Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) is a Kashmir-based organization with separatist goals that have recently become the focus of international attention because of the role that it may have played in the disrupted British airliner plot of August 2006.  As detailed below, at least one of those arrested in the plot has close personal ties to the group’s founder, Maulana Massod Azhar, who in turn has links to Osama bin Laden.

The objective of Jaish-e-Mohammed is to restore Kashmir to Pakistani rule. The group, whose name translates as Army of Mohammed, evolved out of the Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM) organization and was founded in its current incarnation in Pakistan in March 2000 by Maulana Masood Azhar, the former leader of HUM, shortly after his release from prison in India. Azhar had been incarcerated there since 1994, and was one of four prisoners set free on New Year's Eve 1999 in exchange for 155 hostages aboard an Indian Airlines plane that had been hijacked and flown to Kandahar, Afghanistan. The JEM is mostly made up of former members of HUM and is well networked; Azhar has reportedly met with Osama bin Laden, who is thought to have provided extensive funding for the JEM. Azhar also organized national recruiting drives to collect fighters to go to Kashmir; some of these efforts have been broadcast on state-owned Pakistani television networks. When Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf banned the group in December 2002, Azhar was placed under house arrest.

Another leading JEM member is Sheikh Omar Saeed, who was freed along with Azhar.  Saeed was born and raised in Britain and attended the London School of Economics, a part of the disturbing trend of radicalized young British Muslims of Pakistani heritage.  At the time of his release in 1999, Saeed was serving a prison sentence for the 1994 kidnapping of an American and three Britons in India.  More recently in 2003, Saeed was convicted and sentenced to death in Pakistan for masterminding the 2002 murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

Convicted along with Saeed in the Pearl case are Sheikh Mohammed Adeel, Fahad Naseem and Salman Saqib; the three were sentenced to life in prison. However, none of these four are believed to be those who actually carried out the Pearl murder, and authorities doubt that they ever actually held Pearl.  Three other suspects believed to have been among Pearl’s captors, Fazal Karim, Naeem Bukhari and Zubair Chishti, were detained after leading police to Pearl’s remains in May 2002, but were not formally charged as part of the conditions for leading to the body’s recovery.  The three are all members of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group.  Hashim Qadeer, who is suspected of being one of Pearl’s actual killers, was arrested in August 2005 and has notable al-Qaida links.  Another suspect in the case, Asif Ramzi, was killed while apparently attempting to assemble a bomb, although the circumstances of his death are disputed.  Another, Saud Memon, remains at large.

The JEM has grown rapidly since its inception. It is now thought to number several hundred and be located mainly in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, and India's Doda and southern Kashmir regions. The group's supporters are mostly Pakistanis and Kashmiris, although it also includes Afghan and Arab veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan. As well as the Pearl murder, the JEM has been implicated in a series of terrorist incidents in Kashmir and India.  The majority of its attacks are carried out against police and other government installations of India.  Some past attacks include:

	May 2000: An attack on Kashmir's state secretariat building. Sixteen rifle grenades were fired at the complex, but missed, killing a civilian and wounding two other people, one of them a policeman.
	June 2000: The killing of five people, three of them policemen, and wounding of three in three separate attacks in Srinagar.
	February 2001: A grenade attack killing one member of India's Border Security Force and injuring five others.
	March 2001: The killing of one policeman and wounding of 6 paramilitaries in a gun attack in Srinagar.
	March 2003: A bomb explodes on the Mumbair commuter rail, killing 11 and injuring 70.
	October 2004: A gun ambush upon a Kashmiri government official’s motorcade takes place in Sriniagar, injuring one.
	April 2006: A series of six coordinated grenade attacks in one day kill five and injure 41 throughout Kashmir.  All but one of the grenades were launched at police installations.
	May 2006: Three grenade attacks in a single day targeting police in Srinagar injure a total of 34 people.

The incident which brought the JEM under the scrutiny of the United States and saw the group targeted as part of the wider war against terrorism provoked by the Sept. 11 atrocities in America took place in Oct. 1, 2001. The attack occurred in Kashmir's summer capital, Srinagar, where a suicide bomber exploded a hijacked government jeep laden with explosives outside the state assembly building, while at least two accomplices wearing police uniforms seized a building in the complex. The ensuing gun battle left 38 people dead, and caused the chief minister of the region to demand that the Indian federal government attack Kashmiri-separatist terrorist bases in Pakistan.

The U.S. Department of State added the JEM to its list of foreign terrorist organizations in November 2001. The following month, a suicide attack on the Indian parliament killed 13 people. The JEM is thought to have carried out the assault along with another Pakistani-based terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Tobia (LET). Combined with the changed geopolitical environment that had developed since Sept.11, this put Musharraf under immense pressure to move against groups such as the JEM and LET. He responded by banning both organizations, although he ruled out handing over Pakistani nationals on a list of militants drawn up by Delhi to the Indian authorities. A wave of police detentions followed in Pakistan, and included members of both the JEM and LET.

Like other Kashmiri separatist groups, the JEM has enjoyed the support of a large number of madrassas (Muslim seminaries) in Pakistan and may enjoy tacit support from individuals in the Pakistani government sympathetic to their cause. Indeed, India has claimed that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) conducts the insurgency in Kashmir, recruiting and training terrorist groups such as the JEM before dispatching them across the line of control (LOC) dividing the state between the two countries. It is alleged that the ISI pays militants, with foreign recruits paid approximately Rs400,000- Rs5,000,000 ($8,500 - $10,630) over a two-year period, half of which is paid in advance to a recruit's family, with the rest collected upon completion of contract. Pakistan denies such charges.

According to Indian estimates, over 13,000 terrorists have been killed since 1989, when the insurgency began. More than 3,140 members of India's security forces have also died the Kashmir conflict, which has often threatened to erupt into full-scale war between India and Pakistan. The JEM is not the only player in this conflict, but it has become a major one. Moves by Islamabad to counter it and similar groups that have enjoyed Pakistani support over the years, official or unofficial, are therefore welcome.  However, Musharraf must tread carefully lest he provoke domestic unrest and threats to his life and tenuous leadership.

The JEM has most recently been linked to the August 2006 terror plot involving the destruction of up to ten airliners traveling from Britain to America using liquid explosive devices.  One of those arrested in Pakistan in the plot, Rashid Rauf, is the brother-in-law of JEM founder Maulana Massod Azhar.  Rauf’s father-in-law also runs Darul Uloom Madina, a famously large and radical madrassa in Azhar’s hometown in Pakistan. While it is not known whether Azhar or the JEM had any direct involvement in the planning of the plot, the connections it may indicate heightened contact or ideological cooperation between established south Asian terror groups, like the JEM and al-Qaida, and the homegrown cells in Britain that have been instrumental in plots like this one and the July 7, 2005, London Underground attacks.

Sources:

April 2001, "Patterns of Global Terrorism, 2000," United States Department of State.

“Daniel Perl’s Killers Still on Loose,” Associated Press, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/21/world/
main579223.shtml, January 22, 2003.

B. Raman, "The Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM)," South Asia Analysis Group, Paper no. 376.

Carsen, Jessica, “A Kashmiri Tie to the Terror Plot,” Time Online, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/
0,8599,1227651,00.html?cnn=yes, August 16, 2006.

“Group Profile: Jaish-e-Mohammad,”  Terrorism Knowledge Base, http://www.tkb.org/Group.jsp?groupID=58, 17 August 2006.

M. Ehsan Ahrari, "Jihadi Groups, Nuclear Pakistan, and the Great Game," Srategic Studies Institute: U.S. Army War College, August 2001.

"Pakistan: Not a Pariah, A Friend," The Economist, March 7, 2002.

Rahul Bedi, "Kashmir Insurgency is Being 'Talibanised,'" www.janes.com, October 5, 2001.

Umer Farooq, "Pakistan to Reorganize Intelligence Services," Jane's Defense Weekly, April 3, 2002.

Various articles from BBC Online and the New York Times.