Buoyed by its success in facilitating Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, Pakistan on Sunday sought to turn up the heat on India by publishing a dossier on Kashmir and accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in New Delhi of running five training camps for the Islamic State.
Ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, Pakistan came out with a 131-page dossier compiling its oft-repeated allegations against India about “atrocities, war crimes, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and torture” as well as “rapes and molestation of women” in Jammu and Kashmir. Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government not only reiterated its allegations against the Government of India and its armed forces on human right violations in J&K, but went on to allege that New Delhi was training the Islamic State terrorists in camps in Gulmarg, Raipur, Jodhpur, Chakrata, Anupgarh and Bikaner.
The activities of the Islamic State (IS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in South Asia and Central Asia returned under scanner in the region, after one of its offshoot – Islamic State Khorasan Province or the ISIS-K – was accused by the United States of carrying out an attack near the Hamid Karzai Airport in Kabul on August 27. It killed over 110 people, including US soldiers as well as the Afghans, who had thronged the airport and the adjoining areas, scrambling to fly out in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan on August 15 last.
New Delhi has not yet officially responded to the dossier published by Islamabad. A source in New Delhi, however, dismissed the dossier as nothing but yet another example of Pakistan’s baseless propaganda against India. The source also rubbished it as “preposterous and outlandish” Pakistan’s new allegation against the Modi Government about training the IS terrorists in India.
Khan’s National Security Advisor Moeed Yusuf joined Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari to release the dossier in a news-conference in Islamabad. Yusuf said that the dossier on India’s "atrocities" on J&K was a tribute by Pakistan to Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who had passed away in Srinagar on September 1 after leading the separatist movement against India in J&K for decades.
Qureshi said that most of the information in the dossier had been sourced from documents released by the international human rights organisations and media. He said that Pakistan would share the dossier with the international community to "expose" India, particularly its "atrocities and human rights violations" in J&K and its "support" to terrorist organisations. “We expect the United Nations to compel the Government of India to allow free access to Special Procedure Mandate Holders of the UN Human Rights Council for independent investigations of human rights violations,” said the Pakistani Foreign Minister.
The Prime Ministers of Pakistan and India are expected to address the UN General Assembly in New York on September 24 and 25.
The dossier published by Pakistan accused 1,178 officers and personnel of the security forces of India of committing 3,432 cases of “war crimes” in J&K.
Another source in New Delhi told DH that Islamabad’s new allegation about the Modi Government’s "role in supporting" the IS was intended to embitter India’s relations with the US and Russia.
Islamabad in the past blamed India for several terror attacks in Pakistan, including the recent ones, which maimed and killed citizens of China, ostensibly to take advantage of the slide in New Delhi’s relations with Beijing over the military stand-off in eastern Ladakh.
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