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News Topical, Digital Desk : Amid tensions between India and Pakistan, American journalist and former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani has revealed that the city of Bahawalpur, located in the southern part of Pakistan's Punjab province, has long been considered a nursery of terrorism.
Asra Nomani, co-founder of the Daniel Pearl Project, has reported for years on the terrorist networks that have thrived in the region. She called India's Operation Sindoor a "much-needed action" in attacking a city from which terrorism had been spread for decades.
Asra Nomani said that in this operation, Abdul Rauf Asghar, brother of Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, is reported to have been killed. This is the person who kidnapped and murdered her fellow journalist Daniel Pearl in Bahawalpur.
‘India targeted real targets’
Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Nomani wrote that when he got the news of the attack on nine terrorist bases in Pakistan, including Bahawalpur, under Operation Sindoor, he understood that India had attacked the real bases of terror.
He told that his friend and Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had gone to Bahawalpur in December 2001. At that time General Pervez Musharraf had promised action against terrorists after the attack on Parliament in India. Pearl had collected information about the terrorist offices and training camps operating openly there.
Open terrorist training in Bahawalpur
Nomani said that Daniel Pearl was called for an interview in Bahawalpur through a person named Arif, who was the PR of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. The police raided Bahawalpur to arrest Arif, but his family organised a fake funeral for him. Later the police caught him in Muzaffarabad, which is near the Kashmir border. India has bombed terrorist hideouts there too.
He said Arif handed Daniel over to Omar Sheikh, a London School of Economics dropout who had become a radical. He was trained in terrorism in Pakistan and kidnapped tourists in India. He was released in 1999 after the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814. Masood Azhar was also released along with him, several members of whose family were killed in India's action in Bahawalpur this week.
Serious allegations against Pakistan's intelligence agencies
Nomani wrote that the Pakistan Army and ISI gave shelter to terrorists like Omar Sheikh and Masood Azhar and used them as a weapon against India. He said that this policy of Pakistan is now taking a toll on its own citizens.
He reminded that these terrorists also caused bloodshed in Pakistan. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the murder of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and the 2014 Peshawar school attack are examples of this.
'India's action a strategic move'
Nomani said Pakistan cannot defend itself by saying that the US had created the Mujahideen in the 1980s. "Pakistan had the responsibility to eliminate the terror bases inside its country, but it never did so because its entire policy remained stuck in its obsession to occupy Kashmir," he wrote.
She warned that the propaganda against India and Israel is the same. She says, "Just like Hamas crossed the border and attacked Israel, Pakistan-backed terrorists also infiltrate into India. After this, they mislead the world by calling themselves victims."
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