The hill town of Rawalakot sits in a bowl of pine-covered slopes in the Poonch division of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, roughly fifty kilometres of switchbacking mountain road from the Line of Control, and for the better part of three decades it has held a peculiar position in the architecture of cross-frontier militancy. It is not a headquarters in the sense that Muridke is a headquarters. It runs no two-hundred-acre campus, hosts no founder, prints no recruitment magazine. What Rawalakot is, instead, is the last inhabited place a militant passes through before the frontier, the final town with electricity and a bazaar and a paved road, the staging area where men gather, receive their last briefings, draw their last rations, and then walk into the forest toward the ridgelines that separate them from Indian Kashmir. The town is a threshold. And in September 2023 it stopped being a safe one.

For years the assumption inside the insurgent ecosystem was that a man could disappear into Rawalakot and be untouchable. The town was deep inside Pakistani-controlled territory, ringed by Pakistan Army brigades, populated by families with cross-frontier kinship ties and a long cultural memory of the 1947 war. A man who had crossed from Rajouri or Poonch and settled here, married here, prayed at the same mosque every dawn, was as protected as the geography of South Asia could make him. That assumption is what makes the killing of Riyaz Ahmad, the Lashkar-e-Taiba commander known across the region by his operational name Abu Qasim, such a hinge moment. He was shot in the head at point-blank range inside al-Qudus mosque while he knelt for the pre-dawn Fajr prayer, and the men who did it knew which town, which mosque, which prayer, and which spot in the congregation. The staging ground had been staged against. This guide examines how Rawalakot became the most active infiltration launching pad along the southern Line of Control, what its geography and its militant infrastructure actually look like at ground level, how the Abu Qasim shooting punctured the town’s reputation for safety, and what the targeted killing revealed about the reach of India’s shadow war into the heart of the infiltration apparatus. The argument running through every section is the one that connects this town to the broader campaign chronicled across India’s shadow war against terror: a place that exists to send violence across a border eventually finds that the border works in both directions.

Geography and Strategic Position

Rawalakot is the administrative seat of Poonch district within Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, a district that the Pakistani administration treats as part of what it calls Azad Jammu and Kashmir. The town lies at an elevation of roughly sixteen hundred metres in the Pir Panjal foothills, cradled by forested ridges that rise sharply on every side. Its population is modest, in the range of a few tens of thousands in the urban core, swelling considerably when the surrounding villages of the valley are counted. It has a degree college, a district hospital, a central bazaar, a bus stand, and the ordinary furniture of a Pakistani hill town. It also has, by virtue of where it sits, a strategic value entirely out of proportion to its size.

The thing to understand about Rawalakot is the relationship between its location and the Line of Control. The de facto frontier that separates Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir from the Pakistani-administered portion runs, in this sector, along a chain of high ridges to the town’s east and south. The Indian district of Poonch sits directly across that line, and the two Poonches, the Indian one and the Pakistani one, are halves of a single pre-1947 district that the first India-Pakistan war cut in two. The road distance from Rawalakot to the nearest stretch of the Line of Control is short by the standards of a country, roughly forty to fifty kilometres depending on the route, and the straight-line distance is shorter still. A man on foot, moving through forest and avoiding roads, can close that gap in a matter of days. This proximity is the single most important fact about the town. It places Rawalakot inside the infiltration zone, the band of Pakistani-controlled territory close enough to the frontier that it can function as a forward base.

The terrain between the town and the frontier is the terrain that makes infiltration possible at all. The Pir Panjal range here is a tangle of forested slopes, narrow nullahs, seasonal streams, and high passes that connect the valleys on the Pakistani side to the valleys on the Indian side. The most consequential of these passes is the Haji Pir Pass, which sits at an elevation of around twenty-six hundred metres and connects the Poonch sector on the Indian side to the Rawalakot sector on the Pakistani side. Haji Pir is not a footnote in this story; it is, by the assessment of Indian defence planners across multiple decades, the principal corridor through which Pakistani-trained militants have moved into the Kashmir Valley. India captured the pass in the 1965 war and then returned it to Pakistan in the post-war settlement, a decision that retired Indian generals have spent sixty years describing as a strategic error. The pass remains in Pakistani hands, and the town of Rawalakot sits on the Pakistani approach to it. That geographic accident is why a quiet hill station with a degree college and a hospital became a name that appears in Indian Army infiltration logs.

Weather shapes the rhythm of the frontier here as much as politics does. The high passes close under snow through the deep winter, which compresses the infiltration calendar into the warmer months, broadly from the spring thaw through the late autumn. The pattern that Indian Army formations in the Poonch and Rajouri sectors have documented for years is a surge in attempted crossings as the snow recedes from the ridgelines, a sustained flow through the summer, and a tapering as the first snows return. Rawalakot’s function as a staging town is therefore seasonal in its intensity. Through the cold months the town reverts more fully to ordinary life; through the warm months it carries a transient population of men who do not belong to its families and do not intend to stay.

The town is also a node in a road network that matters. The route from Rawalakot connects northward toward Bagh and onward toward Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, and southward toward Kotli and the lowland districts. Crucially, Rawalakot sits on the Pakistani end of one of the few sanctioned crossing points along this stretch of the Line of Control. The Poonch-Rawalakot route, operating through the Chakan Da Bagh crossing on the Indian side and the Tatrinote crossing on the Pakistani side, was opened in the mid-2000s as a cross-frontier bus service and trade corridor, a confidence-building measure intended to reconnect families divided in 1947. The bus service, when it runs, links the Indian town of Poonch directly to Rawalakot. The existence of a legitimate, sanctioned, monitored crossing in the same sector as the busiest illegitimate crossing is one of the central contradictions of the place, and it is a contradiction that the analysis below will return to, because it shapes both how militants move and how their hunters might have moved.

Strategically, then, Rawalakot occupies a specific tier in the geography mapped across Pakistan’s terror safe haven network. It is not where the organisations are built. The building happens in the Punjab heartland, in Muridke and Bahawalpur and Lahore. Rawalakot is where the product of that building is delivered to the frontier. In supply-chain terms it is the final distribution point, the warehouse closest to the customer, and the customer is the Indian side of the Line of Control. Understanding the town requires holding that function steady in view: every other feature of Rawalakot, its mosques, its safe houses, its transient lodgers, its relationship with the local Pakistan Army brigade, arranges itself around the single purpose of moving armed men across a mountain frontier.

The civilian reality of the town complicates this picture, and honesty requires stating the complication plainly. Rawalakot is a real town with a real population that has nothing to do with militancy. Its degree college educates young people who will become teachers and clerks and shopkeepers. Its hospital treats the ordinary illnesses of a mountain district. Its bazaar sells vegetables and cloth and mobile phones. The valley around it is agricultural, terraced for maize and vegetables, dotted with villages whose residents are connected by blood to villages on the Indian side and who would, if the frontier allowed it, simply be Kashmiris of the Poonch division rather than citizens of two hostile states. The infiltration function is not the whole of Rawalakot. It is a parasitic layer that sits on top of an ordinary town, using the town’s roads and lodgings and crowds as cover. That layering, the way a genuine civilian settlement becomes the camouflage for a military function, is precisely what makes places like this so difficult to address, and it is a pattern repeated across the safe-haven geography from the cities to the tribal belt.

The human geography of the Poonch belt reinforces the town’s frontier function in a way the physical map alone does not capture. The population of this division, on both sides of the Line of Control, descends from communities, including the Sudhan and Rajput lineages of the Pir Panjal, whose social networks predate the 1947 partition and were sliced rather than dissolved by it. A family in the Rawalakot valley is, with real frequency, a family with cousins in the Indian Poonch district. That kinship lattice has two effects on the town’s role as a staging area. It supplies the guides, because a man whose relatives farm on the Indian side knows the forest routes and the seasonal streams in a way no outsider could. It also complicates the loyalty map, because the same kinship that makes the routes legible to the staging apparatus makes the apparatus legible, in turn, to anyone who can recruit a single connected informant. The cross-frontier family network is the launching pad’s greatest operational asset and, as the events of September 2023 would later suggest, its most serious latent weakness.

Seasonality deserves a closer look, because the calendar of the frontier is one of the most underappreciated features of how a staging town actually works. The high passes of the Pir Panjal, Haji Pir foremost among them, lie under deep snow from roughly late November through the early spring. During those months a crossing through the passes is close to suicidal, and the infiltration calendar contracts accordingly. What this means for Rawalakot is a town with two distinct seasons of identity. Through the cold months the transient militant population thins, the staging cells run quieter, and the town reverts more fully to the ordinary life of a Pakistani hill district. Through the warm months, broadly from the thaw to the first autumn snows, the picture inverts: the passes open, the interception logs on the Indian side record their predictable surge, and Rawalakot fills with men who do not belong to its families. A launching pad, in other words, is not a constant. It pulses with the snowline, and an analyst reading the town’s rhythm can read the staging calendar off the weather.

The road network that threads through Rawalakot is the third element of its strategic position, and it has a dual character that mirrors the town itself. The same roads that carry schoolchildren to the degree college and produce to the central bazaar are the roads along which the 2 PoK Brigade has placed its checkpoints, and they are the roads a staged group travels for the first leg of its journey toward the frontier before it leaves the metalled surface for the forest. Northward the route ties Rawalakot to Bagh and onward to Muzaffarabad; southward it connects to Kotli and the lowland districts; eastward and southward the lesser tracks climb toward the ridgelines. A town is only a launching pad if it can both receive and dispatch, and the road geometry of Rawalakot allows it to do both: to receive groups arriving from the training infrastructure of the Punjab, and to dispatch them toward the passes. The cross-frontier trade and bus corridor through the Tatrinote and Chakan Da Bagh points, layered onto this same network, completes a road map on which the legitimate and the clandestine run, quite literally, along the same tarmac.

Terror Organizations Present

The armed presence in and around Rawalakot is not that of a single organisation but of a small ecosystem, and the composition of that ecosystem reflects the town’s role as a frontier conduit rather than a headquarters. The groups that matter here are the ones that need to move men across the Line of Control: principally Lashkar-e-Taiba, alongside Hizbul Mujahideen, with a supporting presence from the broader umbrella of anti-India outfits coordinated from the regional capital.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is the dominant actor. The organisation whose structure and history are set out in full in the complete guide to Lashkar-e-Taiba built its reputation on the ability to deliver trained fidayeen across hard frontiers, and the Poonch-Rawalakot sector has been one of its principal delivery routes for most of the group’s operational life. Lashkar does not run a campus in Rawalakot of the kind it runs in Muridke. What it runs here is a forward apparatus: handlers who receive groups arriving from the training infrastructure further south, lodging arrangements that absorb those groups into the town without attracting notice, guides drawn from the local population who know the forest routes toward the passes, and a communications layer that connects the staging cell back to the operational command. Abu Qasim, the commander whose killing anchors this guide, was a Lashkar man, and the reporting on his death noted explicitly that he had operated from the Lashkar base in Muridke before relocating to Rawalakot. His career traced the supply chain in person: built in the Punjab, deployed to the frontier.

Hizbul Mujahideen maintains a presence as well, and its presence has a different texture. Hizbul, whose evolution is detailed in the guide to Hizbul Mujahideen, is the oldest of the Kashmir-focused outfits and the one that has always presented itself as indigenous to Kashmir rather than imported from the Pakistani Punjab. For Hizbul, the Poonch and Bagh sectors of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir are home ground in a way they are not for Lashkar. The group’s cadre includes men whose families straddle the frontier, and its staging operations in the Rawalakot belt lean on that local rootedness. Where Lashkar moves Punjabi recruits to the frontier, Hizbul moves men who may already have grown up within sight of it.

Above both groups sits the coordinating umbrella. The United Jihad Council, the alliance of anti-India militant outfits chaired for years by the Hizbul leader Syed Salahuddin, is headquartered in the regional capital of Muzaffarabad to the north. The council does not run the Rawalakot staging cells directly in any operational sense, but it provides the framework within which the various groups deconflict their use of the same passes, the same guides, and the same forest corridors. Rawalakot sits downstream of Muzaffarabad in the command geography: policy and coordination happen in the capital, execution happens at the frontier towns. The relationship between the umbrella command and the frontier conduit is the relationship between a dispatcher and a loading dock.

The Pakistan Army’s role in this ecosystem is the most contested question in any honest account of Rawalakot, and it deserves to be stated carefully because it is the named disagreement that the rest of this guide will adjudicate. The town and its surrounding sector fall under the responsibility of a Pakistan Army formation, the 2 PoK Brigade, often referred to in regional reporting as the Rawalakot Brigade, which holds the Line of Control in this sector and maintains checkpoints along the roads that lead toward the frontier. The brigade’s presence is not nominal. This is a militarised zone, and the Pakistan Army is the supreme authority within it. The question is not whether the Army is present. The question is what the Army’s presence means for the cross-frontier traffic. One reading holds that the infiltration apparatus operates because the Army actively facilitates it, positioning checkpoints so that they screen ordinary travellers while waving through militant groups, providing covering fire across the Line of Control during crossing attempts, and treating the anti-India outfits as auxiliaries of state policy. The opposing reading holds that the apparatus operates despite the Army rather than because of it, that the terrain is simply too vast and too broken for any military to seal, and that the Army tolerates a traffic it cannot fully suppress. The evidence on this question is examined later in this guide, in the section on the infrastructure of shelter, because it cannot be settled by assertion. What can be said here is that no account of the organisations present in Rawalakot is complete without naming the Army as the fourth actor in the ecosystem, alongside Lashkar, Hizbul, and the umbrella command, and that the Army’s exact relationship to the other three is the hinge on which the strategic meaning of the town turns.

The role of Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus completes the picture. The Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, whose long sponsorship of militant outfits is documented in the analysis of the ISI and terror nexus, has historically managed the relationship between the state and the Kashmir-focused groups. In a frontier town like Rawalakot the intelligence presence is not a uniformed one. It is a network of contacts, informants, and liaison men who connect the staging cells to the state’s preferences, who can accelerate or throttle the flow of crossings according to the diplomatic weather, and who ensure that the groups operating from the town remain within the bounds the state wishes to keep them in. The intelligence layer is the least visible of all the actors in the ecosystem and, for that reason, the one whose presence is hardest to document and easiest to deny.

The way Lashkar’s forward apparatus actually functions in a town like Rawalakot rewards a closer description, because the mechanics explain why a staging town is so hard to disrupt. A group of recruits does not simply arrive at the frontier and walk across. The group arrives first at the staging town, where a handler takes charge of it. The handler is the pivot of the whole arrangement. He is the man who arranges lodging that will not attract notice, who feeds and equips the group, who maintains the contact with the operational command further south, who decides, reading the weather and the patrol patterns and the diplomatic signals, when a crossing window has opened, and who hands the group to the guides for the final movement. A handler is not a fighter; he is a logistician and a manager, and his value to the organisation is precisely that he does not cross the frontier himself and so does not get caught at it. He stays in the town, runs group after group, and accumulates the irreplaceable asset of local knowledge. Abu Qasim, in his Rawalakot years, was a handler of this kind operating at commander rank, which is part of why his removal mattered: the campaign did not subtract a foot soldier, it subtracted a node of accumulated logistical knowledge.

The guides form the second specialist layer, and they are drawn, as the human geography of the valley dictates, from the local population. A guide is valuable for one reason: he can move a group of armed strangers from the last road to the frontier through terrain in which a wrong turn means a patrol, an avalanche chute, or a dead end against the fence. The guide reads the forest the way a city handler reads a street. He knows which nullah carries water in which month, which slope is exposed to an Indian observation post, which stretch of the route can be walked by night. A militant outfit cannot manufacture guides; it can only recruit them from the families of the valley, which ties the apparatus, once again, to the local population and its kinship networks. This dependence is structural. A launching pad without local guides is not a launching pad, and local guides cannot be imported.

The historical evolution of the insurgent presence in the Rawalakot belt tracks the broader arc of the Kashmir insurgency. Through the early and middle 1990s, when the insurgency was at its most intense and the frontier at its most porous, the staging traffic through the Poonch sector ran heavy and relatively open. The construction of the Indian anti-infiltration fence through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, together with the 2003 ceasefire understanding, compressed the traffic and forced it to become more selective and more clandestine. Through the years that followed, the flow rose and fell with the diplomatic weather, throttled when the Pakistani state wanted quiet and loosened when it wanted pressure. The revival of militancy in the Poonch and Rajouri districts in the early 2020s, the revival that Abu Qasim was sent to direct, was the most recent upswing in that long oscillation. The point of the history is that the armed presence in Rawalakot has never been static. It is a managed variable, turned up and down by the state that hosts it, and the town has been, throughout, the instrument through which the variable is expressed at the frontier.

A word is owed to Jaish-e-Mohammed, whose presence in the Rawalakot belt is lighter than Lashkar’s but not absent. Jaish, the organisation built by Masood Azhar after his release in the IC-814 hijacking, has historically concentrated its operational geography further south, around Sialkot and the Bahawalpur heartland, closer to the international border than to the Pir Panjal passes. Its use of the Poonch sector has been more occasional, a secondary route rather than a primary one. But the broader point holds: the launching pad is not the exclusive property of one outfit. It is shared infrastructure, deconflicted by the umbrella command, used by whichever group has men to move, and that shared quality is part of what makes it durable. An apparatus that serves several organisations at once is not dismantled by the setback of any single one.

Terrorists Who Lived Here

The men who passed through Rawalakot fall into two categories, and the distinction matters for understanding the town. The first category is the transient: the recruits and fidayeen groups who arrived from the training infrastructure, lodged for a period of days or weeks while a crossing was arranged, and then either crossed the Line of Control or, if intercepted, died at the frontier. These men did not live in Rawalakot in any meaningful sense. They occupied it. The second category is the resident: the commanders, handlers, and facilitators who made the town a base, who married into it or rented in it, who prayed at its mosques and shopped in its bazaar and became, over years, part of its texture. It is the second category that the shadow war has reached, and it is the second category that Abu Qasim belonged to.

Riyaz Ahmad, who operated as Abu Qasim, is the most fully documented of the town’s militant residents because his death generated reporting that his life never did. The portrait that emerges from that reporting, set out in detail in the profile of Abu Qasim, is of a man whose biography traced the entire arc of the cross-frontier militancy machine. He hailed originally from the Jammu region, from the Pir Panjal belt on the Indian side, and crossed into Pakistani-controlled territory in 1999. That crossing date places him among a generation of men who left Indian Kashmir at the height of the insurgency, were absorbed into the Pakistani training infrastructure, and never returned except, in some cases, as commanders directing operations from the safe side of the frontier. Abu Qasim rose within Lashkar-e-Taiba. He operated for a period from the organisation’s base camp in Muridke, deep in the Punjab, and then, in the period before his death, relocated to Rawalakot. Indian security assessments described him as a key figure in the revival of militancy in the border districts of Poonch and Rajouri, the man who, from the Pakistani side, planned and directed the renewed violence that struck those districts after a relatively quiet period.

The reason Abu Qasim chose Rawalakot, rather than remaining in the relative anonymity of a large Punjabi city, is itself revealing. A commander tasked with reviving militancy in Poonch and Rajouri needed to be close to Poonch and Rajouri. Directing infiltration into the Pir Panjal belt is not a task that can be done effectively from four hundred kilometres away. It requires proximity to the routes, contact with the guides, the ability to receive groups and brief them and watch them go. Rawalakot offered that proximity. It also offered, or seemed to offer, safety: a town deep enough inside Pakistani territory, ringed by enough Army formations, populated by enough sympathetic families, that a Lashkar commander could live there openly. The reporting on his death noted that when he was shot, none of his associates were with him, because the area was considered safe for militant commanders, and because Rawalakot had become a place where men who had crossed over from Indian Kashmir naturally settled. He was not hiding in Rawalakot in the way a fugitive hides. He was residing in it in the way a man resides in a town he believes belongs, in some sense, to his side.

His operational cover in the town is worth describing because it illustrates how the resident militant blends into civilian life. Reporting on his activities indicated that Abu Qasim was projected locally as an activist associated with the Hurriyat current, a man engaged in raising funds from various organisations for what was presented as the cause of Kashmir. This is the standard architecture of the resident facilitator: a public identity as a political or charitable figure, a private function as a military planner. The public identity is not entirely fictional; the fundraising is real, the money moves, the cause is invoked. But the public identity exists to license the private one, to give a Lashkar commander a reason to be in Rawalakot, to meet people, to handle money, and to travel, without the daily texture of his life advertising what he actually did. The same pattern of charitable and political fronts layered over operational functions appears across the organisational analysis of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa front and is one of the most consistent features of how the Pakistani militant ecosystem hides itself in plain view.

Abu Qasim was not the only commander to use the town. Indian assessments connected him to other Jammu-region militant figures still operating from the Pakistani side, men described as planning fresh conspiracies aimed at the Jammu belt, men whose names appear in security reporting as the network around him rather than as documented residents of the town in their own right. The point is not the individual roster but the type. Rawalakot housed, over the years, a rotating population of men who fit Abu Qasim’s profile: originally from the Indian side, crossed over in the insurgency years, absorbed into Lashkar or Hizbul, risen to handler or commander rank, and posted to the frontier town because the frontier was where their work was. They are the human infrastructure of the launching pad. The transient fidayeen pass through; the resident commanders run the passing through.

It is worth pausing on what the residential pattern reveals about the town’s relationship to the Pakistani state, because it bears directly on the facilitation-versus-tolerance question. A fugitive hides. A resident does not. Abu Qasim’s mode of life in Rawalakot, open enough that he prayed at the same mosque every dawn, public enough that he had a recognised local identity as a fundraiser, was not the mode of life of a man evading the authorities around him. It was the mode of life of a man who had no reason to fear those authorities, who understood the town and the brigade and the local administration as, at minimum, indifferent to his presence and, at maximum, protective of it. The openness is itself a piece of evidence, and the section on the infrastructure of shelter will weigh it.

The men who did not become residents, the transient fidayeen, left fewer traces, but their passage is documented in the negative, in the Indian Army’s interception records from the Poonch and Rajouri sectors. Every infiltrating group neutralised at the Line of Control, every body recovered after a failed crossing, every cache of weapons found on a forest route, is a record of men who staged somewhere before they crossed, and for the southern Poonch sector the somewhere was disproportionately the Rawalakot belt. These men have no profiles because they completed nothing; they are knowable only as a flow, a current of armed traffic that the frontier defences caught in part and missed in part. The resident commanders like Abu Qasim are the visible tip of the town’s militant population. The invisible mass is the transient flow they existed to manage.

The transient population deserves more than the brief sketch given above, because the men who passed through Rawalakot without becoming residents were the actual cargo the town existed to move, and their journey illuminates the launching pad’s purpose. A typical member of an infiltrating group had been recruited months earlier, often far from the frontier, drawn into a militant outfit through the recruitment channels that run from the seminary network and the charitable fronts into the training infrastructure. He had passed through a training cycle that taught weapons handling, fieldcraft, religious indoctrination, and the specific skills of crossing a fenced and monitored frontier. He had been formed, in other words, by the machinery further south. Rawalakot was the last stop in his formation. The town received him as a finished product, held him while a window opened, and then released him toward the passes. If he was lucky, or if the handlers had read the patrols correctly, he crossed and vanished into the Indian side to begin the operational life for which he had been built. If he was unlucky, he died at the fence, and his death became a line in an Indian Army interception log, one of the negative records through which the transient flow is counted.

The figure of the resident facilitator, the type to which Abu Qasim belonged, repays a fuller anatomy, because this type is what the shadow war has specifically hunted. A resident facilitator is, by definition, a man who has stopped moving. The transient crosses and is gone; the facilitator stays, because his function, running the staging cell, requires permanence. That permanence is the source of both his value and his vulnerability. His value lies in accumulated relationships: with the guides, with the lodging network, with the local administration, with the intelligence liaison, with the families whose sympathy or silence the apparatus depends on. None of those relationships can be built overnight, and all of them are built by staying in one place. But the staying is also what exposes him. A man who stays develops a routine. He prays at one mosque. He shops in one bazaar. He keeps hours. He acquires a recognised face and a recognised public identity. Every one of those settled habits, indispensable to his work, is an item of targeting data. The resident facilitator is the load-bearing wall of the launching pad and, simultaneously, the surface on which a surveillance-driven campaign writes its operations. The shadow war did not need to attack the town’s geography because the town’s geography produced, in the resident facilitator, a far more tractable target.

The network around Abu Qasim, the men Indian assessments connected to him, illustrates a further feature of the resident population: it is layered, not flat. At the top sit the planners, the commanders who direct operations against the Indian side and answer to the operational command. Below them are the handlers who manage the day-to-day movement of groups. Below the handlers are the local facilitators, the lodging-keepers and the quartermasters and the contact men, many of whom may not think of themselves as militants at all but as helpers of a cause, providers of a room or a meal or a piece of information. The launching pad’s human infrastructure runs from the visible commander at the top to the barely-conscious sympathiser at the bottom, and the campaign that hunts it has, by the evidence of cases like Abu Qasim’s, learned to read the whole layered structure rather than just its summit. To find a commander at his mosque, the campaign first had to map the layers beneath him, because it is in those layers that a man’s routine becomes knowable.

It is worth stating plainly what the resident pattern tells us about the relationship between these men and the town. The men who became residents of Rawalakot did not experience the town as a hiding place. They experienced it as home, or as close to home as a frontier posting allows. They married, they raised the prospect of children, they took on public roles, they were known. That ordinary embeddedness, the very fact that a wanted commander could live a normal civic life in a PoK town, is the strongest single illustration of what the safe-haven system actually provided. It did not provide bunkers. It provided normalcy: the ability to be a wanted man and still live a settled life, untroubled, in the open. The shadow war’s deepest blow to Rawalakot was not the removal of one resident. It was the destruction of the normalcy itself, the demonstration that a wanted man in this town could no longer count on the settled, untroubled, open life that had been the launching pad’s quiet promise to its operators.

Eliminations in This Location

The killing of Abu Qasim on the morning of 8 September 2023 is the event that converts Rawalakot from a name in infiltration logs into a turning point in the shadow war, and it deserves a careful reconstruction, because the details of how it was done carry the analytical weight.

The morning began as every morning began for him. Abu Qasim rose before dawn and walked to al-Qudus mosque in Rawalakot for the Fajr prayer, the first of the five daily prayers, performed in the dark before sunrise. This was routine. The reporting on his death is explicit that he attended this mosque, at this prayer, regularly, and that he did so without a security detail, because Rawalakot was understood to be a town in which a Lashkar commander did not need one. He entered the mosque, joined the small pre-dawn congregation, and took his place. At some point during the prayer, an unidentified man approached him and shot him in the head at point-blank range. He died where he knelt. The attacker left. As of the reporting in the days that followed, no arrest had been announced and no group had claimed the killing.

Every element of that reconstruction is operationally significant, and the significance is what makes this killing a reference case rather than merely another name on a list. Consider what the attacker had to know. He had to know that Abu Qasim was in Rawalakot, which required current intelligence on the movements of a man who had relocated from Muridke. He had to know which mosque Abu Qasim attended, out of the several in the town. He had to know that Abu Qasim attended the Fajr prayer specifically, the prayer performed in darkness with the smallest congregation of the day. He had to know where in the congregation Abu Qasim positioned himself. And he had to be able to enter the town, reach the mosque, perform the shooting, and leave, all without being identified or intercepted. This is not the profile of a chance encounter or an opportunistic strike. It is the profile of an operation built on sustained surveillance, surveillance conducted inside Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, inside a militarised sector, against a target who believed himself safe. The precision of the Rawalakot shooting is, by a reasonable assessment, the clearest single demonstration in the entire shadow war of how deep the surveillance reach had become.

The choice of the mosque, and of the prayer, was not incidental, and it raises a tension that an honest account cannot dodge. From a purely operational standpoint, a mosque at Fajr is close to an ideal location for a targeted killing. The target’s presence is predictable to the minute. His posture is predictable; a man at prayer is kneeling, still, facing away from the entrance, absorbed. The congregation is small and the light is poor, which limits the number of witnesses and the quality of their observation. A man who prays at the same mosque at the same hour every day has, in effect, published his schedule. The operational logic is impeccable. But the moral dimension runs the other way. Killing a man inside a place of worship, during prayer, is an act that violates a sanctuary that most traditions, including the one the mosque belongs to, hold inviolable. The operational and the moral are genuinely in conflict here, and the conflict does not resolve. Recognising that the prayer-time mosque killing is operationally rational does not make it morally clean, and recognising that it is morally fraught does not make it operationally irrational. Both things are true at once. This guide states the tension rather than pretending it away, and notes that the same prayer-time pattern, the exploitation of the predictability of a devout man’s schedule, recurs across enough cases in the shadow war that it constitutes a documented method rather than a coincidence.

The killing has to be understood, further, as the closing of a chain that began nine months earlier and several mountain ranges away, in a village on the Indian side. On the first day of January 2023, militants struck the village of Dhangri in the Rajouri district of Indian Jammu and Kashmir. They opened fire indiscriminately on civilians, and they killed seven people, including, by the accounts of the attack, five of them in the initial shooting and two more the following morning when an improvised explosive device, left behind by the attackers, detonated. Thirteen others were injured. The Dhangri attack, reconstructed in full in the explainer on the Dhangri terror attack, was an attack on a civilian settlement, and Indian security assessments identified Abu Qasim as one of its principal conspirators, the man who, from the Pakistani side, had planned the operation as part of the revival of militancy in the Pir Panjal districts. Nine months after Dhangri, the alleged planner of Dhangri was dead inside a mosque in Rawalakot.

The Dhangri-to-Rawalakot sequence is the House Thesis of the entire shadow-war project rendered in its purest and fastest form: an attack generates a target, the target is identified, the target is located, and the target is eliminated. The attack at Dhangri produced a name. The name produced a hunt. The hunt produced a body in a mosque. Run the logic in the other direction and the same chain holds: a man who planned the killing of seven villagers in Rajouri discovered that the planning of that killing was the act that placed his own name on a list, and that the list reached him in the town he had chosen precisely because he believed no list could. The compression of the timeline, nine months from village massacre to mosque shooting, is what makes this case stand out. The attack-to-elimination chain in the shadow war has often run for years; the Pathankot mastermind Shahid Latif, whose case is set out in the profile of Shahid Latif, was reached roughly seven years after the attack he directed. Dhangri to Rawalakot ran in under a year. The acceleration is itself a piece of intelligence about the campaign’s maturing capability.

The killing of Abu Qasim also has to be placed within the specific story of how the shadow war crossed the Line of Control, a story told in full in the analysis of shadow war operations in PoK. For decades the Line of Control was a one-way membrane for lethal traffic: militants crossed from the Pakistani side into Indian Kashmir, and the violence flowed in a single direction. The eliminations inside Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir reversed that direction. The Rawalakot shooting, alongside other killings in the PoK belt, established that lethal operations could cross from the Indian side into Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, that the infiltration corridor had become a corridor in both senses. This is the strategic content of the Abu Qasim case and the reason it belongs in the chronicle of the shadow war rather than merely in a crime log. It is not that one Lashkar commander died. It is that he died in Rawalakot, in a launching-pad town, in a sector held by a Pakistan Army brigade, which means the place that existed to project violence across the frontier had itself been penetrated by violence from across the frontier.

Pakistani officialdom’s response to the killing followed the pattern that the shadow war’s hunters have come to rely on. The reporting indicated that the Pakistan Army went on high alert after the shooting, a reaction that itself confirms how seriously the killing was taken. But there was no swift public investigation, no named suspect, no claim of responsibility, and no extended official acknowledgement of who Abu Qasim had been. The Pakistani state had every reason to keep the matter quiet. To investigate loudly would be to confirm that a wanted Lashkar commander had been living openly in a PoK town under the state’s protection, which is not an admission the state wishes to make. To stay silent is to deny the killing the status of an event. The silence is functional. It is also, in its way, a confirmation: a state that genuinely did not shelter the man would have had no reason to be embarrassed by his death. The muted official response is consistent with the broader pattern documented across the decoding of the unknown gunmen phenomenon, in which the absence of investigation is as informative as any forensic detail.

One further point about the killing’s reception inside the jihadist ecosystem deserves recording. Abu Qasim’s death was, by the count in the reporting at the time, among a series of senior Lashkar figures killed within a single year. The accumulation matters more than any single case. A militant organisation can absorb the loss of one commander. What it cannot easily absorb is the demonstration, repeated across a year, that no rank and no location confers safety, that a man can be reached in Karachi and in Lahore and now in a Rawalakot mosque. The Abu Qasim killing’s true effect was not the subtraction of one planner. It was the message the subtraction carried to every other planner: the launching pad is not a sanctuary, and the men who run it are now inside the same hunt as the men who run the cities.

The operational forensics of the killing raise a question that the reconstruction above deferred, and the question is genuinely open: who carried it out, in the sense of where the attacker came from. There are two plausible answers, and the terrain constrains each of them differently. One answer holds that the operation used a local asset, a man already resident in or near Rawalakot, recruited into the campaign, who knew the town and the mosque and Abu Qasim’s habits because he lived alongside them, and who could perform the shooting and then simply withdraw into a population he belonged to. The other answer holds that a team was inserted across the Line of Control, that the attacker came from the Indian side, performed the operation, and exfiltrated back across the frontier. The precision of the mosque shooting, the intimate knowledge it required of which prayer and which position, points toward local knowledge, toward an attacker who had observed Abu Qasim over time rather than acting on a briefing carried across a mountain range. But local knowledge can be supplied to an inserted team as readily as it can be possessed by a local asset; a team can be briefed by a watcher. The honest position is that the evidence does not settle the question, and that the campaign’s interest is served precisely by leaving it unsettled. The ambiguity is not a gap in the analysis. It is a designed feature of an operation built to be deniable.

The Rawalakot shooting is best understood not in isolation but as one event in a cluster, because Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir saw more than one elimination in this period, and the cluster is more informative than any single case. Other killings in the PoK belt, including the recovery of the beheaded body of a Sunjuwan Army camp attack mastermind near the Line of Control, established a wider pattern: the campaign was not merely capable of a single, perfectly executed mosque shooting, it was operating across PoK with varied methods. A point-blank shooting at Fajr and a beheading near the frontier are operationally very different acts, and the difference itself is intelligence. It indicates either multiple operational profiles within a single campaign or several actors converging on the same category of target. Set against the elimination geography mapped across the analysis of shadow war operations in PoK, the Abu Qasim killing reads as the most surveillance-intensive node in a broader penetration of the PoK theatre, the case in which the campaign’s reach into the launching-pad belt is shown at its most refined.

The timing of the killing within the year is its own line of evidence. Abu Qasim’s death came amid a sequence of senior Lashkar figures killed within a single twelve-month span across Pakistan, and reporting at the time placed him among the most senior of that year’s losses. The significance of a cluster, as opposed to a scatter, is that a cluster reads as a campaign and a scatter reads as coincidence. One Lashkar commander dead in a year is attrition. Several Lashkar commanders dead in a year, in several cities and now in a frontier mosque, is a demonstration, and the demonstration is the product. The Pakistani militant ecosystem could survive the loss of Abu Qasim as an individual. What it could not easily survive was the lesson the loss carried in combination with the others: that seniority did not protect, that location did not protect, that a man could be reached in the chaos of Karachi and in the cultural heart of Lahore and now in the supposed sanctuary of a Poonch-sector mosque. The Abu Qasim killing’s value to the campaign lay less in the man removed than in the message the removal completed.

The chain analysis deserves one further turn, because the Dhangri-to-Rawalakot sequence does more than illustrate the House Thesis; it dates the campaign’s maturation. An attack-to-elimination chain that runs for seven years, as the Pathankot chain did before it reached Shahid Latif, indicates a campaign that can eventually reach its targets. An attack-to-elimination chain that runs for nine months indicates a campaign that can reach them quickly. The compression from years to months is not a minor adjustment of tempo; it is a change of category. A target who knows that the consequence of an attack may arrive seven years later can rationally discount the threat, can hope to be promoted, relocated, or retired before the chain closes. A target who sees the consequence of the Dhangri attack arrive within a single year cannot discount it. The acceleration converts the shadow war from a long-deferred reckoning into a near-term operational hazard, and it is the Rawalakot case, more cleanly than almost any other, that puts the acceleration on the record. The launching-pad town thus contributes a specific and uncomfortable datum to the cross-frontier ecosystem’s risk calculation: the gap between planning an attack and dying for it has collapsed.

A final observation about the killing concerns its location’s symbolic weight, which the campaign’s planners would have understood. Of all the places a Lashkar commander could be reached, a launching-pad town carries a meaning a city does not. To kill a man in Karachi is to demonstrate reach into Pakistan’s commercial chaos. To kill a man in Lahore is to demonstrate reach into the jihadist heartland’s cultural capital. To kill a man in Rawalakot is to demonstrate reach into the apparatus of infiltration itself, into the machine whose entire purpose is to send violence across the frontier. The Rawalakot killing struck the launching pad at the launching pad, and that is why it belongs near the centre of the shadow war’s chronicle rather than at its margins.

The Infrastructure of Shelter

Behind the killing and behind the men killed lies the question of infrastructure: what, physically and organisationally, made Rawalakot function as a launching pad, and what does that infrastructure reveal about the relationship between the armed traffic and the Pakistani state. This section assembles the staging assessment that is the analytical artifact of this guide, and it is also where the named disagreement, facilitation versus tolerance, has to be adjudicated.

Start with the physical infrastructure of staging, because it is the most concrete. A launching-pad town needs, first, lodging that can absorb a transient population of armed men without that population becoming conspicuous. Rawalakot supplies this in the ordinary furniture of a hill town: rented rooms, guesthouses, the homes of sympathetic families, the upper floors of buildings whose ground floors are shops. A group of young men arriving in a town with a degree college and a bus stand and a steady flow of visitors does not, in itself, attract attention. The lodging infrastructure of the launching pad is not a network of secret bunkers; it is the town’s own accommodation stock, used for a purpose the buildings were not built for. Second, a staging town needs a communications layer, the means by which the staging cell stays in contact with the operational command further south and with the guides who will lead crossings. Third, it needs the guides themselves, men drawn from the local population who know the forest routes toward the passes, who can read the terrain and the weather and the patrol patterns, and who can move a group from the town to the frontier. Fourth, it needs a logistics function: rations, weapons, ammunition, the equipment a group carries across. None of this is exotic. The infrastructure of a launching pad is mostly the infrastructure of an ordinary town, repurposed, plus a thin layer of specialist functions, guides and handlers and communications, that the parent outfit supplies.

The geographic infrastructure is the terrain itself, and this is where the staging assessment becomes specific. The corridor from Rawalakot to the Line of Control runs through forested slopes toward the high passes, of which Haji Pir is the most important. The distances are short, the cover is dense, and the routes have been in use, by the assessment of Indian planners, since the very first infiltration of 1947, when Pakistani tribal lashkars moved through this same geography toward the Kashmir Valley. The continuity is striking: the corridor that Abu Qasim’s groups used was, in its essentials, the corridor used at the moment of Partition. Against this corridor the Indian side has built, over decades, an anti-infiltration system: a fence running for hundreds of kilometres along the Line of Control, double rows of fencing and concertina wire, electrified and wired to motion sensors and thermal imaging devices and alarm networks, set back from the frontier on the Indian-controlled side. The fence has reduced infiltration; Indian official figures over the years record a long decline in successful crossings. But it has not eliminated it, because terrain this broken cannot be sealed by any fence, and because every fence can be cut, climbed, or bypassed at its weak points. The staging town and the anti-infiltration fence are the two ends of a single contest. Rawalakot exists to feed men into the corridor; the fence exists to catch them in it.

Now the contested question. Does this infrastructure operate because the Pakistan Army facilitates it, or does it operate despite the Army’s presence, tolerated rather than supported? The question cannot be waved away, because the strategic meaning of Rawalakot depends entirely on the answer. If the Army facilitates, then the launching pad is an instrument of Pakistani state policy and the insurgent traffic is, in effect, a covert arm of the Pakistani military. If the Army merely tolerates, then the launching pad is a problem the Pakistani state has failed to solve rather than a policy it has chosen, and the analytical and diplomatic implications are entirely different.

The evidence for the facilitation reading is substantial and it begins with the placement of the Army itself. The Rawalakot sector is held by the 2 PoK Brigade, a formation whose responsibility is the Line of Control in exactly the stretch through which the infiltration corridor runs. The Army maintains checkpoints on the roads of the sector. A militarised zone with a checkpoint network and a brigade headquarters is a zone in which the movement of people is observed and controlled. For groups of armed men to stage in the town and then move toward the frontier through this zone, year after year, decade after decade, requires either that the Army’s surveillance is being deliberately directed away from the cross-frontier traffic, or that the armed traffic is being knowingly permitted to pass. A checkpoint network that catches ordinary smuggling but never catches infiltrating groups is not a checkpoint network that has failed; it is a checkpoint network that has been instructed. The facilitation reading further points to the documented pattern, recorded over many years in Indian Army accounts, of covering fire from the Pakistani side during infiltration attempts: when a group attempts a crossing and is engaged by Indian troops, Pakistani posts have repeatedly opened fire to suppress the Indian response and create the diversion under which the crossing can proceed. Covering fire is not tolerance. Covering fire is participation. And the facilitation reading rests, finally, on the openness of men like Abu Qasim. A wanted Lashkar commander who lives in a PoK town without a security detail, prays at a fixed mosque, holds a recognised public identity, and is connected to the state’s intelligence apparatus, is not a man the state is failing to notice. He is a man the state has chosen not to disturb.

The tolerance reading is weaker but it is not empty, and an honest adjudication has to give it its due. The terrain argument is real: the Pir Panjal here is genuinely vast and broken, and no military on earth can place a soldier behind every tree. A degree of leakage across a frontier of this character is inevitable regardless of intent. The tolerance reading would also point out that the Pakistan Army has, in other theatres, conducted genuine and costly operations against militant groups, that it is not uniformly the patron of every armed outfit, and that the relationship between the state and the Kashmir-focused groups has fluctuated with the diplomatic weather. There have been periods when the state throttled the traffic and periods when it loosened it. A tolerance reading would say that what Rawalakot shows is a state managing a traffic it finds useful but does not fully control, rather than a state running a clandestine programme with mechanical precision.

Weighing the two, the evidence tilts decisively toward facilitation rather than mere tolerance, and the tilt is produced by the specifics rather than by assertion. Tolerance can explain leakage. It cannot explain covering fire, which is an active military act. Tolerance can explain a failure to detect a hidden man. It cannot explain the undisturbed open residence of a known commander in a brigade’s own sector. Tolerance can explain a porous frontier. It cannot explain a corridor that has run continuously, through the same passes, since 1947, under the eye of a brigade specifically responsible for that frontier. The honest formulation is that the Pakistan Army’s relationship to the Rawalakot launching pad is one of facilitation operating at a deniable distance: the Army does not need to hand a militant his rifle for the Army to be the reason the infiltrator reaches the frontier. The facilitation is structural. It is built into where the checkpoints are placed, what they are instructed to look for, and what they are instructed to ignore. This conclusion aligns with the broader documentation of the Pakistan Army’s relationship to terror leadership, and it is the conclusion that the specifics of Rawalakot, more than the specifics of almost any other safe-haven town, make difficult to escape.

The infrastructure of shelter, then, is not merely the lodging and the guides and the forest routes. It is, at its foundation, a political arrangement. The buildings and the passes are inert. What animates them, what turns an ordinary hill town into a functioning launching pad, is a decision, taken and re-taken over decades, by the authority that holds the sector, to let the launching pad function. Rawalakot is sheltered terrain because a state chose to shelter it. That choice is the deepest layer of the infrastructure, and it is the layer that the Abu Qasim killing exposed to view, because a killing of that precision, in that town, forced the question of what the state had been protecting and why.

The anti-infiltration fence on the Indian side deserves a fuller treatment, because it is the physical antagonist of everything Rawalakot does, and the contest between the launching pad and the fence defines the operational reality of the corridor. The barrier that India constructed along this stretch of the Line of Control is not a single line of wire. It is a layered system: double rows of fencing and concertina coils, raised to a height a man cannot easily vault, set back from the frontier on the Indian-controlled side, electrified in stretches, and wired into a network of motion sensors, thermal imaging devices, and alarms designed to give Indian troops the seconds of warning they need to move to an interception. Indian official figures over the years record a long decline in successful crossings, and that decline is real; the fence works. But a fence is a delaying device, not a sealing device, and the insurgent apparatus has treated it as such. The handlers and guides of the staging towns study the fence the way a besieging force studies a wall: where the terrain undercuts it, where a nullah passes beneath it, where snow or landslide has damaged it, where the sensor coverage thins. The fence raised the cost and lowered the success rate of crossings from the Rawalakot corridor. It did not abolish the corridor, and the persistence of interception incidents in the Poonch and Rajouri sectors after the fence’s completion is the proof that the corridor remained in use.

The diplomatic-weather dimension of the launching pad’s operation is the feature that most clearly distinguishes a facilitated apparatus from a merely tolerated one, and it deserves to be made explicit. If Rawalakot’s infiltration function were simply a failure of control, an unstoppable leakage across an impossible frontier, then its intensity would be roughly constant, varying only with the seasons. It is not constant. The traffic through the Poonch corridor has risen and fallen, across decades, in a pattern that tracks the diplomatic relationship: throttled during periods when the Pakistani state sought calm, whether for the sake of a peace process, an international engagement, or relief from pressure, and loosened during periods when the state sought to apply pressure on the Indian side. A traffic that can be turned up and down is a traffic with a control valve, and a control valve implies a hand on it. The oscillation of infiltration intensity with the political weather is, by itself, strong evidence that the launching pad is managed rather than merely endured, because an unmanaged leak does not modulate itself to suit a foreign ministry’s calendar.

The financial infrastructure forms a quieter layer of the shelter system, and Abu Qasim’s own cover illustrates it. His public identity as a fundraiser, a man raising money from various organisations under the banner of the Kashmir cause, was not decoration; it was a working part of the apparatus. A launching pad runs on money: lodging must be paid for, guides compensated, groups equipped and fed, families whose silence is needed kept content. The charitable-front model, the registration of fundraising and welfare operations that double as the financial plumbing of militant logistics, is the mechanism through which that money moves without appearing to move. The international effort to choke terror financing, the listings and the grey-list pressure that bore on Pakistan over years, was an attempt to attack precisely this layer. Its effect on a frontier town’s staging economy was real but partial, because the sums required to run a staging cell are modest and the charitable-front model is adaptable. The financial layer of Rawalakot’s shelter infrastructure was squeezed by the international pressure documented across the wider analysis of Pakistan’s terror safe haven network, but a squeeze is not a closure, and the staging economy adjusted.

There is a deeper continuity to register before leaving the infrastructure question, and it concerns the sheer durability of the corridor. The forest routes from the Rawalakot belt toward the passes were used, by the assessment of Indian planners, by the tribal lashkars that moved toward the Kashmir Valley in the very first weeks of the 1947 war. The same geography, the same passes, in some cases the same village paths, have carried armed men toward Indian Kashmir for the better part of eight decades. No fence, no ceasefire understanding, no diplomatic thaw, and no military operation has closed the corridor in all that time. That durability is the strongest argument against the tolerance reading and for the facilitation reading, because a corridor that survives every change of weather, every fence, and every government, under the eye of a brigade specifically responsible for the frontier, is not surviving by accident. It is surviving because the authority that could close it has, across eight decades and many governments, consistently chosen not to. The infrastructure of shelter, in its deepest layer, is not wire and lodging and guides. It is a sustained political decision, and the durability of the Rawalakot corridor is the visible trace of that decision written across eighty years of frontier history.

How the Shadow War Changed This City

The killing of Abu Qasim did not change Rawalakot’s geography. The passes are where they were; Haji Pir still connects the two Poonches; the corridor to the frontier still runs through the same forest. What the killing changed was something less tangible and, for this ecosystem, more corrosive: the town’s psychological status. Rawalakot had been, in the mental map of the cross-frontier groups, a safe place. After the morning of 8 September 2023 it was a place where a commander had been shot in the head during Fajr prayer and the killer had walked away. That is a different kind of place, and the difference has consequences that this section traces.

The first and most immediate change was in the behaviour of the resident militant population. A commander who had previously prayed at a fixed mosque, at a fixed hour, without a security detail, because the town was understood to be safe, could no longer rationally do any of those things. The reporting in the aftermath noted that the Pakistan Army went on high alert, but the deeper change was among the militants themselves. The fixed routine, which had been the natural mode of life in a town believed to be a sanctuary, became a liability, because the Abu Qasim killing had demonstrated exactly how a fixed routine is exploited. The predictable becomes the targetable. After Rawalakot, the residents of the launching-pad ecosystem had to begin doing what the senior figures in the cities had already been forced to do: vary their movements, abandon fixed schedules, travel with protection, reduce their public visibility, and treat their own predictability as the threat it had become. This is a real cost. A militant apparatus that has to spend its attention on the security of its own commanders is an apparatus diverting attention from its function, and an organisation whose frontier handlers are looking over their shoulders is an organisation running its launching pad less efficiently than before.

The second change was in the town’s relationship to its own openness. Before the killing, the openness of Rawalakot, the ease with which a man like Abu Qasim could live a visible life, was an asset to the broader ecosystem, because visibility within a sympathetic and protected town carried no penalty. After the killing, that same openness became a vulnerability. The features of the town that had made it comfortable for a resident commander, the fixed mosque, the recognised public identity, the absence of a security detail, were revealed to be the precise features that a surveillance-driven killing exploits. The town did not become physically more dangerous. It became psychologically less hospitable to the kind of open residence that had defined the jihadist presence there. A launching pad that can no longer offer its operators a settled, visible, unworried life has lost part of what made it a launching pad. The function can continue; the comfort cannot.

The third change concerns the Pakistan Army and the security posture of the sector. A targeted killing of this precision, inside a brigade’s own sector, against a man the brigade had every reason to know about, is an institutional embarrassment regardless of which reading of the Army’s role one accepts. If the Army facilitated Abu Qasim’s presence, then the killing demonstrated that the Army’s protection was not protection enough. If the Army merely tolerated him, then the killing demonstrated that the Army’s control of its own sector was weaker than its presence implied. Either way the institutional response had to be a tightening: more attention to who enters the town, more scrutiny of the transient population, more security around the insurgent commanders the Army was, in whatever mode, sheltering. And here lies the deepest irony of the Rawalakot case. The shadow war, by killing a militant commander, forced the Pakistan Army to spend resources protecting its remaining militant commanders. The hunter did not merely subtract a target; it imposed a tax on the entire apparatus, a tax paid in the security attention that now had to be diverted to keeping the launching pad’s operators alive. An apparatus that has to be guarded is more expensive and less flexible than an apparatus that can operate in the open, and the shadow war converted Rawalakot from the second kind of place into the first.

The fourth change is the one that matters most strategically, and it concerns the meaning of the Line of Control. For the entire history of the cross-frontier insurgency, the Pakistani side of the Line of Control was the safe side. A militant who reached it had escaped. A commander who lived on it was beyond reach. The whole logic of the launching pad depended on the asymmetry: violence flowed from the Pakistani side to the Indian side, and the Pakistani side absorbed no return. The Rawalakot killing, together with the wider set of eliminations inside Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, dismantled that asymmetry. After Rawalakot, the Pakistani side of the Line of Control was no longer the safe side in any absolute sense. It was simply the other side, a place where a man could be reached, a place from which a killer could withdraw. The corridor that Rawalakot existed to feed had been demonstrated to run both ways. This is the change that connects the town’s small story to the largest argument of the shadow war, the argument set out in the overview of India’s shadow war: the doctrine that a state which shelters militancy will discover that the shelter itself becomes the threat. Rawalakot was shelter. Rawalakot became a place where the sheltered die. That conversion, from sanctuary to hunting ground, is the doctrine made visible in a single hill town.

It would overstate the case to claim that the killing of one commander shut down the Rawalakot launching pad. It did not. The geography that makes the town a staging area is permanent. The passes remain. The forest corridor remains. The Pakistan Army brigade remains, and so does whatever arrangement allows the brigade and the insurgent traffic to coexist. Infiltration attempts in the Poonch and Rajouri sectors continued after September 2023, and the Indian Army’s interception logs from the sector record the continuation. The launching pad still functions. What it no longer does is function freely. It functions now as a contested space, a place whose operators must assume they are watched, a town that has lost the one thing a launching pad most needs to offer, which is the confidence of the men who use it. The before-and-after of Rawalakot is not the difference between an active launching pad and a closed one. It is the difference between a launching pad that operated in serene confidence and a launching pad that operates in fear. The shadow war did not take the town. It took the town’s peace of mind, and for an infrastructure that runs on the confidence of its operators, that is a substantial subtraction.

The events that followed the broader 2025 escalation extended the pressure on the sector. When the Pahalgam attack of April 2025 triggered the Indian military response that became Operation Sindoor, the Pir Panjal frontier became, once again, an active military front; the Poonch sector on the Indian side absorbed heavy Pakistani artillery fire, and the towns along the Line of Control, on both sides, lived through the most dangerous days the frontier had seen in years. Rawalakot sits inside that frontier zone. The launching-pad town that had been penetrated by a targeted killing in 2023 found itself, by 2025, inside the blast radius of a conventional crisis. The covert war and the open war had converged on the same geography, which is the convergence that the entire shadow-war chronicle has tracked. For a town whose only strategic purpose is the projection of violence across a frontier, the lesson of the years from the Dhangri attack through the Abu Qasim killing to the Sindoor crisis is a hard one: the frontier the town exists to exploit is the frontier on which the town is now exposed.

What Rawalakot finally reveals, set against the wider safe-haven geography, is the limit of geography itself as a form of protection. For three decades the town’s defence was its location: deep enough inside Pakistani-controlled territory, ringed by enough Army formations, embedded in a sympathetic enough population, that distance and terrain and politics combined into a shield. The Abu Qasim killing demonstrated that the shield had a flaw, and the flaw was not in the geography but in the people. A launching pad is run by human beings, and human beings have routines, attend mosques, keep schedules, and can be watched. The shadow war did not defeat Rawalakot’s geography. It went around the geography by going after the people, and in doing so it proved that the deepest sanctuary is only ever as secure as the predictability of the men inside it. That is the finding that the town contributes to the larger record, and it is why a place as small as Rawalakot earns a chapter in the chronicle of a campaign as large as the shadow war.

A question that an honest account of the town’s transformation must confront is whether the change amounts to a strategic success or only to a vivid demonstration. The two are not the same. A vivid demonstration kills a commander, generates reporting, and instructs the insurgent ecosystem that no place is safe. A strategic success degrades the apparatus to the point that it can no longer perform its function. The Abu Qasim killing was unambiguously the first. Whether it was the second is genuinely uncertain, and the uncertainty should not be smoothed over. Infiltration attempts continued through the Poonch and Rajouri sectors after September 2023. The passes did not close. The 2 PoK Brigade did not withdraw, and the arrangement between the brigade and the cross-frontier traffic did not visibly dissolve. By the hardest measure, the measure of whether armed men still cross the frontier from this corridor, the launching pad survived the killing of its most prominent resident. Geographic penetration, the ability to reach a man anywhere, is not the same as structural degradation, the dismantling of the machine that produces such men, and a sober assessment has to hold the two apart.

And yet the cost imposed on the apparatus, even short of structural degradation, is real and worth weighing precisely. Before the Rawalakot killing, the jihadist ecosystem in the launching-pad belt operated at low overhead. Its commanders lived openly because openness was free; its handlers kept routines because routines were efficient; its operators did not divert attention to their own security because security was assumed. The killing made every one of those free things expensive. Open residence now carries a risk premium. Routine now carries a risk premium. The ecosystem must now spend, on the protection of its own people, attention and resources it previously spent on its function. An apparatus running at higher overhead is a less efficient apparatus, and a frontier handler who must watch his own back is a handler giving less of his mind to the movement of groups. The shadow war’s effect on Rawalakot is best captured not as closure and not as mere theatre but as a tax: a permanent levy on the operation of the launching pad, paid in the currency of caution. The launching pad still launches. It launches now while looking over its shoulder, and the looking is a cost it cannot stop paying.

The behavioural convergence between Rawalakot and the cities is the clearest measure of that tax. Before September 2023, a frontier town offered its militant residents something the cities had already stopped offering: the unworried life. The senior figures in Karachi and Lahore had already, under the pressure of the city killings, been forced into the defensive habits of hunted men, varied movement, reduced visibility, security details, the abandonment of fixed schedules. The launching-pad towns had remained, by contrast, places where a commander could still live as Abu Qasim lived, openly and on a fixed routine. The Rawalakot killing erased that distinction. After it, the frontier towns and the cities belonged to the same threat environment, and the insurgent operating in Rawalakot had to adopt the same defensive posture as the insurgent operating in Lahore. The convergence is significant because it means the shadow war had closed its last category of soft ground. There was no longer a tier of Pakistani geography in which a wanted man could relax. The hunt had become general.

For the broader strategic argument the town’s transformation supplies a precise and durable lesson, and it is the lesson on which this guide closes. The launching pad was built on an asymmetry: violence outbound, safety inbound, a frontier that worked in one direction only. The entire economic logic of a staging town depends on that asymmetry holding, because a launching pad that cannot guarantee the safety of its own operators is a launching pad with a defective product. The shadow war attacked the asymmetry directly. It did not need to close the passes or breach the fence or defeat the 2 PoK Brigade. It needed only to demonstrate, once, with sufficient precision, in a launching-pad town, that the inbound direction was open too. The Abu Qasim killing was that demonstration, and its strategic content is the dismantling of the asymmetry rather than the dismantling of the apparatus. Rawalakot still functions as a launching pad. It can no longer function as a sanctuary. And a launching pad that is not a sanctuary is a launching pad operating against a permanent headwind, which is the most the shadow war, in a single hill town, was ever positioned to achieve, and a great deal more than the cross-frontier ecosystem, before that September dawn, believed it could.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Where is Rawalakot located?

Rawalakot is a hill town in the Poonch division of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, the territory the Pakistani administration calls Azad Jammu and Kashmir. It serves as the administrative seat of the Poonch district on the Pakistani side and sits at an elevation of roughly sixteen hundred metres in the foothills of the Pir Panjal range. The town lies a short mountain-road distance, on the order of forty to fifty kilometres, from the Line of Control that separates Pakistani-controlled Kashmir from the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Its position close to that frontier, rather than its size or its economy, is what gives the town its strategic significance.

Q: What is Rawalakot’s role in terror infiltration?

Rawalakot functions as a staging town for cross-frontier militancy, the final inhabited place that infiltrating groups pass through before they move toward the Line of Control. It is not a headquarters or a training campus; the building of militant organisations happens in the Pakistani Punjab. Rawalakot is the forward end of the supply chain, the place where groups arriving from the training infrastructure are received, lodged, briefed, and then guided through the forested corridor toward the high passes that lead into Indian Kashmir. In supply-chain terms it is the distribution point closest to the frontier.

Q: How far is Rawalakot from the Line of Control?

The town lies roughly forty to fifty kilometres from the nearest stretch of the Line of Control by mountain road, and the straight-line distance is shorter still. For an infiltrating group moving on foot through forest and avoiding roads, the gap can be closed in a matter of days. This proximity places Rawalakot firmly inside the infiltration zone, the band of Pakistani-controlled territory close enough to the frontier to function as a forward base, and it is the single most important geographic fact about the town.

Q: What is the Haji Pir Pass and why does it matter to Rawalakot?

The Haji Pir Pass is a high crossing in the Pir Panjal range, at an elevation of around twenty-six hundred metres, that connects the Poonch sector on the Indian side to the Rawalakot sector on the Pakistani side. By the assessment of Indian defence planners across several decades, it has been the principal corridor through which Pakistani-trained militants move into the Kashmir Valley. India captured the pass in the 1965 war and returned it to Pakistan afterward, a decision retired Indian officers have long described as a strategic error. The pass remains in Pakistani hands, and Rawalakot sits on the Pakistani approach to it, which is why the town became a launching pad.

Q: How was Abu Qasim killed in Rawalakot?

Riyaz Ahmad, the Lashkar-e-Taiba commander known as Abu Qasim, was shot dead on the morning of 8 September 2023 inside al-Qudus mosque in Rawalakot. He had gone to the mosque for the pre-dawn Fajr prayer, as he did regularly and without a security detail because the town was considered safe for militant commanders. During the prayer an unidentified gunman approached him and shot him in the head at point-blank range. He died where he knelt. No arrest was announced and no group claimed responsibility in the reporting that followed.

Q: Who was Abu Qasim and what was his role?

Abu Qasim was the operational name of Riyaz Ahmad, a senior Lashkar-e-Taiba commander. He originally hailed from the Jammu region on the Indian side and crossed into Pakistani-controlled territory in 1999. He rose within Lashkar, operated for a period from the organisation’s base in Muridke, and then relocated to Rawalakot. Indian security assessments described him as a central figure in the revival of militancy in the Poonch and Rajouri border districts and as one of the principal conspirators behind the Dhangri village attack of January 2023.

Q: What is the connection between the Dhangri attack and the Rawalakot killing?

On 1 January 2023, militants attacked the village of Dhangri in Rajouri district on the Indian side, killing seven civilians through indiscriminate firing and a planted explosive device. Indian assessments identified Abu Qasim as a key planner of that attack. Nine months later, on 8 September 2023, the alleged planner was shot dead inside a Rawalakot mosque. The sequence is one of the fastest attack-to-elimination chains documented in the shadow war: an attack generated a named target, and the target was located and reached within a year.

Q: Which terror organizations operate in Rawalakot?

The dominant organisation is Lashkar-e-Taiba, which runs a forward apparatus of handlers, lodging arrangements, local guides, and communications in the town. Hizbul Mujahideen also maintains a presence, one rooted more locally given its long association with the Poonch and Bagh sectors. Above both groups sits the United Jihad Council, the coordinating umbrella of anti-India outfits headquartered in Muzaffarabad. Pakistan’s Army and its intelligence apparatus form the fourth and least visible layer of the ecosystem.

Q: Does the Pakistan Army facilitate infiltration from Rawalakot?

The weight of the evidence supports facilitation rather than mere tolerance. The Rawalakot sector is held by a Pakistan Army formation responsible for exactly the stretch of frontier through which the infiltration corridor runs, and that formation maintains a network of checkpoints. A checkpoint network that catches ordinary smuggling but never catches infiltrating groups, a documented pattern of covering fire from Pakistani posts during crossing attempts, and the undisturbed open residence of a wanted commander in the brigade’s own sector, are difficult to explain by tolerance alone. The honest formulation is facilitation operating at a deniable distance, built into where checkpoints are placed and what they are instructed to overlook.

Q: What crossing points connect Rawalakot to Indian Kashmir?

There are two kinds of crossings. The sanctioned crossing is the Poonch-Rawalakot route, which operates through the Chakan Da Bagh point on the Indian side and the Tatrinote point on the Pakistani side; it was opened in the mid-2000s as a cross-frontier bus and trade corridor to reconnect divided families. The unsanctioned crossings are the forest routes and high passes, principally the Haji Pir Pass, used by infiltrating militant groups. The coexistence of a legitimate monitored crossing and the busiest illegitimate corridor in the same sector is one of the central contradictions of the place.

Q: How does the Poonch-Rawalakot bus service relate to infiltration?

The Poonch-Rawalakot bus service is a legitimate cross-frontier link, a confidence-building measure intended to allow families divided by the 1947 partition of the old Poonch district to meet. It is monitored and sanctioned by both governments. Its relevance to infiltration is contextual rather than direct: it demonstrates that the same sector contains both a controlled, observed crossing and an uncontrolled militant corridor, which underlines that the porousness of the frontier in this sector is selective rather than total, and that movement across it is permitted or prevented according to who is moving.

Q: What is the 2 PoK Brigade?

The 2 PoK Brigade is the Pakistan Army formation responsible for the Line of Control in the Rawalakot sector, and regional reporting often refers to it as the Rawalakot Brigade. It holds the frontier, maintains the checkpoint network in the sector, and is the supreme security authority in the area around the town. Because the infiltration corridor from Rawalakot runs through territory this brigade controls, the brigade’s posture toward militant movement is central to the question of whether the launching pad operates with state facilitation or merely state tolerance.

Q: Has the shadow war reduced Rawalakot’s infiltration function?

The killing of one commander did not close the launching pad; the geography that makes the town a staging area is permanent, and infiltration attempts in the Poonch and Rajouri sectors continued after September 2023. What the shadow war changed is the confidence with which the town operates. The Abu Qasim killing demonstrated that a resident commander could be reached, which forced this ecosystem to abandon fixed routines, increase security, and reduce visibility. The launching pad still functions, but it functions now as a contested and watched space rather than as a serene sanctuary.

Q: Why do militants consider Rawalakot safe?

For three decades the town’s perceived safety rested on geography and politics: it sat deep enough inside Pakistani-controlled territory, was ringed by enough Army formations, and was embedded in a population with cross-frontier kinship ties, that distance, terrain, and state protection combined into a shield. A man who had crossed from Indian Kashmir and settled in Rawalakot could live openly, marry locally, and pray at a fixed mosque. The Abu Qasim killing exposed the flaw in that confidence: the geography was intact, but the people inside it had predictable routines, and routines can be watched.

Q: What does the al-Qudus mosque shooting reveal about surveillance in PoK?

It reveals a surveillance reach far deeper than the broader ecosystem had assumed. To kill Abu Qasim as he was killed, the operation had to know that he was in Rawalakot, which mosque he attended, that he attended the pre-dawn Fajr prayer specifically, and where in the small congregation he positioned himself, and it had to be able to enter the town and withdraw without being identified. That is not the profile of an opportunistic strike. It is the profile of sustained surveillance conducted inside Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, inside a militarised sector, against a target who believed himself beyond reach.

Q: How does Rawalakot compare with Muzaffarabad as a staging centre?

Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, sits higher in the command geography: it hosts the United Jihad Council umbrella and functions as the administrative and coordinating centre of the cross-frontier apparatus. Rawalakot sits downstream of it, at the execution end. Muzaffarabad is where coordination and policy happen; Rawalakot is where men are actually staged and pushed across the frontier in the Poonch sector. The relationship is that of a dispatcher to a loading dock, with Muzaffarabad dispatching and Rawalakot loading.

Q: How has Operation Sindoor affected Rawalakot?

The Pahalgam attack of April 2025 triggered the Indian military response known as Operation Sindoor, and the Pir Panjal frontier became an active conventional front, with the Poonch sector on the Indian side absorbing heavy Pakistani artillery fire. Rawalakot sits inside that frontier zone. A launching-pad town that had already been penetrated by a targeted killing in 2023 found itself, by 2025, inside the blast radius of a conventional crisis, an illustration of how the covert war and the open war have converged on the same stretch of geography.

Q: Can Pakistan secure Rawalakot against further targeted killings?

Securing the town fully is difficult, and the difficulty is structural. The features that made Rawalakot useful as a launching pad, its ordinary civilian texture, its accommodation stock, its steady flow of visitors, are the same features that make it hard to screen. The Pakistan Army can increase checkpoints and tighten scrutiny of the transient population, and after the Abu Qasim killing it had institutional reason to do so. But protecting resident militant commanders converts the apparatus into something more expensive and less flexible, and it cannot eliminate the underlying vulnerability, which is that a launching pad is run by people whose routines can be observed.

Q: Did Abu Qasim work alone in Rawalakot?

No. Abu Qasim functioned at commander rank within a layered structure, and the reporting on his death noted that he was projected publicly as a fundraising activist while privately directing operations against the Poonch and Rajouri districts. Around him sat handlers who managed the movement of infiltrating groups, local facilitators who supplied lodging and logistics, and guides who knew the forest routes to the passes. Indian assessments also connected him to other Jammu-region militant figures still operating from the Pakistani side. He was a node in an apparatus, not a solitary operator, which is why his removal mattered as the subtraction of accumulated logistical knowledge rather than of a single fighter.

Q: Why is Rawalakot called a launching pad rather than a safe haven?

The terms describe different functions. A safe haven is a place where wanted men shelter and live; a launching pad is a place from which violence is projected across a frontier. Rawalakot is both, but the launching-pad function is the defining one. Cities such as Karachi and Lahore are primarily safe havens, places of refuge and organisation. Rawalakot’s distinctive purpose is forward staging: receiving infiltrating groups, briefing them, and dispatching them through the Pir Panjal passes into Indian Kashmir. Calling it a launching pad keeps that active, outbound, frontier-facing role in view rather than reducing the town to a passive refuge.