Syed Salahuddin, chairman of the United Jehad Council (UJC), on Monday said they had no links with the Taliban and ruled out their presence in Kashmir.
“We don’t have any physical link with the Taliban,” a Srinagar-based news agency Kashmir News Services (KNS) quoted Salahuddin as saying.
“We don’t want the Taliban to come to Kashmir and they are needed in Afghanistan the most.”
Salahuddin, who is in Muzaffarabad, told the news agency in an interview that people spreading rumours about the Taliban in Kashmir were trying to “malign the Kashmiri resistance struggle”.
Meanwhile, the head of Dukhtaran-e-Millat, Asiya Andrabi, in a media interview also said the Taliban prior to entering Kashmir had to take Kashmir leadership into confidence.
“When Afghan Taliban or al Qaeda comes to Kashmir, we should keep in mind that the roadmap or agenda should be ours,” Andrabi told the website.
“We have to think that our brothers are coming to help us to liberate us from India but we shouldn’t surrender everything to them. Before they enter here, there should be debate with them and we must clear ourselves to them that there should be Islam in Kashmir not to propagate any ideology.”
Assertions are rife that following the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014, the Taliban will enter Indian-controlled Kashmir to fight Indian army. Separatist leaders in the restive region have been critical of Taliban and al Qaeda ideology.
