Terrorism in a Kashmiri Mask: How the ISI, the external stakeholders, and Gulf Money Built — and Lost — a Thirty-Year War

Analysis

By Murtaza Ali

Every war needs a story. Pakistan's war in Jammu & Kashmir needed an especially convincing one, because the war itself could never be admitted. For three decades, ISI ran what may be history's most elaborately sustained act of strategic impersonation: Pakistani terrorism, dressed in Kashmiri clothes, speaking the language of liberation, funded by Gulf charity, and — in its most recent chapter — given its talking points by the external stakeholders. That architecture is now collapsing. And the collapse reveals not just Pakistan's desperation, but the uncomfortable complicity of actors far beyond Rawalpindi.

The Blueprint: Manufacturing an Uprising That Never Was

When ISI launched its proxy insurgency in 1989, its foundational requirement was deniability. Pakistan could not be seen as the aggressor — the conflict had to appear as a spontaneous indigenous Kashmiri uprising. To achieve this, ISI spent the 1980s systematically cultivating Jamaat-e-Islami Kashmir (JeI) as its political and financial backbone, channelling Gulf remittances and zakat collections into Hizbul Mujahideen while keeping Pakistani handlers entirely in the shadows. When Hizbul Mujahideen spoke of 'azaadi,' it was reading a script written in Rawalpindi.

JeI's role went far beyond ideology. It operated one of the most sophisticated civilian funding networks in ISI proxy history — madrassa pipelines for radicalised recruits, hawala channels for Gulf money, and a welfare-to-warfare ecosystem that kept the insurgency self-sustaining across political cycles in both nations.

By late 2018, ISI's penetration of Indian political networks had yielded actionable foreknowledge: Article 370 would be revoked, and JeI would be proscribed. With a six- to nine-month window before the political earthquake, ISI executed a pre-emptive organisational pivot. For the new operation, it needed external expertise. It found that expertise in Washington.

The External Stakeholder's Fingerprints: Designing the Perfect Deception

The Resistance Front (TRF) was not assembled by ISI operatives working in isolation. Apparently, the external stakeholders provided strategic communication consultation — precise guidance on language, narrative framing, and vocabulary calibrated to resonate with Western human rights organisations, UN mechanisms, and international media. The instruction was clear: do not invoke jihad, invoke resistance. Do not speak of religious liberation, speak of self-determination. Do not threaten — issue 'warnings' framed as responses to 'demographic aggression.'

The result was a terrorist organisation that sounded, to Western ears, like a political movement. Every TRF communiqué was crafted for an international audience guided by the external stakeholders. The objective was threefold: conceal TRF's Pakistani origins, generate international diplomatic pressure on India, and provide Western governments a plausible 'Kashmiri resistance' narrative usable as leverage whenever India pursued policies inconvenient to Western interests.

This was not an isolated event. The Western Agencies have long recognized that Jammu and Kashmir represents India's most significant strategic vulnerability. It is the focal point at which sustained external pressures most effectively limit India's policy autonomy. By maintaining calibrated instability in Kashmir and keeping Pakistan diplomatically credible as a party to a 'freedom struggle' rather than unambiguously designated a state sponsor of terrorism, Washington preserves a pressure mechanism it can activate or moderate depending on the state of US-India relations. The proxy war in J&K is not merely Pakistan's war.

Abbas Sheikh: The Human Face ISI Could Not Replace

No element of TRF's deception architecture was more important — or more fragile — than its human face. ISI understood from the beginning that a faceless organisation could not sustain international credibility as a 'Kashmiri resistance movement.' It needed a commander with a Kashmiri identity, a Kashmiri voice, and a Kashmiri story. Abbas Sheikh was constructed to be exactly that.

Sheikh was TRF's self-styled commander — its public identity, its spokesperson, its proof of local authenticity. But he was not an independent actor making independent decisions. He was a carefully managed ISI asset, directed on target selection, timing of attacks, choice of victims, and the precise language of claim statements, all calibrated to serve Pakistan's strategic communications objectives. He was, in essence, a human press release — a Kashmiri face on a Pakistani operation.

Reportedly, ISI deliberately compartmentalised Sheikh from TRF's true organisational lineage. According to the authors' ground research, he was kept strategically uninformed about the comprehensive framework behind the outfit. This was a deliberate counter-intelligence measure: if Sheikh were captured, he could not reveal what he did not know. His value to ISI was his face and his voice, not his knowledge of the machinery behind him.

When Indian security forces eliminated Abbas Sheikh, the damage to TRF's architecture went far beyond the loss of one commander. Sheikh had been the irreplaceable centrepiece of TRF's legitimacy as a Kashmir-based organisation. His death exposed the single most critical weakness of ISI's entire facade strategy: a Pakistani-engineered organisation wearing a Kashmiri identity cannot simply promote the next person in the chain of command. Every replacement commander required ISI to invest significant time, resources, and operational risk in constructing a new public identity with credible Kashmiri credentials — credentials that Indian intelligence agencies, now fully aware of the template, could rapidly scrutinise and dismantle.

ISI attempted to construct a replacement public identity for TRF after Sheikh's elimination. It failed. The organisation that had once generated international headlines and sympathetic human rights coverage was left without a credible Kashmiri face at precisely the moment its operational capacity was being systematically decimated by Indian security forces. The human mask had been removed, and nothing underneath it looked Kashmiri.

The Money Trail: Gulf Pipelines and the New Financial Architecture

With JeI proscribed and its assets frozen in February 2019, ISI's most sophisticated domestic funding network — built over forty years — was dismantled at a stroke. ISI's response was to immediately activate Ahl-e-Hadith networks as replacement financial conduits, drawing on their theological alignment with Wahhabism and existing access to Saudi charitable pipelines. This was not new construction — it was the activation of a deeper, older relationship between Ahl-e-Hadith and Lashkar-e-Taiba, both rooted in the same Markaz Dawa al-Irshad infrastructure built with ISI backing in Pakistan.

The Gulf money architecture operates through deliberate layers of institutional distance. Charitable foundations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE — controlled by trustees with documented connections to Pakistani intelligence, often retired ISI officers operating through nominee arrangements — collect diaspora donations under humanitarian banners. Funds travel through Dubai and Riyadh hawala networks before entering J&K disguised as religious donations. Indian intelligence agencies have disrupted several nodes, but the multi-jurisdictional spread makes comprehensive interdiction enormously difficult.

The Unravelling: When the Mask Runs Out of Faces

No funding pipeline, no external stakeholders, and no new facade outfit can substitute for what ISI has irreversibly lost: authentic Kashmiri participation. By 2022–23, local recruitment had reached historic lows. Young Kashmiris — ISI's renewable human resource for three decades — were choosing education, entrepreneurship, and engagement with the post-370 framework over certain death. Tourist arrivals hit record levels in 2023 and 2024. Panchayat elections drew meaningful participation in former militant strongholds. ISI's prediction of a mass popular uprising after the abrogation of Article 370 was met with silence.

ISI's response — inserting Pakistani nationals with fabricated Kashmiri identities into J&K — carried a fatal flaw. Every time Indian security forces established a neutralised militant's true Pakistani identity through biometrics, forensics, and communications intercepts, it produced irrefutable diplomatic proof that the entire 'Kashmiri resistance' narrative was Pakistani terrorism wearing a Kashmiri costume. Each exposure was a strategic defeat that no propaganda could undo.

The Verdict: Three Decades, One Conclusion

ISI's proxy war architecture has been structurally broken — not temporarily disrupted, but fundamentally and perhaps irreversibly dismantled. TRF and PAFF failed the single most decisive test: they cannot recruit Kashmiri fighters. An insurgency with no local base is not an insurgency. It is an invasion wearing a mask.

The elimination of Abbas Sheikh proved what ISI feared most — that the entire architecture rested not on ideology or genuine resistance, but on the performance of individual human beings willing to wear a Kashmiri identity for Pakistani strategic purposes. Remove the performer, and the theatre collapses.

But the collapse of ISI's architecture does not automatically guarantee J&K's future. The conditions ISI exploited — political alienation, economic marginalisation, governance deficits — were real before Rawalpindi weaponised them. Military and intelligence excellence can win a war. Only governance and justice can prevent the next one. The Kashmiri people endured three decades of a proxy war waged in their name, for Pakistan's interests, with American strategic facilitation. That debt must now be repaid — not in rhetoric, but in genuine opportunity, political dignity, and accountable governance.

The mask has finally slipped. What India does with the unmasked truth will define J&K's next thirty years.

Disclaimer: This paper is the author's individual scholastic contribution and does not necessarily reflect the organization's viewpoint.

Murtaza Ali, Counter Terrorism & Counter Intelligence Analyst. He writes on grassroots governance, defence strategy, and counter-insurgency developments in Jammu and Kashmir.

Twitter Handle id : @Themurtazabhat