As Indian agencies probe the terror network spanning both Jammu and Kashmir and several north Indian states after the November 10, 2025, blast near Delhi’s Red Fort metro station that left 13 people dead, evidence increasingly points to a Turkish role in this effort to orchestrate blasts across India.
On October 18, 2025, Kashmir police arrested Pakistan-sponsored Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists as they put up posters on the outskirts of Srinagar, threatening pro-Indian Kashmiris and police informers. The investigation led to Ahmad Wagay, an Islamic cleric and self-declared de-radicalization activist who instead indoctrinated youth to join Al Qaeda, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Islamic State. His interrogation further unveiled the white-collar terror network of Kashmiri doctors and associates from other states like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
The investigation by India’s terrorism investigation body ... revealed an international dimension to this terror attack.
The information gleaned from his interrogation led to police raids on the Al Falah University campus in Faridabad, where police recovered assault rifles and more than three tons of explosive materials, including ammonium nitrate, detonators, and gelatine sticks. As the raids were ongoing, Umar Nabi, a medical doctor from Pulwama, a Jaish-e-Mohammad stronghold in South Kashmir, blew himself up in a Hyundai i20 filled with explosives in a crowded area near Delhi’s seventeenth-century Red Fort.
The investigation by India’s terrorism investigation body, the National Investigative Agency, revealed an international dimension to this terror attack. Allegedly, the masterminds of the Jaish-e-Mohammed-linked white-collar terror module, Nabi and two other doctors—Muzammil Ganai and Adil Rather—used Faridabad’s Al Falah University as their base and received instructions from a Turkey-based handler codenamed “Ukasa” via encrypted communication apps like Signal and Threema to plan multiple bombings across India. Reports indicate that Ukasa served as the main link between the Delhi-based doctors and the Pakistan-based terror groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind, both allegedly behind the attack. The National Investigative Agency investigations suggest that Ukasa played a leading role in training the doctors to establish covert cells and communicate secretly. Reportedly, Umar and his associates underwent ideological indoctrination in Turkey sometime between 2021 and 2022. Indian agencies also suspect that Turkey and Pakistan provided funds to the Indian cells via traditional hawala money transfers.
A day before the car bomb, Indian agencies arrested the Istanbul International Forum’s co-founder, Farhan Nabi Siddiqui, for publishing hateful tracts and aiding illegal and suspicious immigrants from Bangladesh. Farhan, along with his Turkish partner, Nasi Torba, received more than $1 million from hawala channels. Allegedly, the non-governmental organization used funds from Turkey and Germany to buy land in the northern Indian states of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh to build mosques and religious seminaries. The investigations also hint at a complex network that uses religious and educational charities and non-governmental organizations to propagate extremist narratives and launder foreign funds.
Terrorist groups receive small weapons and strategic and tactical guidance from Turkey-based individuals and entities.
During a recent research visit to Jammu and Kashmir, former terrorists and intelligence officials related that many Kashmiri students have been visiting Turkey over the past four or five years. Following Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s August 2024 ouster and the empowerment of Islamist radicals in that South Asian country, many Kashmiri youths with affiliations to Jamaat-e-Islami traveled to Turkey and Qatar, and then onward to Pakistan, where they received Pakistani passports. They returned to Bangladesh to coordinate the activities of Pakistan’s Islamist proxies like Jamaat-e-Islami and terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, and Ansarullah Bangla Team. A local guide, with twenty-seven years’ experience infiltrating Pakistani terrorists into the Kashmir Valley, said that the terrorist groups receive small weapons and strategic and tactical guidance from Turkey-based individuals and entities.
Turkey’s activism on Kashmir and in Islamist causes in South Asia emanates from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s pan-Islamist dreams. After India terminated Kashmir’s special status in 2019, Turkey supported Pakistan in the United Nations and peddled anti-India propaganda through its state broadcaster, Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) World. During the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict following the Pahalgam terror attack, Pakistan used Turkish drones against India. Turkey’s defense supplies to Pakistan and the new Islamist regime in Bangladesh have already raised alarm in India.
Many journalists may see the blast near the Red Fort as simply one more terrorist attack, but increasingly for India’s security services, it appears to be Ankara’s shot across the bow as Turkey launches an undeclared terrorist war against India.
