The Web of Terror: From Peshawar to Ankara

The Delhi blast has revealed a transnational jihadist network linking Pakistan’s old proxy wars to Turkey’s new Islamist hubs.

The Hyundai i20 that blew up near Delhi’s Red Fort, killing 13 and injuring more than 30 other civilians, has shattered a complacency about where modern terror is born. Very quickly, investigators uncovered a multi-state ‘white-collar’ module, which led to the arrest of several doctors besides the seizure of a prodigious cache of IED precursors and weapons. Within days counter-terror agencies were tracing threads that led beyond India - to Pakistan’s militant milieu and to meeting points and transit routes in Turkey.

Seen from the subcontinent, the pattern is familiar in outline and novel in detail. The familiar outline begins with Pakistan’s long use of militant proxies as instruments of statecraft. The ISI’s cultivation of mujahideen against Soviet forces in the 1980s evolved into a decades-long practice of sponsoring and sheltering groups that project power across borders, from Afghan theatres to Kashmir. Scholarship and intelligence reporting have documented the lineage from Peshawar-era training networks to the creation of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, and their alleged roles in past attacks such as Mumbai in 2008.

At the centre of the Delhi blast is the figure of Maulvi Irfan Ahmed, a 34-year-old paramedical employee at Srinagar’s Government Medical College and Imam of Nowgam Mosque. To his peers, Irfan was the sort of figure who bridged science and faith. To his handlers, he was someone who could move easily among young, educated Indians and plant the seed of radical thought. Investigators allege that Irfan used his dual standing to recruit medical students, offering them purpose and belonging in the language of religious war. His message drew from Ghazwa-e-Hind, the apocalyptic notion of an eventual conquest of India - a trope popular among terror outfits like Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

Two of Irfan’s closest associates, Dr. Adil and Dr. Muzammil Shakeel, reportedly travelled to Turkey earlier this year. Their journey, intelligence agencies say, was not one of academic exchange but of instruction. In Istanbul and Kayseri, they met foreign handlers who provided encrypted communications tools, financing channels, and ideological literature. The trip was arranged and funded through contacts in Pakistan’s Bahawalpur, the birthplace of the JeM. This connects the dots between the subcontinent’s old sanctuaries of jihad and the newer hubs of recruitment in West Asia.

Professional jihadists

Indian authorities have long grappled with terrorism exported from Pakistan. But this network is of a subtler kind. The conspirators are not desperate youth wielding AK-47s but doctors, paramedics and engineers – a new new class of ‘white-collar terrorists’ who operate behind laptops and WhatsApp groups rather than in jungles or safe houses.

The case of Dr. Shaheen Saeed captures the transformation vividly. A physician and leader of Jamaatul Mominat, a women’s front aligned with Jaish-e-Mohammed, she admitted to recruiting young women for radical indoctrination. Shaheen, who investigators say was in contact with Sadia Azhar, sister of JeM’s chief Masood Azhar, ran online study circles that masqueraded as religious forums. Their real purpose was to cultivate ideological commitment and emotional dependency. Several students returning from universities in Malaysia, the UK, and the Gulf were drawn into her orbit, proving that the radical message now travels seamlessly through diaspora circuits.

In the Cold War decades, radicalisation was often a by-product of poverty or grievance. Today, it wears the polished vocabulary of purpose and intellect. The transformation owes much to the digital sphere, which collapses geography and anonymity and has unfortunately globalised jihad.

Peshawar to Istanbul

Pakistan’s complicity in exporting terrorism is hardly novel. The world saw its first global jihadist university in the Afghan border town of Peshawar in the 1980s, when American-Saudi funding and Pakistani logistics produced the Mujahideen who later birthed al-Qaeda. From those trenches, Masood Azhar and Hafiz Saeed carried the ideology eastward into Kashmir, spawning a generation of militants who viewed the Line of Control not as a border but a staging ground.

What is new is the Turkish connection. Once a secular NATO ally, Turkey has in recent years under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan re-imagined itself as a patron of political Islam. From hosting exiled leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to providing rhetorical cover for Hamas, Ankara’s ideological alignment has shifted towards Islamist solidarity. Turkish soil has become a convenient meeting ground for operatives from South and West Asia, exploiting the country’s visa-free access and porous financial oversight.

Turkey’s recent posture, a mixture of Ottoman-nostalgia, Islamic soft power and pragmatic diplomacy, creates openings that Islamist networks can exploit even as Ankara courts strategic relations with many states.

Indian and Western counterterror officials note that Istanbul now hosts a web of charities, travel agencies, and think-tanks that double as logistical fronts. Some of these have links to the Milli Görüş movement, long associated with Erdo an’s political roots. For Pakistani groups under international scrutiny, Turkey offers plausible deniability wrapped in diplomacy.

The nexus between Pakistan and Turkey also reflects a geopolitical compact. Both countries see in India’s rise a threat to their own standing in the Muslim world. The partnership has produced a quiet alignment: Pakistan supplies the human capital and ideological muscle; Turkey provides access, legitimacy and platforms. Financial flows often move through Hawala channels in Dubai or cryptocurrency wallets controlled from Istanbul’s Fatih district, before re-emerging in Kashmir or Kerala.

These networks also draw from the legacy of Afghanistan’s chaos. The return of the Taliban in 2021 reopened training corridors from Nangarhar to Paktika, where groups like Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) maintain ties with Pakistani clerical networks. Indian investigators believe Irfan Ahmed’s connections in Nangarhar helped secure logistics for his recruits’ Turkish travel.

The result is a geographically diffused, digitally integrated ecosystem which intelligence officials dub as “terror without borders.”

This is not the first time India has confronted such transnational plots. The 1993 Bombay bombings, coordinated by Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company under ISI guidance, introduced the model of globalised terror financing through Dubai and Karachi. The 2008 Mumbai attacks refined it with remote handlers in Pakistan directing gunmen in real time through satellite phones. Yet, in both cases, the perpetrators were foot soldiers.

The current wave is different as its architects are professionals and its recruitment from the elite and educated class.

Turkish temptation

For many young South Asian Muslims, Turkey projects a seductive image: modern yet Islamic, defiant of the West yet globally admired. Turkish television dramas such as Diriliş: Ertuğrul - a historical epic romanticising Ottoman conquest - have found cult followings across Kashmir and northern India. These pop-cultural narratives, amplified by social media influencers and Islamist preachers, have blurred the line between admiration and allegiance.

Erdoğan’s open support for Pakistan’s position on Kashmir has further deepened emotional affinities. In 2020, when he told the Turkish Parliament that “Kashmir is as much our issue as it is Pakistan’s,” his words resonated far beyond diplomacy. Online jihadist forums quoted him as proof that the “Ummah stands united.” For recruiters like Irfan Ahmed, such rhetoric became powerful propaganda material.

The old image of terrorism - of bearded men crossing mountains - no longer suffices. Today’s militant could be a doctor drafting research papers by day and encryption codes by night.

The web of terror has always adapted to power and technology. From Peshawar’s madrassas to Istanbul’s cafes, it now extends through professions once thought immune to fanaticism. India, with its vast young and educated population, sits at the fault line of that transformation. Its defence must therefore begin not only at its borders, but in its classrooms and hospitals before another radicalized professional decides that faith and fury can share the same scalpel.