provide concealment.

In Rawalakot, the escape calculus reverses dramatically. The town’s road network consists of a handful of main roads converging on the town center, with secondary roads leading to surrounding villages. Each main road passes through at least one military checkpoint within a few kilometers of the town. A motorcycle fleeing the town after a shooting would be heading toward a checkpoint that, once alerted, could seal the road. The attackers who killed Abu Qasim fled from Al-Quds mosque into this constrained road network and apparently exited the town before the Pakistan Army’s high alert was established. This timing window, between the shooting and the military response, was the critical escape variable. The operational planning would have included precise timing calculations for how long it would take the mosque’s congregation to react, for the reaction to reach the nearest Army post, and for the Army to activate checkpoint closures. Every minute counted in a way that Karachi and Lahore operations never require.

The Neelum Valley’s escape geometry is even more extreme. A single road follows the river through the valley, with military positions at intervals. Exfiltrating the Khwaja Shahid operation required either moving along this single road past military positions while carrying or concealing evidence of the kidnapping, or moving overland through mountain terrain that rises steeply from the valley floor. Cross-LoC extraction, if it occurred, would have required crossing some of the most heavily fortified and surveilled terrain in South Asia, terrain that India’s own border forces monitor continuously from the opposite side. The operational team’s successful extraction, by whatever route, represents a feat of planning and execution that exceeds anything documented in the urban theaters.

A final dimension of comparison involves the risk-reward ratio. In Karachi, a failed operation carries the risk of a shooter’s capture by police, but Karachi’s police have limited investigative capacity and the criminal justice system provides ample opportunities for suspects to disappear or be acquitted. In Lahore, the risks are higher: police are more effective, the Army is closer, and political pressure following a failed attempt would be more intense. In PoK, a failed operation carries the risk of capture by the Pakistan Army, which exercises military jurisdiction and would treat captured operatives as intelligence assets to be exploited rather than criminal suspects to be processed through civilian courts. Capture in PoK would expose operational networks, handler identities, communication methods, and potentially the involvement of India’s intelligence apparatus in a manner that would constitute a catastrophic intelligence compromise. The willingness to accept this risk for two PoK operations within sixty days speaks to the campaign’s confidence in its preparation and the strategic value assigned to demonstrating PoK-penetration capability.

The comparison also highlights a strategic implication. If the campaign can operate in PoK, it can theoretically operate anywhere in Pakistan. PoK’s security environment is tighter than Karachi’s, Lahore’s, or Rawalpindi’s. It approaches the security level of Pakistani military cantonments and ISI facilities. Demonstrating capability in PoK sends a message that no location, no matter how militarily controlled, provides absolute protection. For the remaining Kashmir terrorists living in Pakistan, this message eliminates the last geographic assumption of safety.

Pakistan’s Security Failure and Response

The twin PoK killings exposed a security failure that Pakistan’s military establishment could not easily explain or dismiss. Unlike the Karachi killings, which could be partially attributed to the city’s chronic violence and inadequate policing, or the Lahore killings, which could be framed as the inevitable consequence of operating in a sprawling metropolis, the PoK killings occurred in territory that the Pakistan Army directly administers. PoK is not a civilian governance space where the police bear primary responsibility for security. It is a military zone where the Army controls movement, monitors communications, and maintains the infrastructure of border defense. A targeted killing inside this zone is not a police failure but a military failure.

The Pakistan Army’s immediate response to the Abu Qasim killing was a high alert across PoK. Checkpoints were reinforced. Patrols were increased. The institutional reaction acknowledged the gravity of what had occurred: if Indian intelligence could assassinate an LeT commander inside a Rawalakot mosque, the entire security architecture of PoK was compromised. The subsequent Khwaja Shahid kidnapping and beheading, occurring despite this heightened alert, compounded the embarrassment. The military had responded to one penetration and failed to prevent a second, more complex operation within the same territory.

Pakistan’s public response followed the pattern established in earlier cases. Officials attributed the killings to Indian intelligence, framing them as violations of sovereignty. Foreign Secretary Qazi’s January 2024 press conference cited the Rawalakot killing alongside other cases as evidence of RAW’s assassination campaign. The framing served diplomatic purposes, positioning Pakistan as a victim of Indian aggression, but it simultaneously admitted a devastating operational reality: Pakistan could not protect the militants it sheltered, even in its most militarily controlled territory.

The intelligence failure has multiple dimensions. First, Pakistan’s counter-intelligence apparatus, which should detect foreign intelligence operations on its soil, failed to identify the surveillance and preparation that preceded both killings. Second, the Army’s checkpoint system, designed to control movement in PoK, failed to prevent the entry or exit of operational teams. Third, the ISI’s own monitoring of militant leaders, which should detect approaching threats, failed to warn either Abu Qasim or Khwaja Shahid. The ISI was reportedly shaken by Khwaja Shahid’s kidnapping, suggesting that the event contradicted the agency’s own assessment of PoK’s security. If the ISI believed PoK was secure enough for its operational assets to live without extraordinary protection, the two killings destroyed that belief.

For the Pakistan Army specifically, the PoK killings carry institutional implications beyond the immediate security failure. PoK’s governance model rests on the Army’s authority. The civilian government of what Pakistan calls “Azad Jammu and Kashmir” exercises limited power; real authority resides with the military, which controls defense, foreign affairs, and key administrative decisions. If the military cannot provide basic security for individuals living under its authority, the legitimacy of its governance role is undermined. Residents of PoK, many of whom have long chafed under military control, gained a new argument: the Army that restricts their freedoms in the name of security cannot even protect those it claims to shelter.

Tilak Devasher, the former special secretary at India’s Cabinet Secretariat and author of extensive analysis on Pakistan’s internal contradictions, has argued that the Pakistan Army’s inability to protect its own proxy assets constitutes a strategic failure distinct from any tactical embarrassment. The proxy relationship between Pakistan’s military establishment and organizations like LeT rests on a transactional foundation: the military provides institutional protection, and the organizations provide asymmetric-warfare capability. When the military demonstrably fails to provide protection, the transaction breaks down. The militants’ willingness to accept ISI coordination, to follow ISI targeting priorities, and to calibrate their operations according to ISI strategic guidance depends in part on the understanding that the ISI will keep them alive and operational. The PoK killings introduced a visible crack in this understanding.

The crack has widened in the months since September-November 2023. Pakistani media reports from early 2024 documented increased security measures around senior militant leaders across PoK and Punjab, including changes in residence patterns, movement in convoys rather than alone, and reduced public appearances at organizational events. These protective measures impose operational costs on LeT, JeM, and Hizbul Mujahideen alike. A commander who changes addresses monthly, avoids known mosques, and travels with armed guards is a commander spending organizational resources on personal security rather than on planning cross-border operations. The shadow war’s impact on PoK-based organizations is therefore not limited to the direct removal of individual commanders. It extends to the degradation of operational capacity caused by the security precautions that surviving commanders must now adopt.

The Pakistan Army’s post-killing response also revealed a structural vulnerability in PoK’s security architecture. The checkpoint system that controls movement into and through PoK was designed to monitor and facilitate the movement of militants and supplies toward the LoC, not to prevent hostile penetration from within or without. The Army’s surveillance infrastructure faces eastward, toward India, watching for military movements and monitoring the LoC zone. It was not designed to detect and prevent intelligence operations conducted by teams that might approach from the west, through Pakistan proper, or from within the local population. Retrofitting this eastward-facing architecture to provide 360-degree security would require a fundamental restructuring of PoK’s military posture, drawing resources from the LoC defense mission that remains the Army’s primary reason for its PoK presence.

What the PoK Operations Changed

The immediate impact of the twin killings rippled outward from PoK through the entire ecosystem of India-targeted militancy in Pakistan. Three specific changes became visible in the months following September and November 2023.

First, the behavioral pattern of PoK-based militants shifted toward heightened security consciousness. Reports from Pakistani media indicated that senior militant figures in PoK changed their residences, altered their movement patterns, and reduced their public visibility. Attendance at known mosques declined among individuals associated with proscribed organizations. The comfortable semi-public existence that commanders like Abu Qasim had maintained, living in rented accommodations, attending neighborhood mosques, and moving through towns without disguise, gave way to a more clandestine lifestyle that reduced operational effectiveness even as it improved personal security.

Second, the killings accelerated the pressure on Pakistan’s already strained relationship with its militant proxies. The ISI’s value proposition to LeT, JeM, and Hizbul Mujahideen has always included protection in exchange for operational utility. The ISI provided sanctuary, funding, and logistical support; in return, the organizations conducted operations against India that advanced Pakistan’s strategic objectives. The PoK killings demonstrated that the ISI could not fulfill its end of this bargain. A protection relationship in which the protector fails to protect eventually loses its coercive and cooperative power. Militant leaders who once accepted ISI direction as the price of sanctuary now had reason to question whether sanctuary actually existed.

Third, the PoK operations provided India with a strategic proof of concept. If the shadow war’s architects were testing whether the campaign could be extended from Pakistan’s cities into its militarily administered territories, the answer was unambiguously yes. Two operations, two dead targets, no arrests, no operational compromise visible in subsequent reporting. The test succeeded. The implications of that success extend beyond PoK to every military cantonment, garrison town, and secure facility in Pakistan where India-wanted individuals might be sheltered. The PoK operations established a new ceiling for the campaign’s geographic reach.

The comparison with Israel’s Mossad operations is instructive. Mossad’s post-Munich Operation Wrath of God demonstrated that no country in Europe could harbor Black September operatives with impunity. The Lillehammer affair in 1973, where Mossad mistakenly killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway, exposed the operation’s reach but also its geographic ambition. India’s PoK operations serve a similar function: they demonstrate that the campaign’s geographic ambition includes Pakistan’s most secured territories. Whether this demonstration leads to overreach, as it did for Mossad in Lillehammer, or to sustained operational success remains an open question, but the demonstration itself has already altered the strategic calculus.

Beyond the Mossad parallel, the PoK operations merit comparison with the specific operational challenge that the US drone program faced in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The CIA’s drone campaign, which accelerated under the Obama administration starting in 2009, operated in North and South Waziristan, tribal territories where the Pakistan Army’s writ was nominal and where Al-Qaeda and TTP operatives lived relatively openly. The US drone program achieved target elimination through technological superiority, employing Predator and Reaper drones flying at altitudes beyond visual detection, guided by satellite communications and signals intelligence. The operational environment was permissive in one critical sense: the targets lived in areas where Pakistan’s military infrastructure was minimal or actively hostile to Islamabad’s own authority.

PoK inverts this equation entirely. Unlike the tribal areas, PoK is territory where the Pakistan Army maintains dense, active, and cooperative control. The Army’s infrastructure in PoK exists to support Pakistani strategic objectives, including facilitating militant operations against India. Conducting covert strikes in this environment is the equivalent of operating inside an adversary’s military base rather than in its neglected periphery. The US drone program succeeded partly because the tribal areas were governance vacuums. The PoK operations succeeded despite the absence of any such vacuum, which makes the intelligence achievement qualitatively distinct from anything the CIA accomplished in Waziristan.

A fourth change, less immediately visible than the behavioral and strategic shifts, unfolded in the realm of information warfare. The PoK killings forced Pakistan to publicly acknowledge a reality it had long avoided confronting: that individuals on India’s most-wanted list were living in Pakistani-administered territory, in identifiable locations, with routines that could be observed and exploited. When Foreign Secretary Qazi cited Muhammad Riaz (Abu Qasim’s legal name) in his January 2024 press conference as a victim of alleged Indian operations, he implicitly confirmed that a designated LeT commander had been residing in PoK with enough permanence to be tracked and killed at his regular mosque. This admission, intended to support Pakistan’s complaint of Indian aggression, simultaneously validated India’s core accusation: that Pakistan provides sanctuary to terrorists India wants dead.

The information warfare dimension extends to the audience within PoK itself. Pakistan has long managed PoK’s information environment, restricting media access, controlling political expression, and presenting the military’s presence as a protective shield for the Kashmiri population. The twin killings punctured this narrative from two directions. Residents of Rawalakot witnessed a targeted assassination inside a place of worship, an event that spoke to insecurity rather than protection. The Neelum Valley population learned that a resident could be kidnapped, held for days, and beheaded without the Army’s layered security apparatus detecting or preventing any phase of the operation. For a population already skeptical of the Army’s governance claims, these events provided concrete evidence that military control served organizational interests rather than civilian safety.

The fifth change was doctrinal, affecting how India’s security establishment conceptualized the campaign’s potential. Before September 2023, the shadow war’s geographic reach had been demonstrated in urban environments where operational anonymity provided natural cover. Analytical observers, including Ajai Sahni of the South Asia Terrorism Portal, had noted that the campaign’s success depended partly on the chaotic security environments of cities like Karachi, where police corruption, criminal violence, and ethnic fragmentation created space for covert action. PoK challenged this assessment by proving that the campaign could function in a controlled, militarily patrolled environment where the advantages of urban chaos did not apply. For Indian strategic planners, this proof of concept expanded the menu of options. Targets previously considered unreachable because of their geographic location, rather than their personal security measures, became theoretically accessible. The constraint on the campaign shifted from capability to political will.

Strategic Implications

The shadow war’s penetration of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir carries implications that radiate outward across four distinct analytical dimensions.

The first dimension is deterrence. For decades, India’s deterrence against cross-border terrorism relied on two mechanisms: the threat of diplomatic isolation and the threat of conventional military response. Neither proved effective. Pakistan absorbed diplomatic pressure while continuing to shelter designated terrorists. Conventional military responses, from the 2016 surgical strikes to the 2019 Balakot airstrike to Operation Sindoor in 2025, imposed costs but did not eliminate the fundamental problem: the individuals who planned and coordinated attacks against India remained alive and operational on Pakistani soil. The shadow war introduced a third deterrence mechanism: the individual targeting of terrorist commanders. The PoK operations intensified this mechanism by demonstrating that even geographic sanctuary within military zones could not guarantee protection. If deterrence works by convincing the adversary that aggression will be punished, then killing the planners of specific attacks in their own sanctuaries is the most direct form of punishment-based deterrence available.

The second dimension is Pakistan’s internal security calculus. PoK’s governance model, in which the Pakistani military exercises effective control while maintaining a fiction of civilian autonomy, depends on the military’s ability to control events within the territory. The twin killings demonstrated that the military’s control has gaps significant enough for hostile intelligence operations to exploit. This realization does not affect only the organizations that depend on PoK’s security. It affects Pakistan’s broader security planning for PoK, including the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor infrastructure that passes through Gilgit-Baltistan, the northern extension of Pakistan-administered territory. If Indian intelligence can operate in PoK’s populated areas, the CPEC corridor’s security assumptions require revision.

The third dimension is the future of the shadow war’s geographic expansion. Before the PoK operations, the campaign’s geographic envelope included Pakistan’s major cities and, through the Nijjar and Pannun cases, Canada. The PoK operations added military-administered territory to this envelope. The remaining geographic gap is Pakistan’s military cantonments: Rawalpindi, where Army Headquarters and ISI are located; the nuclear-weapons facilities in Kahuta and Wah; the training facilities in Mansehra and Muzaffarabad. Whether the campaign will test these boundaries or whether PoK represents the limit of its geographic ambition is a question that only future operations will answer.

The fourth dimension is international perception. The legal debate on targeted killings has been shaped primarily by the US drone campaign and Israel’s Mossad operations. India’s shadow war operates in a different legal space: it is entirely deniable, conducted without any legal framework, and targeting terrorists in a country that shelters them while officially denying that it does so. The PoK operations add a new element to this debate by occurring in disputed territory that India claims as its own. If India considers PoK to be Indian territory under illegal Pakistani occupation, then operations conducted there might be framed as domestic security operations rather than extraterritorial assassinations. This framing, while legally and politically convenient for India, has not been officially articulated and remains a potential future justification.

George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has raised a related question about India’s total-deniability approach: whether operating without any legal framework creates a dangerous vacuum that other states might exploit as precedent. The US drone campaign, for all its controversies, operates within a declared legal framework of Congressional authorization and executive orders. Israel’s Supreme Court issued a 2006 ruling establishing conditional legality for targeted killings. India has articulated no framework, issued no legal memoranda, and officially denied any involvement. The PoK operations intensify this question because they occurred in territory whose legal status is itself disputed. A state conducting deniable operations against targets in territory it claims as its own, administered by a state that officially denies sheltering those targets, operates in a legal gray zone so deep that no existing framework of international law can clearly classify the action.

A fifth dimension, less frequently analyzed but equally significant, concerns the operational sustainability of the PoK theater. Unlike Karachi or Lahore, where the shadow war can potentially conduct operations indefinitely given the size of the target population and the operational advantages of urban environments, PoK’s smaller target pool and tighter security environment create different sustainability dynamics. The two September-November 2023 operations may have consumed intelligence assets and operational networks that took months or years to build. Whether those networks can be reconstituted for future operations, or whether the Pakistani military’s reactive security measures have closed the gaps that the operations exploited, determines whether PoK becomes an ongoing theater or a one-time demonstration.

The evidence from the broader campaign suggests that operational capability, once demonstrated, tends to persist. The Karachi theater has produced multiple operations over several years without apparent degradation of capability. Lahore, initially considered a harder target, has seen an accelerating pace of operations. The pattern suggests that intelligence networks, once established, generate their own momentum as successful operations produce new intelligence (identities revealed at funerals, communication networks exposed, behavioral changes that create new surveillance opportunities) that feeds subsequent operations. If this self-reinforcing dynamic applies to PoK, the September-November 2023 operations may have been the opening of a sustained theater rather than its entirety.

The sustainability question intersects with Operation Sindoor in 2025, which fundamentally altered the security landscape across all of Pakistan-administered territory. The post-Sindoor security environment in PoK, with Pakistan’s military stretched across multiple defensive priorities and its intelligence apparatus focused on both conventional threats and internal stability, may have created conditions that actually facilitate rather than impede continued shadow war operations. An Army that is simultaneously managing ceasefire monitoring, post-conflict reconstruction, and heightened border surveillance along the international boundary is an Army with less capacity to devote to counter-intelligence in PoK’s interior. The comprehensive Sindoor analysis documents how the conventional conflict degraded Pakistan’s military posture across multiple dimensions; the intelligence dimension is one that may prove most consequential for the shadow war’s PoK theater.

The synthesis of these five dimensions produces a clear analytical conclusion: the PoK operations are not outlier events or opportunistic strikes. They represent a deliberate escalation of the shadow war into a new theater, planned and executed with capabilities that demonstrate sustained intelligence investment. They reverse the LoC’s three-decade function as a one-way militant corridor. They expose Pakistan’s inability to protect its most valuable intelligence assets even in military zones. And they establish a geographic precedent that expands the campaign’s potential reach to any location in Pakistan where India-wanted individuals might shelter.

For the militants who remain in PoK, from Syed Salahuddin in Muzaffarabad to the unnamed operatives in Rawalakot’s neighborhoods and the Neelum Valley’s villages, the message is unambiguous. The mountains, the Army checkpoints, and the forward-deployed military infrastructure that were supposed to guarantee their safety have been penetrated. The sanctuary is gone, and the campaign’s architects have ensured that everyone who depended on it knows precisely how it was dismantled.

The analytical weight of this conclusion becomes clearer when placed against the thirty-year trajectory of the Kashmir conflict. In 1989, when the insurgency began, Pakistan’s strategy rested on the assumption that it could wage proxy war against India from the safety of its own territory. Militants trained in PoK and Punjab would cross the LoC, attack Indian targets, and retreat to sanctuaries that India could not reach. Thousands of attacks over three decades validated this assumption. India killed infiltrators at the border, arrested operatives in Kashmir, and occasionally struck camps across the LoC, but it never reached the commanders who planned the operations or the organizational infrastructure that sustained them.

The shadow war upended this strategic assumption in Pakistan’s cities first. Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Sialkot absorbed the initial shocks. Each city’s loss demonstrated that Pakistan’s urban geography provided no protection. The PoK operations completed the circuit by demonstrating that Pakistan’s military geography provided no protection either. The strategic assumption that sustained thirty years of proxy warfare, that Pakistan could inflict pain on India without absorbing personal consequences for the individuals who directed that pain, has been systematically dismantled, theater by theater, target by target, from the chaotic streets of Karachi to the guarded mosque pews of Rawalakot.

Happymon Jacob of Jawaharlal Nehru University, whose analysis of LoC dynamics has traced the relationship between border violence and political decision-making in both countries, has observed that the LoC’s operational significance changes with each innovation in how it is used. The border fence changed it. Ceasefire agreements changed it. Surgical strikes changed it. The shadow war’s extension into PoK represents the latest and perhaps most consequential change: the LoC is no longer a line that India defends and Pakistan exploits unilaterally. It has become a permeable membrane through which lethal capability flows in both directions. Whether this permeability leads toward deterrence stability, where both sides recognize that aggression will be met with personal consequences, or toward escalation, where each penetration provokes a more dangerous response, is the question that defines the next phase of the Kashmir conflict.

The twin killings of Abu Qasim in a Rawalakot mosque and Khwaja Shahid near the LoC in the Neelum Valley answered one question definitively: can the shadow war reach into PoK? It can. The Rawalakot operation demonstrated precision in a constrained environment that Pakistan considered impermeable. The Neelum Valley operation demonstrated sustained capability, the capacity to kidnap, hold, interrogate, and execute, in one of the most militarily saturated corridors on the subcontinent. Together, they constituted the campaign’s most significant geographic escalation, more consequential in strategic terms than any single urban killing because they eliminated the geographic assumption on which PoK’s sanctuary model depended. The question they left unanswered, the one that will determine whether September-November 2023 was an inflection point or a peak, is what comes after the sanctuary disappears. When the last geographic assumption of safety has been disproved, when no mountain pass and no military checkpoint provides reliable protection, the individuals who remain in the campaign’s crosshairs face a choice between deeper concealment and departure. Neither option preserves the operational capability that made them targets in the first place. The shadow war’s architects may have calculated that this dilemma, multiplied across dozens of remaining targets in PoK, achieves more than any individual elimination: it degrades the entire infrastructure of cross-border violence by forcing its practitioners into survival mode, where planning the next attack becomes secondary to surviving until tomorrow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Have targeted killings occurred in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir?

Two documented targeted killings occurred in PoK in the final months of 2023, marking the first time the shadow war campaign penetrated Pakistan’s militarily administered Kashmir territory. Riyaz Ahmad, known as Abu Qasim, was shot dead inside Al-Quds mosque in Rawalakot on September 8, 2023, during Fajr prayers by a helmeted gunman who entered the mosque with a lookout stationed in the veranda. Khwaja Shahid, an LeT commander linked to the 2018 Sunjuwan Army camp attack, was kidnapped from the Neelum Valley in late October or early November 2023, tortured, and found beheaded near the Line of Control. Both targets were on India’s most-wanted lists, and neither killing has produced public arrests or credible claims of responsibility.

Q: Who was Abu Qasim and why was he targeted?

Abu Qasim, whose real name was Riyaz Ahmad, was a senior Lashkar-e-Taiba commander who crossed from Jammu into PoK in 1999. He rose through LeT’s ranks to command operations in the Rajouri sector of PoK and maintained close ties with Sajjad Jaat, LeT’s chief commander. Indian intelligence linked him to the January 2023 Dhangri village attack in Rajouri district, which killed seven civilians including two children through a combination of shooting and a planted IED. He also managed financial operations for LeT. His recent relocation from LeT’s Muridke base to Rawalakot placed him in what he apparently considered a safer location.

Q: What happened at the Dhangri village attack that put Abu Qasim on the target list?

On January 1, 2023, two gunmen entered the Hindu-majority village of Dhangri in Rajouri district, Jammu and Kashmir, and opened fire on residential homes, killing four civilians: Deepak Kumar, Satish Kumar, Pritam Lal, and Shishu Pal. The next morning, an IED planted by the attackers during the previous night’s assault detonated near a victim’s house, killing four-year-old Vihan Kumar and sixteen-year-old Samiksha Devi. A seventh victim died of injuries on January 8. The NIA investigation charged three Pakistan-based LeT handlers for orchestrating the attack. Abu Qasim’s command of LeT’s Rajouri sector operations connected him directly to the planning chain.

Q: How was Abu Qasim killed inside a mosque in Rawalakot?

According to the FIR filed by Rawalakot police and reported by Dawn, Abu Qasim had stayed overnight at Al-Quds mosque as a guest of the prayer leader, Qari Amjad Hashmi, and was attending Fajr prayers. He was seated in the second row of the congregation when a man wearing trousers, a shirt, and a motorcycle helmet entered and fired four bullets into him at point-blank range. A second attacker waited in the mosque’s veranda. Both fled immediately after the shooting. The Pakistan Army went on high alert across PoK following the killing, but no arrests have been publicly announced.

Q: Who was Khwaja Shahid and what was the Sunjuwan connection?

Khwaja Shahid, operating under the alias Mian Mujahid, was an LeT commander resident in the Neelum Valley of PoK. Indian intelligence linked him to the planning of the February 10, 2018, Sunjuwan Military Station attack in Jammu, where three JeM fidayeen fighters assaulted the Army camp at 4:10 a.m., killing six soldiers and one civilian in a battle lasting over twenty-four hours. His role reportedly involved cross-organizational coordination between LeT and JeM for the attack, a pattern of ISI-facilitated cooperation documented in multiple major assaults on Indian military installations.

Q: How is operating in PoK different from operating in Karachi or Lahore?

PoK presents a fundamentally harder operational environment than Pakistan’s urban centers. Karachi’s population of over 15 million provides anonymity; PoK towns like Rawalakot have roughly 50,000 residents where strangers are noticed. Karachi’s endemic criminal violence provides cover for targeted killings; PoK’s violence profile is minimal outside the LoC zone. Lahore offers metropolitan infrastructure for safe houses and escape routes; PoK’s narrow mountain valleys and limited road networks restrict movement and channel it through Army checkpoints. PoK is directly administered by the Pakistan military with forward-deployed soldiers, checkpoints on every major road, and communications monitoring. Every element of an operation becomes more difficult in PoK.

Q: Does the Pakistan Army control security in PoK?

Pakistan’s military exercises effective control over PoK’s security apparatus, even though the territory maintains a nominal civilian government that Pakistan calls the “Azad Jammu and Kashmir” administration. The Pakistan Army’s 12 Infantry Division maintains forward-deployed positions along the LoC, with rear-area garrisons, checkpoints on access roads at Kohala Bridge, the Bagh-Rawalpindi road, and the Rawalakot-Islamabad highway. Significant powers including defense, foreign affairs, and key administrative decisions rest with the military rather than civilian authorities. This military control made the twin killings particularly embarrassing, as they represented failures of the Army’s own security infrastructure rather than civilian police shortcomings.

Q: Can operations cross the LoC in both directions?

The PoK killings demonstrated that the LoC, which functioned for decades as a one-way corridor for militant infiltration from Pakistan into Indian Kashmir, can now be crossed in both directions for lethal purposes. Whether the operational teams that killed Abu Qasim and Khwaja Shahid actually crossed the LoC to conduct their operations or were locally recruited assets operating within PoK remains genuinely uncertain. The Khwaja Shahid case, where the body was deposited near the LoC, provides the strongest circumstantial evidence for cross-LoC operational movement. If confirmed, this would represent a historic reversal of the LoC’s function.

Q: What is the Rawalakot mosque killing’s significance in the broader pattern?

The Rawalakot mosque killing is the single most operationally precise assassination documented in the shadow war series. The attackers knew which mosque Abu Qasim would attend, what time the prayer would occur, and where in the congregation he would be seated. This level of intelligence detail, demonstrated inside a military-administered town in PoK, establishes that the campaign’s surveillance capabilities extend into environments previously considered impenetrable. The killing also established the prayer-time targeting method as a deliberate tactic, replicated weeks later in Shahid Latif’s October 2023 killing inside a Sialkot mosque.

Q: Why is PoK significant for Kashmir militancy?

PoK has served as the operational backbone of Kashmir-directed militancy for over three decades. Muzaffarabad hosts the United Jihad Council headquarters under Syed Salahuddin. Rawalakot and surrounding areas served as launch pads for LoC infiltration into Indian Kashmir. The Neelum Valley contains training facilities and staging areas for cross-border operations. Militants who fought in Indian Kashmir retreated to PoK when conditions became dangerous, establishing an exile community that maintained organizational structures and planned future operations from relative safety. PoK’s significance lies not just in its geographic position along the LoC but in its function as both staging ground and sanctuary for the entire militant ecosystem.

Q: What did Pakistan do after the PoK killings?

Pakistan’s immediate military response was a high alert across PoK following the Abu Qasim killing, with reinforced checkpoints and increased patrols. Despite this heightened posture, the Khwaja Shahid kidnapping and beheading occurred within approximately two months, compounding the security failure. Diplomatically, Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary cited the Rawalakot killing in a January 2024 press conference as evidence of Indian intelligence operations on Pakistani soil. Pakistani police filed FIRs in both cases, but no arrests have been publicly announced. The intelligence failure prompted internal reassessment of PoK’s security architecture, with reports indicating increased ISI attention to the protection of remaining high-value militant figures in the territory.

Q: How did the PoK killings affect militant behavior?

Reports from Pakistani media in the months following the twin killings indicated significant behavioral changes among PoK-based militants. Senior figures associated with proscribed organizations changed residences, altered daily routines, and reduced their attendance at public mosques. The comfortable semi-public existence that commanders had maintained, living in known locations and moving through towns without disguise, shifted toward more clandestine operational security. These behavioral changes degraded the militants’ operational effectiveness, as the security precautions required to avoid assassination consumed time and organizational resources that had previously been directed toward planning cross-border operations.

Q: Is Syed Salahuddin at risk in Muzaffarabad?

Syed Salahuddin, chairman of the United Jihad Council and supreme commander of Hizbul Mujahideen, operates from Muzaffarabad, PoK’s capital city and the territory’s most significant urban center. The PoK killings demonstrated that the shadow war can reach targets in PoK’s populated areas, which logically extends the threat to any high-value individual in the territory. Salahuddin’s protection depends on Pakistani military security and his own precautionary measures, but the Abu Qasim case proved that military security in PoK can be penetrated and the Khwaja Shahid case proved that extended operations including kidnapping are possible. Whether the campaign will target Salahuddin specifically depends on strategic calculations about escalation and the diplomatic consequences of eliminating a figure of his prominence.

Q: Were the two PoK killings coordinated or separate operations?

The sixty-day window between the Abu Qasim killing in September and the Khwaja Shahid kidnapping and beheading in October-November 2023 suggests a coordinated campaign targeting PoK as a theater rather than two isolated incidents. The target selection, both LeT commanders with attack connections to Indian military and civilian targets, is consistent with centralized target prioritization. The intelligence preparation for both operations would have overlapped temporally, with surveillance and logistics for the second operation potentially running in parallel with the first. The divergence in method, a surgical mosque shooting versus a kidnapping-torture-beheading sequence, does not rule out coordination; it may indicate different operational teams within the same strategic direction.

Q: What does the beheading method reveal about the Khwaja Shahid operation?

The beheading is a methodological outlier in the shadow war series, which otherwise relies almost exclusively on firearm executions with rapid escape. Beheading requires sustained physical control, tools, time, and a psychological intent that transcends elimination. The method may indicate a different type of operational asset, possibly cross-LoC teams with military or paramilitary training, as distinct from the locally contracted shooters who conduct mosque and street killings. The severe torture preceding the execution suggests an interrogation phase, where captors sought intelligence about LeT’s PoK infrastructure, personnel, or future operational plans before the killing. The deposition of the body near the LoC adds a geographic dimension to the message.

Q: How does the PoK theater compare to the Canada theater?

Both PoK and Canada represent geographic expansions of the shadow war beyond Pakistan’s urban centers, but they differ fundamentally in operational environment and strategic logic. PoK is contested territory that India claims as its own, administered by a hostile military, with geographic constraints that restrict operational freedom. Canada is a Five Eyes intelligence ally with advanced signals intelligence, functional law enforcement, and diplomatic leverage that Pakistan cannot match. The PoK operations demonstrated capability against military security; the Canada operations demonstrated willingness to operate in a partner nation’s territory despite the diplomatic consequences. Together, they define the shadow war’s geographic ceiling: from military zones to allied nations, no environment has proven impermeable.

Q: What role does the Pakistan Army play in facilitating militancy in PoK?

The Pakistan Army’s role in PoK goes beyond passive tolerance of militant presence. Military infrastructure supports the logistics of cross-LoC infiltration: Army posts along the LoC have historically provided covering fire during crossing attempts, and military roads facilitate movement of personnel and materials to staging areas. The Army controls PoK’s communications infrastructure, transportation networks, and administrative apparatus. Militant organizations like LeT and Hizbul Mujahideen operate within this military ecosystem, with the ISI serving as the coordinating link between the Army’s strategic objectives and the organizations’ operational activities. The PoK killings exposed this relationship by demonstrating that the Army’s security umbrella, which enables militancy, could not protect militants from external targeting.

Q: Could PoK become the shadow war’s primary theater?

PoK is unlikely to replace Karachi or Lahore as the primary operational theater for several reasons. PoK’s population of high-value targets is smaller than Pakistan’s urban centers, where dozens of India-wanted operatives are documented. The operational challenges of PoK’s constrained geography and military presence make each operation more resource-intensive. Karachi and Lahore offer higher target density with lower operational risk. PoK’s strategic significance lies not in volume but in demonstration effect: proving that the campaign can operate there expands the psychological and deterrent impact of operations conducted elsewhere. Every Karachi killing becomes more threatening when PoK killings prove that geography alone cannot provide protection.

Q: What is the legal status of PoK and how does it affect the analysis?

PoK’s legal status is contested and directly relevant to the analysis. India considers all of Jammu and Kashmir, including the territory administered by Pakistan, to be an integral part of India under illegal Pakistani occupation. Pakistan calls the territory “Azad Jammu and Kashmir” and treats it as a self-governing entity, though real authority rests with the Pakistani military. The nomenclature dispute matters because it affects how the PoK operations might be legally framed. If India considers PoK as Indian territory, operations conducted there could theoretically be characterized as domestic security operations rather than extraterritorial killings, though India has not officially articulated this framing. The international community, including the United Nations, treats the entire Kashmir dispute as unresolved. This analysis uses “Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir” as the terminology consistent with India’s official position while acknowledging the competing Pakistani designation.

Q: How many terrorists have been killed in PoK compared to other theaters?

PoK accounts for two documented targeted killings in the shadow war series, both in the September-November 2023 window. This compares to approximately ten or more killings in Karachi, multiple killings in Lahore including the high-profile Amir Hamza assassination, several in Rawalpindi, and cases in Sialkot, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Punjab province. PoK’s contribution to the total count is small, but its strategic significance outweighs the numbers. The two PoK killings represent qualitative escalation into new territory rather than quantitative accumulation in established theaters. Each PoK operation required more intelligence preparation, operational planning, and risk acceptance than a comparable urban strike.

Q: What were the cross-organizational ties between LeT and JeM in the Sunjuwan attack?

The February 2018 Sunjuwan Military Station attack was officially attributed to Jaish-e-Mohammed, with three JeM-affiliated Pakistani nationals identified as the attackers. Khwaja Shahid’s LeT connection to the planning of this JeM operation illustrates the cross-organizational collaboration that the ISI facilitates between nominally separate militant groups. The ISI acts as a coordinating hub, tasking different organizations with complementary roles: JeM provides fidayeen-trained attackers for suicide-style operations, while LeT provides intelligence, logistics, and planning support through its more extensive PoK-based infrastructure. This collaboration has been documented in multiple attacks including the 2016 Pathankot airbase assault and the 2016 Uri attack.