Of all the misnomers, ‘frozen conflict’ signally falls short as a description of the situation in Kashmir since the partition of India in 1947. The UK, which bears historic responsibility for the unresolved division, is also uniquely close to the conflict since a significant number of Pakistani Kashmiris are UK citizens or dual nationals. This latest outbreak of hostilities was always going to happen; until a resolution is found, Kashmir will continue to inspire and foster terrorist acts and remain one of the core grievances in the Islamist narrative. It will define and disrupt not only the relationship between Pakistan and India but also between the other states of South Asia.

Shortly after 1am on the morning of Wednesday 7 May, India launched strikes on Bahawalpur and Muridke in Pakistani Punjab and on Kotli, Bagh and Muzaffarabad in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). Indian military statements have said they targeted bases linked to Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Hizb ul-Mujahideen (HuM), in response to the 22 April terrorist attack by five armed militants on tourists in Pahalgam which killed 26, and has been attributed to the Resistance Front, considered to be associated with LeT. It is worth looking in more detail at why these locations were chosen by India.

Pakistan-administered Kashmir is better known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK, Free Jammu and Kashmir), or sometimes just Azad Kashmir. It is a long, thin strip of land which curls around the western side of the Line of Control, a military line between Indian and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It is divided into ten districts, bunched into three divisions. The capital, Muzafferabad, is in the north, nestling in the foothills of the Himalayas and the picturesque but earthquake-prone Neelum valley; the division of Poonch is in the middle and the southern division of Mirpur comprises the districts of Mirpur, Kotli and Bhimber. Kotli is where the foothills of the Pir Panjal range start and is forested with pine trees. The landscape in Mirpur District is dry pebbly sand, thrust upwards in eroded mounds, some covered with scrub. There is a reducing amount of cultivable land. Bhimber is flatter, hotter and drier and heads south towards the Punjabi plain. If you drive around Bhimber you may find in a dusty village a war memorial commemorating Kashmiris who fought and died in the first and second world wars on the British side. They are profoundly local, not tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission but by the people who still live there.

Two of the locations for the Indian strikes were in the Punjab, firmly inside Pakistani territory. One, Muridke, is close to Lahore and has long been known as the central headquarters of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political organisation or ‘charity wing’ of LeT.  Its leader, Hafiz Saeed, was a co-founder of LeT and directly associated with the 2008 Mumbai attacks which killed 166 people. In the 1980s, he had been close to Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian-Jordanian Islamist and spiritual guide to Osama bin Laden. Their centre of operations was Peshawar, and it was as a result of their acquaintance that in 1987, with funding from Osama bin Laden, LeT was formed. Hafiz Saeed has continued to operate, with limitations, from his base in the Punjab. In July 2019 he was arrested and sentenced to 11 years, with an additional 31 being added in 2022 for terrorist financing. Although he is reportedly being held in prison in Lahore, it appears that as with earlier custodial sentences, this is being served under a kind of house arrest.

It would be difficult for the Pakistani state to untangle the overlap between charitable organisations and their Jihadi wings, even should they want to. In 2019, when the Punjab government took charge of the Muridke head office, the JuD leadership handed over 72 ambulances to the police. The government also had to take over the school and hospital, and housing for 300 families. A senior official said that hundreds of mosques which had been under the control of JuD in Lahore would be taken into official control. The degree of their embedding in often poor communities means the state would need to replicate the support provided by the charities. The more established the charities become the more political power – and money – they accumulate, making the task of challenging them harder, even if their heart was in it.

In Bahawalpur police sources confirmed that the Indian strikes hit a seminary located near Chowk Azam and allegedly linked to Jaish-e-Muhammed. Four large explosions were reported by residents, with much of the city plunged into darkness. Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) chief Maulana Masood Azhar acknowledged on Wednesday that 10 members of his family and four close associates had been killed in India’s missile attack on the outfit’s headquarters in Bahawalpur.

Masood Azhar, like Hafiz Saeed, is one of the doyens of the Pakistani Jihadi scene. Although younger, he had also been involved in the Afghan Jihad, and followed this with trips to Somalia and to the UK in the 1990s. At the time he belonged to Harakat Al-Ansar, a Kashmiri Jihadi group which brought together Harakat ul-Jihad al-Islami (HUJI) and Harakat ul-Mujahideen (HuM). He travelled to Srinagar, in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1994 and was arrested and imprisoned in Delhi. His release was demanded by those who conducted both the kidnapping of six foreign tourists in 1995, and the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814 in 1999. The latter was successful; back in Pakistan he founded Jaish-e-Muhammed, which was then linked both to an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 and the Mumbai attacks in 2008.

As with Hafiz Saeed, Pakistan has taken steps to curb his activities, but not to halt them. Azhar has, under their watch, built up a substantial enterprise in Bahawalpur, such that his power base is enmeshed in the local population and difficult to dismantle. The hard to substantiate, but impossible to disprove, assumption is that in both their cases the Pakistani state considered them to be a useful adjunct to their state capabilities in the contest against India, but one which was only sometimes dirigible and which brought precipitous liabilities if they strayed beyond their brief (which they were wont to do).

For the UK, Masood Azhar is of particular concern. He is accused of having been associated with those involved in plotting terrorist attacks in the UK and was related to Rashid Rauf – the British citizen from Birmingham behind the attempt in 2006 to blow up transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives (the ‘liquid bomb plot’, also known as Operation OVERT). Rauf’s family was from Dadyal in Mirpur, but he was connected by marriage to Azhar and was arrested in Bahawalpur a day before a series of arrests were made across the UK. In December that year, a Pakistani court found no evidence he had been involved in terrorist activities and downgraded his charges. He escaped from custody at the end of the following year, and was assumed to have travelled to Waziristan, a militant stronghold. His family confirmed his death in a US drone strike in 2012.

Within Azad Kashmir, Kashmiri militant camps in the heavily wooded hills around Muzafferabad have been operating since Kashmiri Jihad started in earnest in the 1980s. Following the Mumbai attack, a number of LeT-associated establishments were closed down. But the area close to the Line of Control is difficult to access and militarised, leaving little opportunity to understand quite what is going on there. It is the area further south, in Mirpur Division, which is more interesting from a British perspective. The Indian strikes on 7 May hit a mosque in Kotli and, according to the Pakistani authorities, killed two children and left two others injured.

Kotli is the northernmost of the three districts of Mirpur Division, with Mirpur District in the centre and Bhimber in the south. Mirpur District encircles the Mangla reservoir, created in the 1960s by the construction of Mangla Dam across the Jhelum and Poonch Rivers. It was this which caused the first serious wave of migrants from Azad Kashmir to the UK, particularly to Birmingham and Bradford, mostly to work in the textile mills. The majority of the Mirpuri population are ethnically Jats, who have traditionally lived in rural communities and are very conservative. Women seldom leave the home and first cousin marriage is the rule. The language they speak is Pahari, a Punjabi dialect. While historically the Mirpuri Jats have little in common with the ‘Valley Kashmiris’ of Srinagar or even with those further north in Muzafferabad, the emergence of the Kashmiri cause had a strong impact on their identity, with consequences for the UK.

There are no precise figures available but it is estimated that between 70-80 per cent of the British Pakistani population have family links to Mirpur Division. There are now at least half a million Mirpuris (this number is probably higher) with British citizenship in the UK, many of whom are second or third generation. Mirpur District is poorly connected to what is often called ‘Mainland Pakistan’, and even to the rest of AJK, including Muzafferabad, since there are very few access roads. This has intensified family and tribal links and restricted integration with other communities in Pakistan. Owing to the rigid culture of first-cousin marriage, British Mirpuris have remained closely associated with their village bases in Mirpur, and in many cases these communities are tight-knit in corresponding locations in the UK. This means in practice that things which happen in Azad Kashmir have a direct impact on Kashmiri communities in the UK.

The overlap between Kashmiri Jihad and ‘Global Jihad’ has been clear since the co-emergence of Al-Qaeda and the Kashmiri Jihadi groups, and no-one embodies that cross-fertilisation more clearly than the now-deceased Ilyas Kashmiri. He was born in Bhimber in 1964, fought Indian forces on the Line of Control and was a veteran of the Afghan Mujahideen. As a leader of Harakat-ul-Jihadi-al-Islami (HUJI) he fostered very close relations with the leadership of Al-Qaeda in Waziristan and acted as an inspiration and a facilitator for British Kashmiri aspirant-Jihadis, many of whom had been brought  up on stories of his operations over the Line of Control. He gained a reputation as a ruthless and skilful operative and ran training camps outside Kotli, which was a good location because it was more hilly and wooded. Those who knew the right people sought him out and joined him. There was a lot of local support, and Jihadis became increasingly influential.

When a failed attempt to assassinate President Musharraf in 2003 put him on the wrong side of the Pakistani state and brought a spell in detention, he transferred his base from Kotli to Waziristan. From here he was suspected of plotting attacks against the West, aided by a string of willing volunteers who came from the UK and Europe to join him. He was killed in US drone strike on South Waziristan in 2011.

The risk now is that more violence will revitalise the Kashmiri Jihad and encourage those who are looking for a fight. Kashmir has always been prominent in the Al-Qaeda list of grievances, and is often wrapped up with that of the Palestinian cause. It is an easier Jihad to join. Even if the current military escalation between India and Pakistan quietens down, it is important to remember that the drivers for radicalisation are as lively as ever. When it comes to Kashmir, Jihad is often a source of pride, part of a decades long struggle against India, and it has widespread tacit support.