The killing of 13 militants Sunday has served a blow to their ranks which otherwise had managed to keep pace with constant losses even after government forces launched “Operation All Out” last year killing more than 250 of them since.
A senior police officer described Sunday’s killings as “significant” saying it weakened the local support structure for “foreign militants”.
“Foreign militants can’t survive for long without support of local militants who know the topography, and in that sense it (killing of militants on Sunday) is a success,” the officer said.
The officer said the militants from Hizb ul Mujahideen (HM) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) were scheduled to plan for future coordination and had called a joint meeting yesterday in this regard.
“This plan has been dealt a severe blow,” he said.
Local youth have constantly joined militant groups since the killing of BurhanWani in 2016, most of them going with the largest local militant group HM the popular militant leader was affiliated with.
A majority of the militants killed on Sunday also belonged to the same group which fights for Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan.
The trend of Kashmiri youth joining militancy has continued in 2018 despite “Operation All Out” in which government forces killed 218 militants during 2017 alone including 15 influential commanders, the highest number since 2010.
But today the number of militants is more or less the same as it was at the beginning of 2017, according to officials.
Since the beginning of this year 46 militants have been killed, including those gunned down along the Line of Control (LoC), a senior police official said.
But during the same period at least 22 local youth have picked up arms, eight of them in just the past fortnight, according to the police officer who spoke to GK on contion of anonymity.