Bahawalpur is not a city the world paid much attention to until the morning of May 7, 2025. Founded in 1748, a former princely state capital graced with Mughal-inspired palaces and a university older than Pakistan itself, it sits in the desert-adjacent south of Punjab at the edge of the Cholistan sands, approximately 400 kilometers from Lahore and roughly 100 kilometers from the Indian border. Its Nawabs built monuments. Its seminaries built clerics. And in January 2000, one of those clerics returned from Kandahar to the city of his birth and transformed it into the institutional capital of the most dangerous anti-India terrorist organization in the subcontinent. Masood Azhar was born in Bahawalpur. He built Jaish-e-Mohammed in Bahawalpur. He housed its headquarters in Bahawalpur. And when Indian Rafale jets launched SCALP missiles in the pre-dawn darkness on May 7, 2025, one of the nine target coordinates they carried in their targeting systems pointed directly at the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah compound, an 18-acre facility that was simultaneously a mosque, a madrassa, a gymnasium, a stable, and the organizational nerve center of one of the most lethal terror groups operating against India.

This story cannot be told as the story of a terrorist organization that happened to set up camp in a convenient city. It is the opposite: the story of a man who went home, built his organization in the city where he grew up, and received from that city’s surrounding institutions enough cover, enough silence, enough proximity to the Pakistan Army’s 31 Corps headquarters, to operate for twenty-five years in plain sight. Pakistan’s authorities pointed cameras at the compound. Pakistani police guarded its gates. Pakistani media photographed its minarets. And for twenty-five years, nothing happened to it, until a foreign air force made the decision that Pakistan’s own institutions had consistently declined to make. What follows is the complete guide to Bahawalpur as a safe haven: its geography, its terror infrastructure, the men who lived here, what happened when India finally struck, and what the aftermath reveals about the relationship between the Pakistani state and the organization it harbored for a quarter century.

Geography and Strategic Position

Bahawalpur occupies a singular position in the physical geography of Pakistan’s Punjab. Situated in the southeastern corner of the province, south of the Sutlej River, pressed against the northern edge of the Cholistan Desert, the city extends toward the Rajasthan border of India across a landscape of flat agricultural land transitioning into sand dunes. Founded in 1748 by Muhammad Bahwal Khan, the city became the capital of a princely state stretching across what is now one of Pakistan’s largest districts by area, covering approximately 24,830 square kilometers of agricultural zones, riverine terrain, and desert. Its Nawabs maintained autonomous rule through the British period, entering a subsidiary alliance with the Crown in 1833 before the state merged into Pakistan’s administrative structure in October 1955.

From an intelligence geography perspective, several physical dimensions carry operational significance. Proximity to the Indian border, approximately 100 kilometers at the nearest points, places the city within an interior buffer that makes ground-level cross-border operations implausible from outside. Sialkot sits roughly 15 kilometers from the international border and serves as a staging ground for infiltration operations, as documented in the examination of JeM’s border-city operations hub. Bahawalpur’s 100-kilometer setback positions it differently: not as a staging city for infiltrations but as a headquarters city where command decisions are made, recruits processed, and organizational infrastructure concentrated. The distance from the border is not a limitation for this role; it is a feature enabling the kind of long-duration institutional development that a front-line city cannot safely support.

Rail connectivity gives the city logistical reach in both directions. The Adamwahan Bridge, also known as the Empress Bridge and built in 1878, remains the only railway crossing over the Sutlej River in Pakistan. Links running toward Peshawar connect the city to northern training infrastructure in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Links toward Karachi connect it to the financial networks concentrated in Sindh’s port economy. This bidirectional rail connectivity made Bahawalpur a natural organizational hub before the jihadist era and retained that utility for an organization like JeM that needed to move recruits, funds, and materiel across Pakistan’s geographic breadth without creating obvious logistical signatures.

The former princely state identity of Bahawalpur carries more than historical flavor. The Nawabs of Bahawalpur maintained administrative independence from British India’s broader political structures through the subsidiary alliance, retaining a local governing apparatus that shaped the cultural and institutional character of the region across generations. Bahawalpur State Library, founded in 1924 by Nawab Muhammad Sadiq Khan V and later renamed Sadiq Egerton College Library, and the Islamia University of Bahawalpur, established as a religious college in 1925 before achieving university status, anchor a civic identity that distinguishes the city from the purely agricultural character of surrounding districts. The Derawar Fort, located in the Cholistan Desert roughly 100 kilometers from the city center, provides one of the subcontinent’s most photographed architectural landmarks. This combination of institutions creates a city with genuine historical depth, which JeM exploited in a specific way: the organization’s alignment with Bahawalpur’s established Deobandi educational infrastructure allowed it to present itself not as an external imposition but as an organic outgrowth of the city’s religious and intellectual tradition.

Bahawalpur’s economy is organized primarily around cotton, wheat, and sugarcane cultivation across the irrigated zones feeding from the Sutlej River system and the Sutlej Valley Project’s canals. Agricultural employment dominates a labor market that leaves significant rural male populations underemployed for stretches of the agricultural calendar, creating a demographic of young men with religious educational access, limited formal employment, and family networks connected to the Deobandi institutional ecosystem. JeM’s recruitment explicitly targeted this demographic: the madrassa’s stipends and accommodations provided economic value unavailable from state education or the agricultural economy, while the organization’s jihadist ideology channeled economically constrained young men toward a mission framed as religious obligation. The agricultural economy’s seasonal rhythms and the relative absence of industrial employment alternatives in the surrounding district created a structural vulnerability that JeM’s institutional presence converted into a sustained recruitment advantage.

The Bahawalpur district is administered as part of Bahawalpur Division, covering Bahawalpur, Bahawalnagar, and Rahim Yar Khan districts, with an estimated combined population exceeding fifteen million people. The metropolitan area of Bahawalpur city itself hosts approximately 970,000 residents by 2025 estimates, making it Pakistan’s eleventh or twelfth largest city depending on methodology. Population density is substantially lower than Lahore or Karachi, which has direct consequences for surveillance dynamics: an 18-acre compound is more visually conspicuous in a mid-sized city than in a megacity, and the community surrounding the compound is more familiar with its activities than a metropolitan-anonymity model would allow. This familiarity is double-edged from an intelligence standpoint: it means local residents around the compound know what it is, but that same communal familiarity generates social pressure against cooperating with counter-intelligence operations. The organization’s two and a half decades of civic embedding ensured that reporting on the compound’s activities carried social costs within the community that insulated the headquarters from the human intelligence vulnerabilities typically associated with highly visible facilities.

Bahawalpur’s military geography extends beyond its relationship to 31 Corps. The city sits within Pakistan’s strategic depth zone that military planners in Rawalpindi have historically treated as the interior buffer within which nuclear assets, strategic reserves, and sensitive infrastructure can be positioned without the vulnerability associated with the Attock-Rawalpindi-Lahore corridor closer to the Indian border. Pakistani strategic thinking after the 1971 war progressively developed this depth concept, and the Bahawalpur region’s position within it influenced the confidence with which organizations like JeM could establish permanent infrastructure. An operational assumption embedded in Pakistani strategic culture held that India would not project conventional military force beyond the border regions, keeping the interior permanently outside any Indian action envelope. Operation Sindoor’s targeting list explicitly rejected this assumption and struck three of its four inside-Pakistan targets in locations illustrating exactly this depth concept: Bahawalpur at 100 kilometers from the border, and the organizational headquarters of Lashkar-e-Taiba at Muridke near Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital and a city whose targeting generated even more international commentary than Bahawalpur.

The water geography of the region carries its own strategic dimension. Bahawalpur’s position along the Sutlej River, downstream from the headworks and canals of the Sutlej Valley irrigation system, connects the city to the broader Indus Waters Treaty geography. The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 allocated the eastern rivers, including the Sutlej, to India and the western rivers to Pakistan, with India entitled to utilize the Sutlej’s full flow after an agreed transition period. Bahawalpur’s agricultural economy depends on canal infrastructure fed by the Sutlej system, and any significant change in river management could affect the agricultural productivity that the city’s rural hinterland depends upon. This water vulnerability gives the city an economic exposure to Indian policy choices in the Indus basin that operates entirely independently of JeM’s organizational presence, but that is not analytically separable from the broader India-Pakistan relationship within which the terrorist headquarters was embedded for two and a half decades.

Population growth in Bahawalpur district moved from 1.453 million in 1981 to 2.411 million in 1998, and the city’s metro population reached approximately 970,000 by 2025, making it Pakistan’s eleventh or twelfth largest urban center depending on the census methodology applied. Islamia University, founded in 1925 as Jamia Abbasia, provided the city with decades of religious and educational infrastructure before partition. The university’s presence created an intellectual environment that the jihadist infrastructure could engage productively, supplying graduates familiar with Islamic jurisprudence and open to organizational recruitment at the intersection of religion and politics.

Climatic conditions in the region define the operational environment in ways relevant to training cycles. Summer temperatures in Bahawalpur regularly exceed 45 degrees Celsius. Annual rainfall runs between 20 and 25 centimeters, concentrated in the monsoon season. Desert proximity means limited natural cover and frequent dust conditions that compromise visibility and surveillance. Winter temperatures drop sharply, reaching single digits Celsius. This combination of extreme summer heat and manageable winter cold was useful for training programs designed to build fighter endurance: heat acclimatization is a documented component of training curricula in several South Asian jihadist organizations, and Bahawalpur’s summer conditions served this purpose without special infrastructure.

Roads connecting the city center to the Ahmadpur East area, where the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah compound is located, pass through flat agricultural land. Ahmadpur East is a district town in Bahawalpur district, a regional hub of cotton and agricultural commerce. From the main highway, the compound’s minarets are visible. Journalists who visited the site before 2025 reported being warned away at the gate by armed guards positioned outside. Visual accessibility of the compound from public roads was consistent with its organizational confidence: a facility that neither hid nor felt the need to. Satellite imagery on commercial platforms confirmed the compound’s physical scale years before Operation Sindoor made its coordinates internationally recognized.

What does not appear in official promotional materials is the most significant feature of contemporary security geography: the headquarters of the Pakistan Army’s XXXI Corps, also known as 31 Corps, is located in the city’s cantonment zone. The cantonment is one of the Army’s major garrison installations in southern Punjab. Intelligence analysts and investigative journalists have consistently documented that the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah complex is approximately 8 kilometers from 31 Corps headquarters. That proximity is not a coincidence of urban development. It is a proximity that successive Pakistani governments and military establishments chose not to reduce by even one meter across twenty-five years of international pressure, a choice whose meaning becomes visible only when viewed across the full temporal span of the organization’s uninterrupted operations.

Bahawalpur’s administrative geography adds context. Punjab’s Home Department, which oversees provincial police, has historically maintained close relationships with military institutions and has in documented cases acted to shield certain militant figures from prosecution when the Army or ISI preferred continued freedom for those individuals. The district police leadership in Bahawalpur operated within this institutional environment. When Pakistani police guarded the Usman-o-Ali campus perimeter, they were not performing a security function independent of the Army’s institutional preference. They were expressing a local extension of the political-military compact that made southern Punjab’s jihadist infrastructure sustainable across decades.

The local political economy provided additional reinforcement. JeM-affiliated madrassas offered employment for teachers, stipends for students from low-income households, and charitable services in a district where state provision was inconsistent and poverty was widespread. These material contributions created community dependencies that translated into local political protection, supplementing the military-intelligence protection provided at the institutional level. A city whose political representatives depended partly on constituencies that benefited materially from JeM’s educational infrastructure was structurally resistant to implementing the counter-terrorism actions that would have eliminated that infrastructure. The compound’s survival was overdetermined: military protection from above, economic integration from below, and police compliance in the middle.

Terror Organizations Present

Bahawalpur’s profile as a concentration point for jihadist infrastructure did not begin with Jaish-e-Mohammed. Deobandi seminaries in the region had been producing graduates oriented toward the Afghan jihad since the 1980s, when the ISI ran the logistical backbone of the anti-Soviet campaign and Deobandi institutions throughout southern Punjab served as ideological feeders. Harkat-ul-Ansar, the organization in which Masood Azhar first developed as an organizer, drew from this regional network. Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and other related groups used the same talent pool, and the district’s madrassas participated in a distributed system extending through Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, connecting young men from agricultural backgrounds to the organizational structures of multiple militant organizations simultaneously.

By the time Jaish-e-Mohammed arrived in 2000, the city already had established networks of Deobandi clerics, fundraising infrastructure, and a population that, in neighborhoods connected to the jihadist ecosystem, had normalized the presence of armed men in religious establishments. ISI use of Bahawalpur’s religious institutions as recruitment ground during the Afghan jihad created a supply-chain relationship that persisted beyond the formal end of that campaign. When the strategic focus shifted from Afghanistan to Kashmir in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, the same institutional infrastructure that had fed the Afghan campaign was redirected toward the Kashmir theater, with Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other organizations drawing from the same southern Punjab talent pool.

Among organizations that have maintained presence in Bahawalpur, Jaish-e-Mohammed is by far the most significant in terms of physical infrastructure and command concentration. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s primary headquarters is at the Muridke compound near Lahore. Hizbul Mujahideen is concentrated in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Al-Badr has negligible southern Punjab presence. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, from which Azhar emerged, remains active across Pakistan but does not maintain a Bahawalpur headquarters of comparable scale. Sipah-e-Sahaba and its affiliated sectarian organizations have a presence in the city’s Deobandi ecosystem, contributing to the overall character of its religious landscape without directly coordinating with JeM’s Kashmir-focused operations.

Concentration of JeM’s infrastructure in Bahawalpur reflects both the organizational logic of a group founded by a local man and the strategic choice to place the headquarters well inside Pakistan’s territory, away from the Line of Control and its associated security complications. Training camps are distributed across Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balakot, Mansehra, and other locations, but the organizational center, the place where leadership decisions are made and resources coordinated, remained in Bahawalpur throughout the group’s operational history. When journalists approached the compound in 2019, Pakistani police were physically guarding it. Those guards were not there to arrest anyone inside. They were there to prevent journalists from documenting the compound’s activities and dimensions with sufficient clarity to make the dual-use characterization undeniable in international forums.

JeM’s presence in Bahawalpur reflects the broader strategic alignment between the Punjab Deobandi milieu and the Pakistan Army’s institutional preferences for proxy force deployment against India. Punjab dominates Pakistan’s officer corps: the vast majority of senior Army generals are Punjabi, and the Army’s institutional culture is shaped significantly by Punjabi religious conservatism. This demographic reality gives Punjab’s Deobandi institutions a structural connection to the military that organizations based in Sindh or Balochistan do not have. JeM’s Punjab roots, its Bahawalpur identity, and its ISI-connected protection all reflect this alignment between the regional religious milieu and the military’s proxy strategy, a strategy that India’s shadow war has progressively targeted across two decades of operations against the organizations this alignment produced.

Secondary ecosystems of organizational fronts surround JeM’s primary presence. Al-Rahmat Trust functions as the charitable front for the Usman-o-Ali campus. Affiliated organizations at local mosques and smaller madrassas serve as soft-recruitment networks where JeM’s ideology is presented in more palatable form before committed individuals are channeled toward the training infrastructure. JeM’s digital media arm, Al-Qalam Media, produces propaganda distributed through JeM-affiliated networks across the district, sustaining ideological engagement beyond the campus’s immediate reach. This layered ecosystem gave JeM something valuable beyond its own organizational resources: a community in which its presence was not anomalous. In a city where armed men in religious establishments had been normalized for decades and where fundraising for jihad had been an established social practice, the Usman-o-Ali campus operated with a visibility that depended on collective institutional tolerance rather than institutional blindness.

Pakistan’s religious-political party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F), associated with the Deobandi school and represented most prominently through Maulana Fazlur Rehman, maintains significant organizational and political infrastructure in Bahawalpur’s district. JUI-F does not direct JeM’s operations and has at times maintained public distance from the group’s most extreme positions. However, the institutional overlap is real: shared Deobandi theological tradition, overlapping donor networks, and mutual participation in the religious-political ecosystem of southern Punjab create structural proximity that cannot be reduced to coincidence. Political cover provided by JUI-F’s mainstreaming of Deobandi political identity within Pakistani electoral democracy has indirectly benefited JeM’s Bahawalpur headquarters by making the expulsion of Deobandi religious establishments from Pakistani civic life politically expensive for any government inclined toward reform.

The relationship between JeM and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, later reconstituted as Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, operates in Bahawalpur through shared demographic and ideological foundations. Sipah-e-Sahaba’s primary mission is anti-Shia sectarian mobilization, which differs from JeM’s Kashmir-focused anti-India militancy, but the organizations draw from the same Deobandi talent pool and share overlapping fundraising networks in the city. JeM’s leadership has consistently maintained that the organization’s focus is on Kashmir rather than sectarian violence inside Pakistan, a framing that has enabled it to present a more internationally defensible image than explicitly anti-Shia organizations. Nevertheless, the organizations’ shared institutional ecosystem in southern Punjab means that disrupting one without addressing the other leaves intact the broader infrastructure of Deobandi militancy that both depend on.

Understanding the full ecosystem of organizations present in Bahawalpur matters for a specific analytical reason: it explains why physical disruption of the JeM headquarters campus does not automatically eliminate the organizational infrastructure that produced it. Training camps can be rebuilt. Madrassas can be reopened under different names. Charitable trusts can be reconstituted. Financial networks can be re-routed. What makes Bahawalpur’s terrorist infrastructure resilient is not any single physical installation but the distributed ecosystem of Deobandi institutions, social welfare functions, political relationships, and ISI-connected protection that collectively maintained the city as a viable operating environment across two and a half decades of international pressure. That ecosystem has not been physically disrupted by the May 7 strike: what was disrupted was the command center at the top of an organizational pyramid whose institutional foundations remain embedded in the city’s religious and political fabric.

Terrorists Who Lived Here

Masood Azhar Alvi was born in Bahawalpur on July 10, 1968, as one of approximately eleven children in the family of Allah Bakhsh Shabbir, who served as the headmaster of a government-run school and maintained Deobandi religious convictions. The family also operated a dairy and poultry farm near the city. Azhar’s upbringing was thoroughly embedded in the Deobandi milieu: a household combining government service with religious conservatism, producing a son who left mainstream school after class eight and enrolled in the Jamia Uloom ul Islamia Banuri Town in Karachi, one of Pakistan’s most significant Deobandi institutions, from which he graduated in 1989 as an alim.

Jamia Banuri Town’s role in Azhar’s formation deserves specific attention because it explains the intellectual character of the organization he subsequently built. The institution had been a significant node in the Afghan jihad’s ideological infrastructure since the 1980s, with faculty members who maintained direct connections to Abdullah Azzam’s theory of individual jihadist obligation, the fard ayn doctrine that transformed defensive jihad from a collective obligation into an individual religious duty for Muslims globally. Azhar absorbed this framework at precisely the period when it was being applied to the Kashmir theater, and his subsequent writings, particularly his jihadist text “Fazail-e-Jihad,” demonstrated a systematic approach to translating this theological framework into recruitment literature. The capacity to construct jihadist obligation from recognized classical jurisprudential sources distinguished Azhar from organizational leaders who relied primarily on charismatic authority: he could argue the Islamic case for organized anti-India violence in terms that Deobandi-trained clerics found difficult to refute from within their own tradition.

After graduation, he joined Harkat-ul-Ansar and eventually became its general secretary, traveling internationally to Britain, Saudi Arabia, Zambia, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates, Mongolia, and elsewhere to raise funds and recruit. His capacity to combine religious authority with organizational management made him valuable to the group’s leadership. By 1993, he had established contacts with figures connected to Osama bin Laden’s network in Nairobi. In 1994, he traveled to Jammu and Kashmir and was arrested by Indian security forces. Five years in Indian custody at Kot Bhalwal jail followed before the IC-814 hijacking and Kandahar exchange secured his release on December 31, 1999.

Within weeks of returning to Pakistan, Azhar addressed an estimated 10,000 people at a public gathering in Karachi, proclaiming that Muslims should not rest until India was destroyed. Jaish-e-Mohammed was formally launched on January 31, 2000, in the city of his birth. His return to Bahawalpur after Kandahar was a homecoming that became a headquarters decision, anchoring the organization’s identity and physical infrastructure to the city that had shaped him. The choice was not purely sentimental: it placed the organizational headquarters in a city with family networks, established Deobandi institutional connections, community familiarity, and proximity to an Army cantonment whose presence provided a security umbrella that no other Pakistani city could match for an organization enjoying ISI patronage.

Azhar’s intellectual development shaped JeM’s organizational character in ways that distinguished it from contemporaries. Unlike Hafiz Saeed, who combined organizational genius with public media engagement and institution-building across social services, Azhar built primarily on textual religious authority, propaganda production, and ISI relationship maintenance. He was a propagandist and organizer rather than a field commander. His personal writings and speeches carried significant mobilizing force within the Deobandi milieu, and the organization’s magazine Al-Qalam reflected his editorial orientation toward combining Islamic jurisprudential arguments with operational jihadist doctrine. This intellectual focus meant that JeM’s identity was more dependent on Azhar’s authority than an organization built primarily on military command would have been, making his physical presence in Bahawalpur organizationally significant beyond mere symbolism.

The full profile of Masood Azhar’s career trajectory is documented in depth in the series. Specific to understanding Bahawalpur is the pattern of Azhar’s physical location throughout the organization’s existence. After 2001 and the Indian Parliament attack that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war, he spent periods under nominal Pakistani custody before being released. After 2016 and Pathankot, Pakistan again claimed to have placed him under arrest before he subsequently reemerged. After 2019 and Pulwama, Pakistan claimed again to have taken him into custody and to have taken over the Bahawalpur campus. By late 2024, satellite and human intelligence both confirmed his presence at the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah campus. His last confirmed public appearance before Operation Sindoor was at a wedding in June 2024, where he appeared with family members including his son. The pattern of claimed custodies followed by confirmed reemerging presence in Bahawalpur represents the most complete available documentation of the gap between Pakistan’s stated and actual counter-terrorism policy.

Abdul Rauf Azhar, Masood’s younger brother, born approximately 1975, was the organization’s de facto operational chief and the most consequential figure in JeM’s command structure for most of its existence. At just 24 years old in December 1999, he masterminded the IC-814 hijacking that secured his elder brother’s release from Indian custody. The operational requirements of a successful hijacking, including coordinating a five-person armed team, negotiating with Taliban authorities for landing rights in Kandahar, managing a weeklong hostage situation under sustained surveillance pressure, and concluding a negotiation with the Indian government, indicated organizational capability far exceeding what his age might suggest.

After the organization’s founding, Abdul Rauf’s operational role expanded to encompass every significant dimension of JeM’s military activities. He established and managed training camps in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and inside Pakistan proper, including facilities at Balakot, Mansehra, and Muzaffarabad. He coordinated directly with ISI contacts. He prepared organizational propaganda through the group’s media outputs. He arranged funding through hawala networks with Gulf connections. He maintained relationships with other terrorist groups, including meetings with Taliban leadership after their return to power in Afghanistan in 2021, which secured Taliban assurances of continued support for JeM’s Kashmir operations. India and the United States both formally designated him a global terrorist. NIA charge sheets and international terrorism databases documented his role in every major JeM attack after 2000: the December 2001 fidayeen attacks on the Jammu and Kashmir assembly and the Indian Parliament, the January 2016 Pathankot airbase attack, and the February 2019 Pulwama bombing that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel.

Unlike his elder brother, who had become more publicly withdrawn after repeated health episodes in the late 2010s, Abdul Rauf maintained an active operational tempo throughout the 2020-2025 period. His role in organizing training for more than 300 active recruits distributed across Muzaffarabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir was documented in intelligence assessments before the May 7, 2025 strike. He lived in Bahawalpur near the family compound, under ISI protection, conducting operational direction from the city for more than two decades before that protection was terminated from the air on the morning of May 7.

The relationship Abdul Rauf maintained with the Pakistan Army’s ISI was the organizational lifeline that made Bahawalpur’s command concentration viable. Intelligence liaisons within ISI’s S Directorate, which handles militant proxy relationships, served as the primary channel through which JeM received advance warning of Pakistani law enforcement operations, protection from judicial proceedings initiated by domestic courts, and access to the financial system through intermediaries who provided hawala routing with regulatory protection. This relationship was not a fixed institutional arrangement with a documented organizational chart: it was a set of personal relationships maintained between specific ISI officers and specific JeM figures, which meant that officer rotations and command changes in ISI periodically required relationship maintenance and re-establishment of trust. Abdul Rauf’s two-decade operational tenure made him the primary keeper of these relationships on JeM’s side, developing the institutional trust and personal familiarity with individual officers that organizational effectiveness in Pakistan’s ISI-proxy ecosystem requires. His death did not just remove a military planner: it removed the primary relationship manager between JeM and the institution that made its Bahawalpur headquarters possible.

Ibrahim Athar, another Azhar brother, led the IC-814 hijacking operation in the field. His role was concentrated in the 1999 operation rather than ongoing organizational management, but his continued presence in the extended family network in Bahawalpur represented another layer of the command concentration in a single city. Masood Azhar’s son, Abdullah Azhar, was implicated in JeM’s digital fundraising operations. Financial intelligence assessments from 2024 documented that he managed wallet-based fundraising through EasyPaisa and SadaPay, with approximately 30 new wallets created each month to avoid detection. This “digital hawala” system routed funds through secondary accounts in a pattern designed to obscure the organizational connection, generating a financial footprint that spread across Pakistan’s mobile banking infrastructure while maintaining Bahawalpur as the organizational anchor for the cash flows.

Masood Azhar’s sister Sadiya Azhar took on an increasingly significant organizational role following Operation Sindoor. In October 2025, JeM’s propaganda outlet Al-Qalam Media announced the formation of Jamat ul-Muminat, the organization’s first women’s brigade, with Sadiya Azhar designated as its head. Recruitment for the women’s wing reportedly began at the Markaz Usman-o-Ali in Bahawalpur, suggesting the campus retained organizational function even after the May 7 strike. Recruitment targets included economically disadvantaged women enrolled in JeM’s educational facilities across Bahawalpur, Karachi, Muzaffarabad, Kotli, Haripur, and Mansehra, as well as wives of JeM commanders. The announcement indicated that Masood Azhar and his brother Talha al-Saif had jointly approved the women’s brigade, suggesting that organizational decision-making capacity survived the strike’s most devastating personnel losses.

Shah Nawaz Khan, known operationally as Sajjid Jihadi, and Maulana Mufti Mohammad Asghar were identified in reporting as senior operational figures based in Bahawalpur before the strike, overseeing the training pipeline for the organization’s active recruits distributed across multiple locations. Their post-strike status and current location have not been confirmed in open-source reporting, representing an intelligence gap that is itself significant: organizations whose senior operational figures cannot be located have either dispersed effectively or been eliminated in ways that have not been publicly confirmed.

Concentration of the Azhar family in Bahawalpur reveals an organizational confidence deriving exclusively from institutional protection. Organizations under genuine threat disperse their leadership. The systematic targeting of the Azhar network by India’s covert campaign had progressively degraded JeM’s broader command structure in the years preceding 2025, but the Bahawalpur core remained intact and centralized precisely because it operated under protection qualitatively different from anything available to operatives in Karachi or Rawalpindi. The Azhar family compound in Bahawalpur was not a hiding place. It was a home. It existed in the open because the institutional environment made concealment unnecessary, and because twenty-five years of uninterrupted operation had confirmed, again and again, that nothing was going to happen to it.

Talha al-Saif, identified in reporting as another Azhar family member involved in organizational governance, represented the third generation of family involvement in JeM’s command structure by the time Operation Sindoor occurred. The October 2025 Al-Qalam Media announcement regarding Sadiya Azhar’s leadership of the Jamat ul-Muminat women’s wing specifically cited approval from both Masood Azhar and Talha al-Saif, indicating that family-based succession planning had been built into the organizational structure before the May 7 strike. This succession architecture reflects Azhar’s understanding of JeM’s vulnerability: if the organization’s resilience depended on a single founder-leader, his death or incapacitation would produce organizational collapse. By distributing command authority across multiple family members, and by establishing the Bahawalpur campus as a multigenerational institutional base, he built redundancy into the leadership system that the May 7 strike’s focus on operational rather than organizational figures could not entirely eliminate.

What the family’s post-Sindoor continuity in some organizational capacity reveals is the difference between disrupting command capacity and ending institutional continuity. Abdul Rauf Azhar’s death removed the operational chief. Structural damage to the campus disrupted the physical headquarters. Ten family members killed by the strike represented an enormous personal cost. But institutional continuity of JeM as an organization embedded in Bahawalpur’s Deobandi ecosystem, dependent on ISI protection, and operating through charitable front funding did not end on May 7. The question is whether the accumulated personal costs, operational disruption, and permanent loss of geographic invulnerability produced by the strike were sufficient to alter the institutional decision-making that has sustained the organization’s Bahawalpur anchor across two and a half decades of pressure. That question has not yet found a definitive answer in the observable post-Sindoor period.

Eliminations in This Location

Bahawalpur’s history as a site of targeted operations against Jaish-e-Mohammed is concentrated in a single date: May 7, 2025. Unlike Karachi, which accumulated a chronological record of targeted killings across multiple years as the shadow war’s ground-level methodology progressively penetrated urban geography, or Sialkot, where JeM’s border-city presence produced specific high-value eliminations, Bahawalpur was not the site of the methodical motorcycle-borne assassinations characterizing the shadow war’s earlier operational phase. Instead, it became the site of something categorically different: a precision airstrike by the Indian Air Force, part of a coordinated nine-target campaign representing India’s most extensive military action against Pakistani territory since the 1971 war.

The Pahalgam attack of April 22, 2025 that triggered Operation Sindoor deserves examination as the proximate cause for Bahawalpur’s inclusion as a target. Twenty-six people were killed at the Baisaran Valley meadow in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, when attackers opened fire on a group that included domestic tourists. Survivor accounts indicated that attackers selected victims based on religious identity. The scale of civilian casualties, the deliberate targeting method, and the symbolism of striking a tourist destination in an area Jammu and Kashmir’s administration had been developing as part of a post-Article 370 normalization narrative combined to produce political pressure in India that no previous attack since Pulwama had generated. Intelligence assessment pointing to JeM’s involvement, and specifically to the Bahawalpur command structure’s role in facilitating the attack, made JeM’s headquarters a target in the resulting military response despite the diplomatic escalation costs of striking Pakistani territory directly.

At 01:05 hours Indian Standard Time on May 7, 2025, Indian armed forces launched Operation Sindoor. The operation ran for approximately 25 minutes. The detailed reconstruction of the 23-minute strike sequence and weapons systems deployed is covered in the operational analysis of that campaign. India described the operation as targeting terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, aiming to neutralize the operational capabilities of groups responsible for cross-border terrorism, specifically the Pahalgam attack of April 22, 2025, which killed 26 civilians, the majority of them tourists, at Jammu and Kashmir’s Baisaran Valley.

The weapons systems deployed against the Bahawalpur target are worth noting for what they reveal about the operation’s planning assumptions. SCALP cruise missiles, known in Indian service as the Storm Shadow variant procured from France as part of the Rafale acquisition, have a stand-off range exceeding 250 kilometers when launched from optimal altitude and speed parameters. This range meant that the Rafale aircraft delivering the Bahawalpur strike did not need to penetrate Pakistani airspace to weapons-release point. Missiles launched from Pakistani airspace entry points or from safe-side-of-border launch positions could reach the Bahawalpur target coordinates. This stand-off methodology reduced crew risk and minimized the time available for Pakistani air defense to intercept the attack profile. The munition’s precision guidance also allowed targeting of specific structures within the 18-acre compound, enabling India to claim targeted destruction of the command and training infrastructure while the mosque structure itself provided Pakistan with the civilian-facility characterization it used in subsequent diplomatic communication. Whether the strike’s targeting algorithms attempted to preserve religious structures while destroying operational buildings, or whether Pakistan’s characterization selected mosque damage from a more comprehensive strike, cannot be verified from open-source reporting but remains a significant element of the competing factual narratives each side presented to the international community.

India’s government briefing on May 7 presented a list of 21 terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, including the nine sites targeted. The Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah compound in Bahawalpur was designated as Site 9. OSINT imagery from analyst Nathan Ruser’s account, among other open-source intelligence channels, documented the strike with before-and-after satellite imagery showing significant structural damage to the compound. India claimed the facility was used for recruitment, training, and logistical coordination and had been substantially destroyed. Pakistan acknowledged the strikes but disputed the characterization of what was struck and what damage resulted.

Most significant confirmed outcome of the strike was the killing of Abdul Rauf Azhar. Indian officials confirmed his death. He had masterminded the IC-814 hijacking in 1999, planned every major Jaish attack against India in the following two decades, and held among the five highest-priority designations in India’s counter-terrorism target list for more than twenty years. His killing on May 7 removed the most operationally experienced figure in JeM’s command structure, a figure whose absence the organization cannot quickly or easily compensate for through organizational succession.

Beyond Abdul Rauf, the strike produced significant casualties within Masood Azhar’s extended family. In a statement released after the operation, Masood Azhar reported the death of ten family members: his elder sister and her husband, his nephew and his nephew’s wife, his niece, and five children from within the family. He did not list his brother Abdul Rauf among those killed, despite Indian confirmation of that death. Four close aides were also reported killed. Pakistan’s official statement cited thirteen civilian deaths at the compound. In September 2025, at the Mission Mustafa Conference held inside Pakistan, JeM commander Masood Ilyas Kashmiri spoke publicly about Azhar’s family being devastated by the Indian strikes. His statement, made at a conference inside Pakistan without evident government interference, acknowledged that ten family members and four close associates had died in the attack on Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah, constituting a rare public confirmation of the strike’s organizational impact from within the organization itself.

Pakistan’s official response followed a consistent pattern: denial of the compound’s militant character, assertion of civilian casualties only, framing of the action as aggression against a religious institution. Pakistani authorities stated thirteen civilians were killed without acknowledging the deaths of Abdul Rauf Azhar or other organizational figures. The government characterized Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah as a mosque and madrassa rather than a terrorist headquarters and pressed this framing in international diplomatic forums. ISPR statements emphasized damage to civilian structures. All these official positions were systematically undermined by JeM’s own subsequent statements and by satellite imagery evidence, creating a public factual record inconsistent with Pakistan’s official characterization and damaging to Pakistan’s broader counter-terrorism credibility.

The international response to the Bahawalpur strike exposed a fault line in how different actors weighted Pakistani sovereignty against Pakistani counter-terrorism obligations. Countries that had most actively pursued JeM’s designation and demanded Pakistani action against the organization expressed measured understanding of India’s targeting rationale while formally condemning the escalation. Countries with closer economic and political relationships to Pakistan, including China and Turkey, emphasized sovereignty violation. The United States occupied an ambiguous position, calling for de-escalation while briefing journalists that Indian intelligence on the target set appeared credible. The UN Security Council met but issued no resolution, with China’s blocking posture preventing consensus condemnation of the Indian strikes. This fractured international response reflected the same institutional ambiguity that had prevented decisive international action against JeM’s Bahawalpur headquarters across twenty-five years: a gap between what major powers acknowledged in private regarding JeM’s state-protected status and what they were willing to formalize in multilateral settings where Pakistani diplomatic interests had to be managed alongside counter-terrorism imperatives.

Physical strike assessment methodology used by India for evaluating the Bahawalpur operation combined signals intelligence on communications disruption, satellite imagery analysis of structural damage, human intelligence from in-country networks, and open-source analysis of JeM’s subsequent propaganda output. The combination of these sources produced Indian assessments of significant operational disruption that differed substantially from Pakistan’s official characterization of minimal military effect. Independent satellite analysts examining before-and-after imagery confirmed significant structural change to the Usman-o-Ali campus that was inconsistent with the Pakistani government’s claim that nothing of military significance had been present. This public imagery-based verification capability, unavailable in previous conflict contexts, created an evidentiary environment in which government assertions on both sides could be evaluated against observable physical evidence, shifting the information environment in ways that neither party had fully anticipated before the strike.

Analytical significance of Bahawalpur as an elimination site differs from the significance of the shadow war’s ground-level operations. Individual assassinations eliminate specific people. A precision airstrike on an 18-acre organizational headquarters eliminates infrastructure, command capacity, and the psychological immunity simultaneously. What India actually destroyed across the full Sindoor campaign remains contested, but the satellite imagery evidence of structural damage at Bahawalpur, combined with JeM’s own acknowledgment of significant organizational losses, established a factual record substantially different from Pakistan’s minimalist official account. Bahawalpur on May 7, 2025 became the most consequential single location in the recorded history of operations against Jaish-e-Mohammed.

Post-strike intelligence collection focused on Bahawalpur addressed a specific question with significant strategic implications: had the organization’s leadership been present at the compound during the strike, or had pre-strike warning enabled evacuation of critical personnel. Masood Azhar’s post-strike statement, in which he personally described the deaths of ten family members and four aides at the compound, established that the extended Azhar family had been at the headquarters on the night of May 6-7. Azhar himself subsequently issued audio and video statements that confirmed his personal survival. Whether he was physically present at the compound during the strike or at a separate location that night has not been definitively established in open-source reporting. The organizational significance of his survival, if confirmed, is that JeM’s founder and symbolic center remained alive, providing an anchor for organizational continuity that the deaths of Abdul Rauf and other operational figures could not eliminate. The organizational significance of Abdul Rauf’s confirmed death is precisely the opposite: the person who converted Azhar’s symbolic authority into operational reality was gone, leaving a gap between the organization’s symbolic continuity and its operational capacity that cannot be bridged by any available succession mechanism.

The Infrastructure of Shelter

Jaish-e-Mohammed’s infrastructure in Bahawalpur is best understood through its primary facility: the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah complex, also known as the Usman-o-Ali campus, located in the Ahmadpur East area of Bahawalpur district, approximately 400 kilometers from Lahore and 8 kilometers from the Pakistan Army’s 31 Corps cantonment. Before the May 7, 2025 strikes, the compound spanned 18 acres. Its scale is best grasped through its documented facilities: a central mosque functioning as the public-facing religious anchor of the complex, a madrassa with reported enrollment exceeding 600 students, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, and horse stables housing at least a dozen animals. Funding for the facility was routed through Al-Rahmat Trust, and the campus reportedly underwent significant transformation after 2011, when construction expanded its training infrastructure with facilities whose civilian cover was thin even by the standards of Pakistan’s dual-use militant ecosystem.

Al-Rahmat Trust is the registered charitable organization that provided financial and administrative cover for the campus. Its formal registration as a charitable entity created a legal identity separate from Jaish-e-Mohammed’s terrorist designation. Pakistan formally banned JeM in 2002, but the trust model allowed organizational functions to continue under civilian administrative cover. Funds collected by the trust came from Pakistani domestic donors, diaspora networks in Gulf countries and the United Kingdom, and sources identified in financial intelligence assessments as affiliated with Gulf-based charitable fronts with documented jihadist connections. That money paid for staff salaries, student stipends, post-2011 construction costs, and the operational expenses of an organization that officially did not exist but functionally dominated the campus’s daily activities.

Enrollment of more than 600 students in the madrassa represents a humanitarian dimension that any honest analysis must address directly. Hundreds of young men, many from economically disadvantaged families in Bahawalpur district, were enrolled in religious education programs at the campus. For their families, the madrassa provided free education, housing, meals, and in some cases stipends. These material benefits were real. The ideological environment in which they were provided was shaped entirely by JeM’s interpretation of Deobandi jihadism, an interpretation that presented armed conflict against India as a religious obligation. Transition from student to organizational recruit was not always coercive; in an environment where the community normalized JeM’s worldview and where the organization provided material support unavailable from state institutions, the pipeline was more institutional than coercive. Pakistani reformers sympathetic to counter-terrorism have acknowledged that closing the madrassa without replacing its educational and welfare functions would create humanitarian consequences that political leaders in southern Punjab were unwilling to absorb, a dynamic that JeM deliberately cultivated by embedding itself in the social welfare economy.

The deliberateness of this embeddedness deserves emphasis because it reflects organizational strategy rather than opportunism. Hafiz Saeed’s Lashkar-e-Taiba built one of Pakistan’s largest networks of hospitals, clinics, and schools that operated during natural disasters like the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and 2010 floods, creating welfare dependency that insulated the organization from domestic pressure. JeM applied a similar logic at smaller scale in Bahawalpur: by becoming an essential welfare provider in the city’s most economically vulnerable neighborhoods, it created constituencies with material interest in the organization’s continued operation that operated independently of ideological commitment. A family whose son received free religious education and three meals daily from the Usman-o-Ali campus had a material incentive to avoid cooperating with counter-terrorism authorities that went beyond any ideological sympathy for the organization’s stated mission. This welfare capture of community loyalty is among the most effective counter-counter-terrorism strategies available to an organization with resources and state backing, and it is among the hardest to disrupt through the combination of legal pressure and regulatory action that international counter-terrorism frameworks rely upon.

Post-2019 FATF pressure did produce one visible change in JeM’s Bahawalpur infrastructure: the organization became more aggressive in developing alternative funding channels that were harder to trace and freeze than conventional banking flows. Abdullah Azhar’s digital wallet operation, generating approximately 30 new EasyPaisa and SadaPay accounts monthly, was a direct response to international financial monitoring that had identified the organization’s traditional banking channels. The shift to mobile wallet platforms exploited Pakistan’s rapid fintech development in the 2018-2024 period, using legitimate financial infrastructure designed for underbanked rural populations to route organizational funds through channels that created an enormous volume of low-value transactions impossible to monitor comprehensively. ISI facilitation of this transition, documented in financial intelligence assessments, meant that the regulatory agencies nominally responsible for monitoring these platforms were operating in an institutional environment where the security services they ultimately reported to had an interest in the platforms’ use by the organization they were supposed to be monitoring. This institutional conflict of interest is the defining characteristic of counter-terrorism regulation in a state where the security services are simultaneously responsible for counter-terrorism compliance and for the protection of specific organizations designated as terrorists by international bodies.

Adjacent to the primary campus, a separate 6.5-acre walled compound developed around 2009 constitutes the second major physical element of JeM’s Bahawalpur infrastructure. Documented facilities include a swimming pool described as used for water training, horse stables, and tactical training areas. Swimming pool training in this context is consistent with infiltration routes used in Kashmir operations, where crossing the Jhelum River and its tributaries has been documented as an operational requirement. Horse stables are consistent with training for movement across mountainous terrain where motorized transport is impossible. Together, the two facilities present a combined institutional footprint of approximately 24.5 acres in a single Pakistani city, exceeding the physical presence of most non-state armed groups anywhere in South Asia and making the plausibility of Pakistani official unawareness essentially zero.

Masood Azhar’s personal residence in the city, separate from the institutional campus, was described in reporting as a heavily fortified structure with armed guards, reinforced perimeters, and security arrangements consistent with the resources available to a state-protected figure rather than a fugitive. Its location within Bahawalpur, in a secure area near the cantonment zone, placed it within the effective security perimeter that Army presence provided to the city. Some reporting referenced proximity to Pakistani nuclear research infrastructure, though this claim cannot be independently verified and should be treated with appropriate caution pending additional corroboration.

Digital fundraising infrastructure represents the most recent addition to JeM’s Bahawalpur operational ecosystem. Financial intelligence assessments from 2024 documented that the organization had migrated significantly toward mobile wallet platforms, with Abdullah Azhar managing fundraising through EasyPaisa and SadaPay accounts, creating approximately 30 new wallets monthly to evade detection. This “digital hawala” system routed funds through secondary accounts in patterns designed to obscure organizational connections, funding arms purchases, operational costs, and family support. ISI was reportedly involved in enabling the transition to these platforms, suggesting that even the organization’s financial innovation was conducted with state facilitation. Bahawalpur served as the organizational anchor for these financial flows, with coordination of the broader network running through the city’s command structure.

Proximity to 31 Corps headquarters remains the most analytically significant feature of the infrastructure. Intelligence analysts have consistently characterized the 8-kilometer distance as establishing, beyond reasonable inference, that the Army had institutional knowledge of the compound’s functions across the entire period of its operation. The structural argument does not require proof of specific operational direction: the Pakistan Army controls the security environment around its major cantonment cities with a thoroughness that makes implausible any claim that an 18-acre compound housing hundreds of people, armed guards, and the command structure of a designated terrorist organization could operate for twenty-five years without the corps commander’s awareness. Whether that awareness translated into active operational direction or passive institutional tolerance is a distinction that matters for legal characterization, but it does not change the material reality of what the compound was permitted to do for a quarter century.

FATF grey-listing of Pakistan in 2018 and repeated in 2021 specifically targeted the charitable-front infrastructure that the Usman-o-Ali campus represented. Pakistani regulatory responses included formal actions against Al-Rahmat Trust: asset freezes announced, administrative processes initiated, and reports of compound “takeovers” issued after Pulwama. India consistently characterized these actions as cosmetic, designed to satisfy FATF evaluators without actually disrupting operational capacity. Evidence from May 7, 2025, showing the campus operating as an active organizational headquarters with Masood Azhar personally present and Abdul Rauf Azhar commanding operations from the facility, supported India’s assessment that FATF compliance had been formal rather than substantive.

The pattern of formal compliance without substantive disruption is not unique to Bahawalpur or to JeM. Pakistan’s counter-terrorism regulatory architecture was built in response to international pressure rather than internal strategic conviction, and the gap between its formal commitments and institutional behavior reflects that origin. FATF grey-listing created pressure that the Pakistani finance and interior ministries responded to with administrative actions, prosecutions of organizational figures using provisions that carried limited actual penalties, and monitoring arrangements that documented organizational activities without disrupting them. Pakistan’s removal from the FATF grey list in 2022 was accompanied by formal improvements in regulatory coverage that left the underlying ISI-JeM relationship structurally unchanged. The Bahawalpur campus expanded rather than contracted after 2022, and Abdul Rauf Azhar maintained his operational role without visible interruption from 2022 until his death in 2025.

Physical resilience of the campus infrastructure across three years of post-FATF operation provides a data point for assessing what regulatory interventions can and cannot accomplish against an organization with institutional state protection. Regulations whose enforcement depends on the willingness of a state security apparatus that simultaneously provides protection to the regulated organization will not produce operational disruption. This is not an insight confined to Pakistan: it is a general principle of counter-terrorism governance whose Bahawalpur application happens to be among the most thoroughly documented examples available in public reporting. Understanding this principle is essential to evaluating any future Pakistani commitments regarding JeM’s infrastructure, which will inevitably be framed in formal regulatory terms rather than through acknowledgment of the ISI-JeM relationship that makes formal regulation insufficient.

Bahawalpur’s broader Deobandi madrassa network provides a feeder system for the primary institutional infrastructure. Smaller seminaries aligned with JeM’s ideological foundations operate across the district, presenting the organization’s worldview as the natural expression of Islamic faith in the context of the Kashmir struggle, identifying promising recruits, and channeling them toward the Usman-o-Ali pipeline. This feeder network is more concentrated in Bahawalpur than in most comparable Pakistani cities precisely because the organizational headquarters is there, creating a logistical efficiency in recruitment that a distributed headquarters model cannot replicate. Young men recruited through smaller madrassas in Bahawalpur district entered a city-wide organizational ecosystem whose center of gravity was the 18-acre compound they would eventually be trained to join.

The logistical infrastructure connecting Bahawalpur’s headquarters to JeM’s distributed operational network across Pakistan deserves documentation as a system rather than a collection of individual elements. Recruits moved from Bahawalpur to training camps via both rail and road, with logistics managed through intermediaries who maintained plausible civilian identity. Weapons and equipment moved through routes documented in NIA charge sheets and international intelligence assessments as running from Gulf financial sources through Karachi’s port entry points northward and westward to the training camp locations. Communications between Bahawalpur command and operational cells in Jammu and Kashmir evolved over two decades from satellite phone networks to encrypted messaging applications to the distributed cell structure that limited exposure at any single node. Financial flows from Gulf donors through Al-Rahmat Trust and subsequently through the mobile wallet network created a money movement architecture deliberately designed to prevent end-to-end tracing. Each of these logistics elements was a separate challenge for counter-terrorism authorities attempting to disrupt the organization without having the capacity to act against its headquarters directly. The headquarters’ existence in Bahawalpur served as the coordinating node for all of these distributed systems, providing the organizational coherence that kept the separate elements functioning as an integrated system rather than disconnected cells. Eliminating that coordinating node through the May 7 strike created disruption not only to the command structure but to the coherence of the entire logistics architecture that the headquarters managed.

How the Shadow War Changed This City

For most of the period between 2000 and 2025, Bahawalpur’s safe-haven status was effectively unchanged. Unlike Karachi, where the shadow war’s targeted assassinations progressively penetrated urban geography and produced documented behavioral changes, or Rawalpindi, where the killing of a Hizbul Mujahideen figure within the garrison city’s perimeter created significant alarm within the militant community, Bahawalpur remained largely untouched. Geographic depth inside Pakistan, the Army cantonment’s institutional umbrella, and the political costs of action against a nuclear-armed state all combined to preserve the city’s status as the shadow war’s most significant gap: the place where the most important organizational leadership concentrated precisely because it was safest.

Operation Sindoor represented a categorical escalation beyond the patient, ground-level elimination campaign that characterized the preceding decade. Ground-level methodology of individual assassinations by unknown gunmen operating on foot or motorcycle was a tactical choice suited to the political constraints of covert operations: deniable, incremental, and contained within a range of Pakistani responses that stopped short of conventional military retaliation. Bahawalpur’s JeM headquarters was immune to that methodology. Precision airstrikes were not. India’s decision to include Bahawalpur in a nine-target simultaneous campaign represented an operational judgment that the costs of leaving the organizational headquarters untouched exceeded the costs of the escalation that striking it would produce, a judgment that proved accurate in the sense that the post-strike escalation, though significant and including a Pakistani counter-operation and a brief period of multi-domain military engagement, was contained within the ceasefire framework negotiated through the DGMO hotline and US diplomatic involvement.

Organizational impact of the May 7 strike on Bahawalpur was significant across multiple dimensions. At the command level, the death of Abdul Rauf Azhar removed the most operationally experienced figure in JeM’s structure. For more than two decades, operational direction of the organization had flowed through him: training camp management, infiltration logistics, attack planning, and ISI liaison all passed through the operational chief’s authority. His death created a command vacancy that cannot be filled by promoting an available deputy. Operational chiefs accumulate ISI relationships, organizational knowledge, and network trust across decades of function. These assets are not transferable by appointment, and their absence creates organizational disruption that is qualitatively different from the loss of any fighter or mid-tier commander.

Structural damage to the Usman-o-Ali campus, documented through satellite imagery showing significant physical alteration of the compound between pre-strike and post-strike periods, altered the physical headquarters of JeM’s operations. Whether the most sensitive organizational assets, leadership personnel, planning documents, electronic communications equipment, weapons stocks, and financial records, were present at the compound or had been dispersed before the strike is a question the available evidence cannot definitively resolve. The logic of pre-strike dispersal suggests that an organization with ISI intelligence access might have had warning sufficient to move critical assets. The evidence that Masood Azhar’s family was present at the compound on the night of May 6-7 suggests either that warning was insufficient, that the family chose not to relocate, or that the leadership assessed the compound as protected by factors that ultimately did not prevent the strike.

Pakistan’s broader response combined the civilian-casualty framing pursued in international forums with a military counter-operation designed to demonstrate that the Pakistani state would not absorb Indian strikes without response. Pakistan’s Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos, conducted in the days following May 7, included claimed strikes on Indian military installations, drone exchanges across the Line of Control, and the aerial engagement that produced the first jet-era dogfight between two nuclear-armed states. The escalation was ultimately contained by the DGMO hotline agreement and US diplomatic pressure into a ceasefire that both sides accepted, though the terms of that ceasefire and its durability continued to be debated in the months following the agreement.

The doctrine established by India’s willingness to strike Bahawalpur is the May 7 operation’s most enduring strategic consequence for that city specifically. During the shadow war’s ground-level phase, the deep interior of Pakistan’s Punjab was universally understood, by the organizations operating there and by external analysts, as beyond the reach of Indian kinetic action. Geography conferred immunity. Operation Sindoor demolished that assumption as thoroughly as SCALP missiles demolished the compound’s structures. Every organization that built its infrastructure behind Pakistan’s geographic and military buffer now operates in a risk environment fundamentally different from the one that existed before May 7. This is not merely a Bahawalpur phenomenon: it is a Pakistan-wide recalibration of what “safe” means for organizations enjoying ISI protection.

This doctrinal shift operates at multiple levels simultaneously. At the tactical level, organizations that concentrated leadership in Bahawalpur-style central facilities face a physical security calculation that no longer excludes air-delivered precision munitions as a threat. Dispersion, which limits operational efficiency, must now be weighed against the new demonstrated vulnerability of concentrated headquarters infrastructure. At the strategic level, the willingness to absorb the diplomatic and military escalation produced by strikes inside Pakistan proper signals that India’s threshold for conventional military action has changed, which forces Pakistani strategic planners to reconsider the risk architecture that previously allowed them to support anti-India organizations under a nuclear deterrence umbrella that they calculated would prevent Indian conventional response. That calculation proved incorrect. The deterrence equilibrium that made Bahawalpur safe did not prevent a Rafale-launched SCALP strike on the 8-kilometer perimeter of a Pakistani Army corps headquarters.

Pakistan’s response to this doctrinal shift has combined military signaling, diplomatic protest, and continued organizational support in patterns that are consistent with strategic ambiguity rather than genuine policy revision. The military signaling, through Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos and drone exchanges across the Line of Control, demonstrated that Pakistani deterrence retained credibility at the sub-nuclear level. The diplomatic protest, framing Indian strikes as aggression against a nuclear state, attempted to establish international norms against such action that would protect Pakistani-hosted organizations from future strikes. Continued organizational support, through the ISI’s relationship with JeM’s surviving command structure, signaled that the underlying strategic choice to use militant proxies against India had not been revised. This combination means that Bahawalpur’s doctrinal significance will be determined not by what happened on May 7 but by what India chooses to do with the precedent it established, and whether Pakistan’s failure to prevent the first such strike produces the institutional revision that two and a half decades of international pressure failed to achieve.

Behavioral changes among JeM’s surviving leadership after May 7 have mirrored patterns documented in other Pakistani cities following high-pressure operations. Masood Azhar has not made a confirmed public appearance in Bahawalpur since the strike. Public-facing organizational events have been held in other locations. Organizational communications have reportedly shifted further toward encrypted channels and dispersed cell structures that limit exposure at any single node. The September 2025 Mission Mustafa Conference, at which JeM’s commanders acknowledged organizational losses, took place inside Pakistan but not in Bahawalpur, indicating at minimum a temporary relocation of public-facing functions from the city that had served as the organization’s public anchor for twenty-five years.

Historical precedent provides context for assessing whether physical infrastructure destruction translates into durable organizational degradation. Balakot in 2019 targeted a JeM training facility in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and produced substantial controversy about the degree of damage inflicted. JeM’s operational capacity in the years following Balakot did not demonstrably collapse: the organization continued to recruit, maintain training infrastructure across multiple locations, and conduct operations in Jammu and Kashmir, culminating in the Pahalgam attack of April 2025 that triggered Operation Sindoor. Bahawalpur’s strike differs from Balakot in important ways, targeting the organizational headquarters rather than a training camp, and killing the operational chief rather than destroying physical structures whose human occupants had largely evacuated. Whether these differences produce more durable organizational degradation, or whether JeM’s ISI-connected resilience absorbs them as it absorbed every previous pressure, is the defining question for the post-Sindoor phase.

What May 7, 2025 permanently changed about Bahawalpur is the psychological ledger of the safe haven itself. For twenty-five years, operating from Bahawalpur carried no operational cost. Geographic depth, military proximity, and political deterrence all made the city a cost-free sanctuary. After May 7, operating from Bahawalpur carries demonstrated risk: the city has been struck, the compound has been damaged, the operational chief has been killed, and the family of the organizational founder has paid a direct price for concentration in a single location. Organizations make rational decisions about the risk-return profile of their operational geography. The Bahawalpur risk-return calculation has shifted. Whether it has shifted enough to alter the underlying ISI-JeM relationship and the state protection that made the city’s safe-haven status possible is a question whose answer will be written in the operational pattern of the years following the strike.

Structurally unchanged after May 7 is the institutional logic that made Bahawalpur a safe haven in the first place. The Pakistan Army’s interest in maintaining Kashmir-focused proxy capability, the ISI’s institutional investment in the relationships that the proxy network represents, the Deobandi milieu’s cultural and political influence in Punjab, and the economic welfare dependency that JeM cultivated across the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, none of these structural factors were altered by SCALP missiles. These are the foundations on which any rebuilt, relocated, or reconstituted JeM presence in Bahawalpur or elsewhere in Pakistan will be constructed. Understanding Bahawalpur means understanding that the compound was not the cause of JeM’s two-decade safe haven: it was the most visible symptom of a systemic institutional relationship that predated the compound’s construction and has survived its partial destruction.

What the May 7 evidence revealed about Bahawalpur is arguably as significant as what it destroyed. Masood Azhar’s own post-strike statement confirmed his family’s presence at the compound. JeM commanders’ subsequent public statements confirmed organizational losses in Bahawalpur. The satellite imagery confirmed structural damage. And Pakistan’s inability to sustain its “civilian facility” framing in the face of these confirmations demonstrated once again that the compound’s militant functions were not disputed by the evidence; they were disputed only by Pakistani government statements. The city that gave birth to Jaish-e-Mohammed has been permanently marked as an operational theater in a conflict that will not conclude until Pakistan’s institutional relationship with the organizations it has housed changes in ways that go far deeper than any single airstrike can reach.

The civilian population of Bahawalpur has absorbed consequences from the city’s safe-haven role that rarely appear in strategic analyses focused on organizational command structures and strike assessments. For the students enrolled in the Usman-o-Ali madrassa on the night of May 7, the strike’s consequences were immediate and personal regardless of their individual commitment to JeM’s militant mission. For families whose sons had enrolled in the madrassa for educational and economic reasons rather than ideological ones, the loss of access to the campus’s welfare functions created material disruption without any corresponding increase in their political agency over the city’s role in the conflict. For business owners in neighborhoods adjoining the compound, proximity to a target created economic uncertainty that had nothing to do with their own choices about the city’s identity. The humanitarian cost of housing an anti-India terrorist organization in a residential city is not borne primarily by the organization’s leadership. It is borne by the city’s civilian population, which has neither chosen the organizational presence nor retained meaningful capacity to remove it. That population’s position constitutes the most direct humanitarian indictment of the Pakistani state’s two-and-a-half-decade policy of institutional tolerance for JeM’s Bahawalpur headquarters.

Reconstruction and adaptive response by the broader JeM network in the months following May 7 has proceeded through channels that reflect the organization’s institutional depth. Recruitment messaging from JeM-affiliated networks identified by researchers in the post-Sindoor period framed the Bahawalpur strike as a martyr-creating atrocity that validated the organization’s claim of existential Indian aggression against Muslims. Abdullah Azhar’s digital fundraising apparatus, operating through mobile wallet platforms that regenerate destroyed accounts through new wallet creation, continued generating funds across the organization’s distribution network. Training activity at camps outside Bahawalpur, distributed across Muzaffarabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balakot, continued under the oversight of surviving operational figures below Abdul Rauf in the organizational hierarchy. The organization Masood Azhar built in Bahawalpur was not comprehensively ended by the strike on its headquarters. What was ended was the assumption that the headquarters was untouchable, and the twenty-five-year demonstration that ISI protection and geographic depth together constituted an absolute guarantee of organizational continuity without any kinetic cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Where exactly is JeM’s headquarters located in Bahawalpur?

Jaish-e-Mohammed’s primary operational headquarters in Bahawalpur is the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah complex, also known as the Usman-o-Ali campus, located in the Ahmadpur East area of Bahawalpur district, approximately 400 kilometers from Lahore and roughly 8 kilometers from the Pakistan Army’s 31 Corps cantonment. The 18-acre compound includes a mosque, a madrassa accommodating more than 600 students, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, and horse stables. Documented in satellite imagery and journalistic reporting since at least 2009, the campus was administratively connected to Al-Rahmat Trust, a registered charitable organization serving as the compound’s primary funding vehicle. India designated it as Site 9 in its Operation Sindoor briefing materials and struck it on May 7, 2025, with satellite imagery subsequently showing significant structural damage.

Q: What is Madrassa Usman-o-Ali and what does it actually do?

Madrassa Usman-o-Ali is the educational and religious component of the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah complex in Bahawalpur. Publicly, it functions as a Deobandi seminary providing religious instruction to students from Bahawalpur district and surrounding areas, with reported enrollment exceeding 600 students at various periods. Pakistani authorities have consistently presented it as a civilian educational institution. Indian intelligence and Western counter-terrorism analysts have characterized it as a dual-use facility where religious education provides cover for militant recruitment, ideological indoctrination, and the processing of students into JeM’s organizational pipeline. Facilities including the gymnasium, the swimming pool used for water training, and the horse stables are inconsistent with a purely religious and academic function. Under FATF pressure, Pakistan acknowledged that Al-Rahmat Trust, which funds the madrassa, had organizational connections to JeM, without conceding that the educational programs served as cover for militant activities.

Q: Was Bahawalpur specifically targeted during Operation Sindoor, and why?

Yes. Bahawalpur was one of four targets struck inside Pakistan proper during Operation Sindoor, with the remaining five targets located in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. India designated the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah compound a priority target because intelligence assessed it as the organizational headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a group India held responsible for providing operational support to the Pahalgam attack of April 22, 2025, which killed 26 civilians, predominantly tourists, at Jammu and Kashmir’s Baisaran Valley. Targeting the headquarters rather than a peripheral training facility was assessed as more strategically significant: destroying the command and coordination center had greater organizational impact than striking any single training camp in the broader JeM network distributed across Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Q: Is Masood Azhar really from Bahawalpur?

Masood Azhar Alvi was born in Bahawalpur on July 10, 1968, the third of approximately eleven children of Allah Bakhsh Shabbir, a government school headmaster with Deobandi convictions. His family ran a dairy and poultry farm near the city. He grew up in Bahawalpur, pursued advanced religious education in Karachi at the Jamia Uloom ul Islamia Banuri Town, and returned to Bahawalpur after his release from Indian custody in 1999 to found Jaish-e-Mohammed, which was formally launched there on January 31, 2000. The city is not incidentally connected to Azhar: it is his hometown, the location of his family network, the city where his brothers and children built careers within the organization, and the institutional base of everything he created after the Kandahar release. His return to Bahawalpur after 1999 was a homecoming that became a headquarters decision with twenty-five years of documented consequences.

Q: What specific JeM facilities exist in Bahawalpur beyond the main compound?

Beyond the 18-acre Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah campus at Ahmadpur East, JeM maintained a separate 6.5-acre walled compound developed around 2009, documented as including a swimming pool for water training, horse stables, and tactical training areas. Masood Azhar maintained a private fortified residence in the city, separate from the institutional campus, with armed guards and reinforced security arrangements consistent with resources available to a state-protected figure. The organization’s administrative coordination between Bahawalpur’s headquarters and training camps distributed across Muzaffarabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and other locations operated through city-based infrastructure. Al-Rahmat Trust maintained offices for its charitable and fundraising functions. Abdullah Azhar’s digital fundraising operation used mobile wallet platforms anchored in the Bahawalpur organizational center. Together, these installations constitute a JeM presence in Bahawalpur unmatched in concentration by any comparable anti-India organization in any comparable Pakistani city.

Q: Did India actually destroy JeM’s Bahawalpur infrastructure?

Satellite imagery analysis published in the days following the May 7, 2025 strikes showed significant structural damage to the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah compound. Before-and-after comparisons documented by open-source intelligence analysts, including Nathan Ruser, showed clear physical alteration of the compound’s structures consistent with precision munitions strikes. India claimed the facility was destroyed as a training and recruitment hub. Pakistan disputed the characterization, asserting that a religious facility had been struck and that no militant infrastructure was targeted. JeM’s own subsequent behavior and statements, particularly the September 2025 acknowledgment by commander Masood Ilyas Kashmiri that the family compound had been devastated and that ten family members and four associates died in the strike, indicated genuine organizational disruption. Whether the damage was comprehensive enough to permanently prevent reconstruction of operational capacity depends on decisions within the ISI-JeM relationship that are not yet observable through open-source channels.

Q: How close is JeM’s Bahawalpur complex to the Pakistan Army’s 31 Corps headquarters?

The Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah compound in the Ahmadpur East area of Bahawalpur is approximately 8 kilometers from the headquarters of the Pakistan Army’s XXXI Corps in the Bahawalpur cantonment. Intelligence analysts and investigative journalists have consistently characterized this proximity as indicating that the Army had institutional knowledge of the compound’s functions across the full twenty-five years of its operation. The structural argument is that the Pakistan Army controls the security environment around its major cantonment cities with a thoroughness that makes implausible any claim that an 18-acre compound housing hundreds of people, armed guards, and the command structure of a designated terrorist organization could operate for two and a half decades without corps headquarters awareness. This proximity does not prove active operational direction by 31 Corps, but it substantially undermines the Pakistani state’s claim of institutional ignorance regarding the compound’s militant functions.

Q: Has JeM dispersed its assets from Bahawalpur following Operation Sindoor?

Open-source reporting following the May 7 strikes documents behavioral changes consistent with organizational dispersal. Masood Azhar has not made a confirmed public appearance in Bahawalpur since the strike. Public-facing organizational events have been held in other locations. Killing of Abdul Rauf Azhar removed the operational chief whose ISI relationships and institutional knowledge were critical to coordinating from the Bahawalpur center. However, dispersal is not the same as dismantlement. JeM has demonstrated institutional resilience across multiple crises: the 2001-2002 post-Parliament attack ban period, the 2016 post-Pathankot pressure, and the 2019 post-Pulwama and post-Balakot environment. Each time, the organization reconstituted through ISI protection, financial network resilience, and geographic flexibility. Whether Bahawalpur remains the formal headquarters or is replaced by a distributed command architecture depends on decisions not yet visible in open-source reporting.

Q: Why did JeM’s headquarters remain in Bahawalpur despite international sanctions?

Persistence of JeM’s headquarters in Bahawalpur across twenty-five years of international pressure reflects the gap between Pakistan’s formal counter-terrorism commitments and its actual institutional policy. Pakistan banned JeM in 2002, placed Masood Azhar under periodic nominal house arrest during high-pressure international moments, announced takeover of the Usman-o-Ali campus after Pulwama in 2019, and cooperated selectively with FATF compliance requirements. None of these actions translated into operational closure because none were designed to produce operational closure. ISI-connected leadership operated under institutional protection that treated the formal ban as a diplomatic instrument rather than an operational instruction. China’s vetoing of four UN Security Council attempts to designate Azhar as a global terrorist between 2009 and 2019 reinforced international impunity that supplemented domestic tolerance. China finally withdrew its veto protection in May 2019 under sustained international pressure, enabling UN designation, but the designation did not produce operational disruption at the Bahawalpur compound.

Q: Who was Abdul Rauf Azhar and why did his death matter strategically?

Abdul Rauf Azhar was Masood Azhar’s younger brother and the de facto operational chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed for most of the organization’s existence. At just 24 years old, he organized the IC-814 hijacking in December 1999 that secured his elder brother’s release. His operational direction covered every significant JeM attack against India: the 2001 attacks on the Jammu and Kashmir assembly and the Indian Parliament, the 2016 Pathankot airbase attack, and the 2019 Pulwama bombing killing 40 CRPF personnel. He managed training camp infrastructure across Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, Balakot, Mansehra, and Muzaffarabad; maintained ISI liaison relationships; and conducted organizational planning from Bahawalpur throughout his operational career. India and the United States both designated him a global terrorist. His death in the May 7 strike removed the most operationally experienced figure in JeM’s structure, creating a command vacancy that cannot be filled by simple organizational succession because the operational chief role requires decades of accumulated ISI relationships and institutional knowledge that no deputy currently in the organization’s structure possesses.

Q: What was the UN Security Council’s position on Masood Azhar and JeM?

Jaish-e-Mohammed was designated a terrorist organization by the United Nations Security Council. Masood Azhar was designated a UN global terrorist on May 1, 2019, after a decade-long diplomatic struggle in which China vetoed four separate attempts to designate him: in 2009, 2017, 2018, and through a technical hold in early 2019. Each veto was justified by China on the basis of insufficient evidence, a justification Western governments and India characterized as implausible given the documented record of JeM’s attacks and Azhar’s organizational role. China’s eventual agreement in May 2019 came under sustained international pressure following Pulwama and Balakot. Despite the UN designation, the Bahawalpur compound continued to operate as an active organizational headquarters, demonstrating that international designation without Pakistani enforcement is insufficient to produce operational disruption.

Q: What is Al-Rahmat Trust and how did it fund JeM in Bahawalpur?

Al-Rahmat Trust is a registered Pakistani charitable organization serving as the primary financial and administrative vehicle for the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah campus in Bahawalpur. Registered as a charity, it created legal cover for facilities whose underlying organizational functions were militant. Funds came from Pakistani domestic donors, Gulf-based diaspora networks, and sources identified in financial intelligence as affiliated with Gulf-based charitable fronts with documented jihadist connections. Those funds paid for the campus’s operational budget: staff salaries, student stipends, post-2011 construction costs, and organizational expenses of an entity that officially did not exist under JeM’s banned name but functionally operated as JeM’s headquarters. FATF grey-listing actions against Al-Rahmat Trust were undertaken as part of Pakistan’s compliance requirements in 2018 and 2021. India’s consistent position was that these actions were cosmetic rather than substantive, a position supported by the May 7, 2025 evidence showing the campus operating as an active headquarters six years after FATF compliance actions began.

Q: How does Bahawalpur’s safe-haven role differ from Karachi and Lahore?

Karachi’s safe-haven function is characterized by scale and anonymity: a megacity of twenty million provides cover through population density, overlapping criminal and militant networks, and a police force with documented limitations in prosecuting organized groups with political protection. Lahore functions primarily as Lashkar-e-Taiba’s headquarters city, with significant political dimensions given its status as Punjab’s cultural and administrative center. Bahawalpur’s character is defined by three factors absent in both cities: the organizational founder was born there, making the city selection an identity decision as much as a strategic one; proximity of 31 Corps cantonment provides institutional protection unavailable in Karachi’s diffuse environment; and concentration of the entire JeM command structure, including multiple family members in critical roles, represented an organizational centralization unusual for a group sustaining international pressure for two decades. This combination made Bahawalpur simultaneously the safest and most consequential target available for a sufficiently bold military action: safest because of institutional protection, most consequential because of command concentration.

Q: What does Bahawalpur reveal about Pakistan’s relationship with anti-India terrorism?

Bahawalpur is the most concentrated single-city demonstration of Pakistan’s institutional relationship with anti-India terrorism. Consider the facts in combination: the organizational founder was born in the city; JeM was formally launched there on January 31, 2000; the headquarters was built with funding from a registered charitable trust; Pakistani police guarded the compound’s perimeter; the compound was built 8 kilometers from a major Army corps headquarters; Pakistan formally banned the organization in 2002 and then allowed it to expand infrastructure for another two decades; FATF compliance actions were undertaken without disrupting operational function; China vetoed four UN designation attempts providing international cover; and the organization’s operational chief lived in the city under ISI protection until a foreign air force ended that protection on May 7, 2025. Each of these facts is individually explicable through alternative framings. Their combination in a single city across twenty-five years establishes a pattern that Pakistan’s formal counter-terrorism narrative cannot coherently contain, and that Operation Sindoor brought into permanent, documented international visibility.

Q: Is Bahawalpur still a safe haven for JeM after Operation Sindoor?

Bahawalpur’s safe-haven status is compromised but not eliminated. May 7 destroyed significant infrastructure, killed the organizational chief, killed ten members of the founder’s immediate family, and permanently demolished the assumption of geographic immunity that had made the city a cost-free sanctuary for a quarter century. JeM’s behavioral changes since the strike, including the absence of confirmed public appearances by Masood Azhar in the city and the relocation of public-facing organizational events, suggest genuine disruption of the city’s function as an undisturbed command center. However, the ISI-JeM relationship that made Bahawalpur safe in the first place has not been structurally altered by a single military operation. Institutional architecture of protection, funding, and recruitment that sustained the compound through twenty-five years of international pressure remains embedded in Pakistan’s security establishment. Whether Bahawalpur’s headquarters role is rebuilt, relocated to a distributed model, or reconstituted in some hybrid form depends on decisions within that relationship whose direction will only become visible as the organization’s operational pattern over the coming years clarifies which choices its leadership and its state patrons have made.

Q: How did Masood Azhar use Bahawalpur’s Deobandi networks to recruit for JeM?

Azhar’s recruitment methodology in Bahawalpur exploited the alignment between the city’s established Deobandi institutional ecosystem and JeM’s theological framework. The Usman-o-Ali campus was not JeM’s only recruitment node in the city: it sat at the top of a pyramid of smaller affiliated madrassas and mosques across Bahawalpur district that served as first-contact environments for prospective recruits. At these smaller institutions, JeM’s ideology was presented not as the program of a designated terrorist organization but as the natural application of Deobandi religious teaching to the Kashmir conflict, framing jihadist participation as a religious obligation comparable to prayer or fasting. Young men identified as receptive at this stage were channeled toward the campus, where organizational identity was formalized and the transition from religious student to organizational recruit completed. Economic incentives reinforced ideological ones: the campus provided food, accommodation, religious education, and in some cases stipends that the surrounding agricultural economy could not match. This layered recruitment architecture, moving from community-level ideological exposure through institutional processing to formal organizational enrollment, produced a pipeline that consistently supplied the training camps distributed across Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with recruits from Bahawalpur district and the broader southern Punjab region.

Q: What role did Jamat ul-Muminat, JeM’s women’s wing, play and why was it based in Bahawalpur?

Jamat ul-Muminat, Jaish-e-Mohammed’s women’s organizational wing, was announced in October 2025 by Al-Qalam Media, with Sadiya Azhar, Masood Azhar’s sister and a survivor of the May 7 strike, named as its head. The announcement cited approval from both Masood Azhar and Talha al-Saif, indicating leadership-level commitment to the women’s wing as an organizational development rather than a symbolic gesture. Recruitment was announced to begin at the Markaz Usman-o-Ali in Bahawalpur, despite the physical damage the May 7 strike had inflicted on the campus, suggesting that the organization’s leadership considered the campus’s organizational function viable enough to restart recruitment operations less than six months after the strike. Target demographics included economically disadvantaged women enrolled in JeM’s educational facilities across Bahawalpur, Karachi, Muzaffarabad, Kotli, Haripur, and Mansehra, as well as wives of JeM commanders. The Bahawalpur origin of the announcement and the campus-anchored recruitment start demonstrated that the city’s role as the organizational center of gravity had survived the May 7 disruption in ways that the post-strike behavioral changes in male leadership functions had partially obscured. Women’s wing announcements by militant organizations are frequently indicators of organizational stress: expanding the recruitment base to previously excluded populations signals that traditional male recruitment pipelines have been disrupted. In JeM’s case, the Bahawalpur-anchored women’s wing announcement was simultaneously a signal of organizational continuity and an indirect acknowledgment that the May 7 strike had created personnel pressures the organization was attempting to compensate for through institutional expansion.

Q: How did China’s veto protection for Masood Azhar affect Bahawalpur’s safe-haven status?

China’s vetoing of four UN Security Council attempts to designate Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, in 2009, 2017, 2018, and early 2019, provided international legal cover that supplemented Pakistan’s domestic institutional protection for JeM’s Bahawalpur headquarters. UN designation would have required member states to impose asset freezes, travel bans, and arms embargoes that, even if imperfectly enforced, would have created additional pressure on the financial infrastructure supporting the Usman-o-Ali campus. More importantly, designation would have removed the diplomatic ambiguity Pakistan exploited to present the compound as a civilian religious institution: an organization whose founder was a UN-designated global terrorist could not credibly be presented as operating a legitimate madrassa. China’s veto protection preserved this ambiguity for a decade, providing time during which the campus expanded its infrastructure, the 6.5-acre secondary compound was developed, and JeM conducted the Pathankot and Pulwama attacks. When China withdrew its veto in May 2019 under sustained international pressure following Pulwama, the resulting UN designation did not produce the organizational disruption its supporters had hoped for, because the designation’s enforcement depended on Pakistan’s cooperation, and Pakistan’s cooperation remained selective. However, the designation permanently damaged Pakistan’s “civilian institution” framing for the campus and strengthened the international consensus that JeM’s Bahawalpur headquarters was exactly what India consistently described it as: the organizational center of a UN-designated terrorist group operating under Pakistani state protection.