While talking to media IGP Kashmir, Vijay Kumar, spoke on yesterday's encounter saying we have identified the terrorists who had attacked at Bijbehara .
"Since 1989, Tral, which is a town and a notified area committee in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir, was center of militancy and now it’s factually correct to say that it is terrorism-free," Kumar said.
"It was a difficult task for the security forces as Tral is a central location of the Valley and had remain hot bed of terrorists since long. It is indeed a big success for security forces and we will continue to wipe out other areas of south Kashmir," he added.
The Hizbul Mujahideen was a dominant force in Kashmir after the militancy broke out in the valley as the outfit had several thousand cadres at the peak of insurgency.
Several top commanders of the outfit, including Burhan Wani and Zakir Musa, were from the Tral area.
Still south Kashmir has countable number of terrorists, but we have now started operations in north Kashmir and have killed recently killed terrorists, he said.
"Foreign terrorists are not in the hinterland, but in the upper reaches of South Kashmir and around 29 foreign terrorists are active. We will collect input and will kill them whenever they come down," Kashmir IGP stated.
Comparatively, there are less number of militants in North Kashmir, but we continue our operations and eliminate them as our forces are fully trained and equipped, he added.
We cannot say Hizbul Mujahideen is fully wiped as it is still the largest group and there are few militants of the organisation left. We do not have any particular target, but our operations depend on the kind of inputs that we get from intelligence and local sources, Kumar said.
It’s encouraging that youths are not joining terror ranks, this is because we do operations in a technical manner. We have proposal of counselling, but Coronavirus outbreak has disrupted it, Kumar said adding that security forces are trying to bring things back to normal.