On July 23, 2025, the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) arrested four Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) terrorists in simultaneous operations. The four arrested include Fardin Sheikh, Mahammad Faique, Jishan Ali and Saifullah Qureshi. They were in regular touch and exchanged crucial information with the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) during Operation Sindoor. The four men are accused of sharing on social media, radical and provocative content, including AQIS jihadi propaganda videos, with an aim to uproot the democratic system and implement sharia (Islamic law) in India, through an armed rebellion.
As reported on June 26, 2025, Vishal Yadav, a clerk at the Indian Navy headquarters in New Delhi, was arrested by the Intelligence Wing of the Rajasthan Police on charges of espionage for suspectedly sharing sensitive military information with the ISI during Operation Sindoor. Authorities revealed that he had been spying for an extended period, sharing classified information about the Navy and other defence units via his mobile phone. He was reportedly in constant contact with a female ISI handler, operating under the alias Priya Sharma, who had lured him into a honeytrap through social media. He received payments through cryptocurrency transactions and direct bank transfers.
As reported on July 15, 2025, the April 22 terrorist attack at Baisaran Maidan in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), was jointly planned by ISI and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), under directives from Pakistan’s political and military leadership. The attack squad was led by Sulaiman, a suspected former Pakistani Special Forces commando, trained at LeT’s Muridke camp in the Punjab Province of Pakistan, who was armed with an M-4 rifle.
On May 29, 2025, the Delhi Police arrested Mohammad Kasim from Bharatpur District in Rajasthan, on charges of espionage, suspectedly carried out on ISI’s directions. The accused, was in contact with his handler in ISI through encrypted messaging apps and social media platforms. The Delhi Police disclosed that Kasim had travelled to Pakistan twice, first in August 2024 and again in March 2025, and stayed there for about 90 days.
On May 1, 2025, Rajasthan Intelligence arrested Pathan Khan for spying for ISI, from the Jaisalmer District of Rajasthan. He was detained around a month earlier for questioning and was formally arrested on May 1. Khan had visited Pakistan in 2013, where he came in contact with ISI officers. He was lured with money, the agency revealed. Even after 2013, he continued meeting ISI officers by going to Pakistan and kept sharing sensitive and confidential information related to the Jaisalmer International Border with Pakistani handlers.
On February 14, 2025, a Nepalese origin ISI agent, Ansarul Miya Ansari was arrested by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police at Vishwas Nagar in East Delhi. Following this arrest, a Pakistani espionage network operating across West Asia, Nepal, and India was exposed. Significantly, at the time of his arrest, authorities recovered a laptop and printer, several confidential Army documents, a copy of the Army training brochure titled “Fighting in Built-Up Areas – 1982”, and deployment manuals and materials marked ‘SECRET’ and ‘CONFIDENTIAL’.
According to partial data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), since 2000, 630 ISI agents have been arrested in India, in 313 incidents (data till July 27, 2025).
Founded in 1948 by Australian-born British Army officer Major General Walter Joseph Cawthorn, ISI was modelled on the British MI6. Trained by the CIA and the SDECE (which was then the French secret service), with an India-centric focus, its early personnel were from the military and the civilian employees of the pre-partition Intelligence Bureau. The ISI officially has seven sections: Joint Intelligence X (JIX), Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB), Joint Counter Intelligence Bureau (JCIB), Joint Intelligence/North (JIN), Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous (JIM), Joint Signal Intelligence Bureau (JSIB) and Joint Intelligence Technical Division (JIT). JIN concentrates on Jammu and Kashmir, conducting operations and supporting various terrorist proxies in the State, and also monitoring Indian forces in the region. JIX serves as the Agency’s secretariat; JIB monitors political intelligence; JCIB is responsible for oversees intelligence operations in Central Asia, South Asia, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Israel and Russia, and is also responsible for field surveillance of Pakistani diplomats stationed abroad; JIM is responsible for covert offensive intelligence operations and war time espionage; JSIB operates a chain of signals intelligence collection stations and provides communication support to its operatives; and JIT is a covert unit with a separate explosives section and a chemical warfare section.
These various sections within ISI have been spreading operations across many countries of the world. ISI has a keen eye on Bangladesh, with a particular escalation of activities after Sheikh Hasina’s exit from power. As reported on May 6, 2025, coordinated by ISI, several Hamas leaders attended meetings in Bangladesh to instigate anti-India propaganda and radicalise youth. especially for promoting the jihadist ideology and activities in India’s Northeast. On January 21, 2025,Rawalpindi secretly dispatched a senior delegation to Dhaka. This was the first time in nearly two decades that ISI officially visited Bangladesh. A senior official from Bangladesh’s Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) received the ISI delegation at the airport upon its arrival aboard an Emirates Airlines flight routed via Dubai. Bangladesh has been grappling with the problem of Rohingya refugees since several years and, as reported on July 18, 2025, many of the Rohingyas have received ideological and paramilitary training from ISI.
Similarly, in Afghanistan, ISI has long been deeply embroiled. As reported on January 11, 2025, the country’s former Vice President, Amrullah Saleh, mentioned that there were more than 150 ISI officials in the Pakistani Embassy at Kabul. According to Saleh, immediately after the Taliban returned to power (August 2021), ISI deployed its covert and overt cadres in Kabul, to safeguard Pakistan’s interests and spread terrorism across the world. The removal of “Indian proximity sentiments” from Afghan media is a prime objective of the ISI in Kabul. Earlier, in May, 2024, a covert operation was led by a team code-named Jabhaa Rubaat, directly controlled by ISI, which remains active in the eastern and southeastern provinces of Afghanistan, including Paktika, Kunar, Nuristan, Nangarhar, Paktia, and Khost. The group’s primary objective was to identify and eliminate anti-Pakistan movements and individuals within Afghanistan.
ISI activities in Nepal primarily focused on countering Indian influence in the region and support various Islamist and separatist groups. As reported on May 22, 2025, Indian Intelligence agencies unearthed a plot orchestrated by ISI to carry out a major terrorist strike in India, one that was in the works before the Pahalgam killings. The breakthrough came with the arrest of a Nepali-origin ISI agent, Ansarul Miya Ansari (mentioned above). During interrogation, Ansari disclosed critical information about ISI’s extensive espionage network and revealed that he had been tasked with procuring and sending classified military documents to Pakistan. Further, at Pakistan’s behest, Turkey is increasingly involved in germinating radical Islamist ideologies along the Indo-Nepal border, funding multiple projects to extend the network of madrassas and mosques in the border areas. Turkish intelligence and ISI are working together to destabilise mainland India. As reported on July 9, 2025, Turkish NGO IHH (Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief), which is associated with extremist groups, has extended its activities in Indo-Nepal border region.
The motto of the ISI “Take Your Precautions”, is taken from verse 4:71 of the Quran which states: “O you who have believed, take your precaution and [either] go forth in companies or go forth all together.”
The ISI is headed by Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence (DGISI), presently Lieutenant General Asim Malik. Under the DGISI there are three Deputy Directors General (DDG), each Two Star officers drawn from the Pakistani Military. The agency also has several wings: ‘A’ (analysis wing), ‘B’ (strategic and international wing, intelligence acquisition and counter-insurgency operations), ‘C’ (internal security), ‘S’ (intelligence operations), ‘CT’ (counter-terror operations), ‘T’ (signals and technical intelligence), ‘P’ (personnel), ‘I’ (internal wing to spy on officers of the agency itself), and an information management wing that deals with media and cyber operations.
S Wing, within the shadowy ISI outfit, is a notorious group made up of active ISI officers, recent retirees, and plain-clothes civilians with highly specialized training, all dedicated to protecting and preserving Pakistan’s territorial integrity using any method, at any cost, with no regard for collateral damage. As black-ops units go, it is about as thuggish and ruthless as is possible.
ISI’s current strength of about 25,000 employees includes civilians who are direct recruits. The ratio of civilians to officers on deputation from the Pakistani army, navy and air force, including military officers who are no longer serving but brought into the ISI on short-term contracts, and from the Police and paramilitary services and other specialist units, is about 60:40.
ISI also has visible footprints in Europe and Africa. For Instance, after fleeing from Pakistan to the UK in 2022, Major (Retd.) Adil Farooq Raja of the Pakistani Army is facing trial in the High Court of Justice – King’s Bench Division, Media and Communications List, UK. The case was filed at the behest of ISI and the trial, scheduled from 21-24 July, 2025 under Case No. QB-2022-002648, has drawn international attention. As reported on July 13, in his court deposition, Raja stated:
The ISI operates in the UK. They have an office in the Pakistani embassy… The two ISI commanding officers operating out of the London embassy are Colonel Asad Rasheed, who works with the active assistance of his staff and the Army, and Air Attache Colonel Taimoor Khan…. I have been friends with Khan for about 17 years. We served together in the Army.
Arshad Sharif, a Pakistani investigative journalist who fled to Dubai on August 10, 2022, to evade ISI harassment, was soon forced to flee again to Kenya. Shockingly, on October 23, 2022, he was shot dead in Kajiado, approximately 80 kilometers south of Nairobi. Kenyan authorities initially claimed his death was a case of mistaken identity at a Police checkpoint, but the autopsy revealed that Sharif had been tortured, and his fingernails pulled out before he was killed. Under mounting public pressure, a report was released by Muhammad Athar Waheed, Director of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), which linked ISI officers to Sharif’s killing. As expected, however, no official action was taken. Earlier, Sajid Hussain, a Baloch rights activist and journalist from Pakistan, living under political asylum in Sweden, was found dead in the Fyris River in Uppsala on April 23, 2020. He left Pakistan due to threats from the Pakistan Army and ISI. Sajid was also the Chief Editor of Balochistan Times, an online magazine he had set up, in which he wrote about abductions, drug trafficking and the long-running insurgency in Balochistan. There are suspected links of ISI to his abduction and murder. Likewise, on December 21, 2020, Karima Mehrab, a Pakistani human rights activist from Balochistan, who had fled Pakistan to Canada in 2015, was found dead in Toronto, Canada. Her body was found near Toronto’s downtown waterfront. Karima was critical of the ISI, which has been accused of abducting human rights activists inside Pakistan. Also, on February 2, 2020, Pakistani blogger and critic of the military, Ahmad Waqass Goraya, was attacked in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His attacker was hired by the ISI to kill him.
Numberless Islamist terrorist operations across the world have a Pakistani footprint. These, most prominently include the 9/11 attacks, with funding routed through Pakistan and links to the then ISI Chief Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed. The Justice for 9/11 Steering Committee noted, “In the weeks after September 11, news reports in the Indian and European press claimed Ahmad and his agency authorized the transfer of $100,000 to Mohamed Atta through the intermediary of a veteran ISI asset, Omar Saeed Sheikh.” Ahmad was abruptly removed from his position on October 7, 2001, but no further action or investigation into his involvement with the “Hamburg Cell” headed by 9/11 architect Mohammad Atta, was pursued. In its 2006 report, a British Defense Ministry think tank observed, “Indirectly Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism – whether in London on 7/7 [the July 2005 attacks on London’s transit system], or in Afghanistan, or Iraq.” On May 7, 2022, the anti-terrorism Police of Italy and the European Counter Terrorism Centre of Europol, along with the anti-terrorism Police of Spain and France, carried out a counter terrorism operation and detained 14 individuals, including a number of Pakistani nationals linked to a Pakistani cell operating in Italy and other European countries. This cell was part of a wider network called ‘Gabar Group’ associated with Zaheer Hassan Mahmoud, a Pakistani national who had attacked the former office of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in September 2020. Earlier, it was reported on February 11, 2020, that ISI was grooming Afghan-linked Pakistani drug gangs in Europe to be its non-state accomplices. The UK is a particularly fertile ground for this purpose because of the presence of a large Pakistani community in England, which is not exceptionally well off, and could be lured by drug money. Further, as reported on June 23, 2023, ISI was using the narcotics trade to generate funds for its own operations. Narcotics networks operating between Pakistan and Europe have become more dominant in recent times, with the United Kingdom, Belgium and the Netherlands as notable targets for trafficking. A number of countries, including Spain and Italy, have recently recorded Pakistan as a prominent source of opiates, in transit from Afghanistan.
The ISI, in cahoots with the Pakistani military establishment, operates a parallel ‘state within a state’ structure, to crush dissent and independent voices within Pakistan, and extends its malignancy across the world through the instrumentalization of Islamist terrorism and organized criminal operations, even as it focuses an overwhelming proportion of its malevolence on its unrelenting enmity for India. Through all this, ISI and the Pakistan Army, as well as the state structure that underpins them, have gone largely unpunished by a global community, powerful elements within which have preferred to exploit Pakistan’s ‘covert assets’, rather than to penalize a rogue state and the evil it has engineered across the world.
