US journalist reacts to India’s Operation Sindoor in Bahawalpur, where Masood Azhar’s brother Rauf beheaded her colleague Daniel Pearl

Amid the rising tensions between India and Pakistan, Asra Nomani, the co-founder of the Daniel Pearl Project and a former reporter at The Wall Street Journal, reveals how Pakistan’s Bahawalpur has been used as a base for domestic terrorists. Her colleague Daniel Pearl was beheaded by Masood Azhar's brother Rauf in the city.

Abdul Rauf Azhar, the brother of Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar, has likely been killed in India’s Operation Sindoor on Pakistan's terror targets.

In an X post, Nomani said when she learned about Operation Sindoor that targeted nine terror camps in Pakistan, including one in Bahawalpur, she “knew then India was striking actual hubs for Pakistan’s homegrown domestic terrorism.”

“My friend, WSJ reporter Danny Pearl, went to Bahawalpur in December 2001 with a notebook and a pen. Gen. Pervez Musharraf had just promised he was shutting down Pakistan’s militant groups after a strike by Pakistan’s terrorists against the Parliament in India, and Danny reported on the militant offices in Bahawalpur,” she said.

She added that Pearl learned that “militant training camps were open for business in Bahawalpur.”

Nomani further describes that Pear was arranged for an interview through a man named Arif, who hailed from Bahawalpur and was the PR for the terror group, Harkutul Mujahadeen.

“The police launched a manhunt to find Arif in Bahawalpur. We learned Arif’s family faked a funeral for Arif. Police found him trying to board a bus in Muzaffarabad, across the country by Pakistan’s border with Kashmir. It is another town India said it bombed terrorist training facilities,” she said.

“Bahawalpur.”

I still have chills in my heart from when I first heard that town’s name in late January 2002. For the 23 years since, I have reported on how Pakistani intelligence and military leaders have used that city — Bahawalpur — in the southern province of Punjab as a base… pic.twitter.com/nFF6geUTp7

“Arif had handed Danny off to Omar Sheikh,a British-Pakistani dropout from the London School of Economics, radicalized in the 1990s in London mosques. He went to Pakistan to train in these militant training camps. Then he kidnapped tourists in India. He was caught and jailed but on Dec. 31, 1999, he was traded for hostages in the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814. Omar Sheikh was freed with Pakistani terrorist leader Masood Azhar, whose family was allegedly killed this week by India’s air strike in Bahawalpur,” she added.

Nomani said in her post that Omar Shiekh was given safe passage by Pakistan’s military and intelligence and used them as weapons against India.

“Their extremism has ruined Pakistan, and Pakistanis can’t blame America for creating the mujahideen to fight the Soviets in the 1980s,” Nomani wrote. “Pakistan has had a duty to dismantle those terrorist bases — for even the safety of its own people. What India is doing is a strategic attack on terrorist bases Pakistani military and intelligence should have eliminated but never did in their obsession to take over Kashmir.”

She further cautioned people, “You will see parallels in the propaganda messages against India and Israel. Like Hamas, Pakistani terrorists crossed a border to kill. Now, Pakistani propagandists call themselves victims of their ‘fascist’ ‘colonizer’ neighbour.”