A US Congress report has reiterated that Pakistan is a base of terrorist operations and several terror groups look to target India and even aim to annex Jammu and Kashmir.The report titled ‘Terrorist and Other Militant Groups in Pakistan’ was put up by the US Congress on March 25. It red-flags how terrorism continues to flourish.Without naming India’s Operation Sindoor, in May last year, it says “several major military offensives, including airstrikes, and hundreds of thousands of ‘intelligence-based operations’ have failed to defeat the numerous terrorist groups that continue to operate on Pakistani soil.”The report says terrorist groups operating, or launching attacks, are under five broad categories — India- and Kashmir-oriented; globally oriented; Afghanistan-oriented; domestically oriented; and sectarian—anti-Shia.In India, it highlights the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), which was designated as a foreign terrorist organisation in 2017. It is one of the largest and oldest militant groups operating in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. “HM’s cadre, numbering up to 1,500, is composed primarily of ‘ethnic Kashmiris’ who seek independence for Kashmir or the annexation of Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan,” it says.In India, analysts who deal in counterterror operations say the branding of HM cadre as ‘ethnic Kashmiris’ is wrong. Largely, those nabbed or killed in operations in J&K are of Punjabi ethnicity from mainland Pakistan.The report also wrongly dubs Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) founder Masood Azhar as a ‘Kashmiri militant’ leader. Azhar, of Punjabi ethnicity and not ‘Kashmiri’ origin, was one of three released from prison in 1999 to swap passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC 814.Along with LET, the JeM was responsible for the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, among numerous others. “Based in both Punjab and in PoK, JEM’s roughly 500 armed supporters operate in India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan while seeking annexation of Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan,’ says the report.On what it termed as ‘globally oriented militants’, the report says the Lashkar-e-Toiba, led by now-incarcerated Hafiz Saeed, and is based in Pakistan’s Punjab province and in PoK, has changed its name to Jamaat-ud-Dawa to circumvent sanctions.“With several thousand fighters, LET was responsible for the mass-scale 2008 terrorist assault on Mumbai, India, as well as several other high-profile attacks”, the report says.The report names Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM), saying that despite being designated as an FTO in 1997, it operates mainly from PoK and from some Pakistani cities. It was responsible for the 1999 hijacking of IC 814.“Twelve such groups are designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) under US law, and most, but not all, are animated by Islamist extremist ideology,” says the report, and adds, “Pakistan has suffered considerably from domestic terrorism since 2003, and related fatalities peaked in 2009”.It cites the US State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2023 (the most recent, released in late 2024), saying “Pakistan took some steps to curtail the activities of terrorist groups” in 2023. It also reported that some madrassas (religious schools) “taught doctrines that could lead to greater acceptance of violent extremist ideology.”In 2018, the US President designated Pakistan a “Country of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. It has been redesignated annually since.