India’s governing BJP party said on Thursday that its “Operation Sindhoor” counter-terrorist airstrikes on Pakistan “eliminated” Abdul Rauf Azhar, the operational commander of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist group and the mastermind behind American journalist Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and beheading in 2002.
Rauf Azhar was the younger brother of JeM founder Masood Azhar, who was also targeted by India on Tuesday night. Masood Azhar survived the airstrikes, but said ten members of his family were killed. His brother Rauf was not among the relatives he initially claimed as casualties.
JeM was founded in Pakistan in early 2000, after Masood Azhar, now 56 years old, was released from prison in India on terrorism charges. He had previously been a high-ranking officer in another Pakistani terror group, Harakat-ul-Mujahideen.
The specific action that got the elder Azhar brother arrested by Indian police was attempting to enter the Jammu and Kashmir region – the epicenter of current tensions between India and Pakistan – with a false passport.
Harakat-ul-Mujahideen forced India to release Azhar and two other terrorists by hijacking an Indian airliner. Rauf Azhar has been identified by India as one of the masterminds behind the hijacking.
A brief leadership struggle within the terrorist group ensued, after which Azhar left his old organization and formed JeM – an even more hardline gang that soon developed a reputation for big, bloody terrorist attacks perpetrated in India, Pakistan, Kashmir, and beyond.
JeM still has ties to its parent group, as well as al-Qaeda and the Taliban. JeM reportedly formed an alliance with the Taliban in 2008 to help it launch attacks against U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. The plane hijacked to secure Masood Azhar’s freedom in 1999 was flown by the terrorists to Kandahar, Afghanistan, which was under Taliban control at the time.
Pakistan technically outlawed JeM in 2002, but India has long been outraged that the Pakistani government allows the group to operate openly within its territory. The Indian government was enraged when Masood Azhar popped up at an Islamic school in Bahawalpur in November 2024 to give a public speech, during which he vowed to continue terrorist attacks against India. JeM headquarters in Bahawalpur was one of the targets India bombed on Tuesday night.
Pakistan’s partners in China have stepped in to protect JeM as well, using a technical maneuver at the United Nations to block sanctions against Rauf Azhar proposed by the United States and India in 2022.
The kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl is one of many heinous acts JeM has been linked to. Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), was abducted by terrorists from a hotel in Karachi, Pakistan, in January 2002. He had moved to Pakistan from India to investigate Islamic terrorism after the 9/11 attack on America.
Abdul Rauf Azhar was one of the kidnappers, working with a group that called itself “The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty.” They claimed Pearl was an Israeli spy and send the United States a long list of demands for his freedom. When those demands were not met, they forced Pearl to film a video in which he identified himself as a “Jewish American,” and then chopped his head off.
The terrorists released the video to the public under the title “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.” His body was dumped in a shallow grave near Karachi.
Pearl’s family, and the U.S. government, were shocked when Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered the release of the main suspect in the Pearl atrocity, a British national named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, in 2021. A lower Pakistani court had ruled that Sheikh was guilty of kidnapping Pearl, but not of killing him, and the time he had already served was sufficient for that lesser offense.
Rauf Azhar became the operational leader of JeM in 2007, at a time when his older brother was trying to keep a low profile. He was designated as a global terrorist threat by the U.S. Treasury Department in December 2010, charged with “recruiting operatives and planning attacks in India and Afghanistan.”
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