Only eight months after taking office, the Pakistani army fired the head of the powerful spy agency of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
The news was released on Sunday with a brief statement by Inter-Services Public Relations, the public relations wing of the Pakistani armed forces, which announced that the Lieutenant General Asim Munir he had left the position of director of the ISI to assume the post of commander of the Gujranwala Corps in Punjab, the second largest province of Pakistan with a majority Sikh population.
General Munir was replaced by Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed, former head of the ISI's counter-intelligence department. Last October, when General Munir was promoted to director of the ISI, Hameed was promoted to the rank of three-star general.
In April he was promoted again, this time by the major general to lieutenant general, and was appointed general helper at the headquarters of the Pakistani armed forces. His meteoric rise in the ISI has earned him several devotees and is considered an influential intelligence planner in the ranks of the powerful espionage agency. At the end of the 2017 he became prominent outside the ISI, when he personally meditated to negotiate an agreement between the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government and the leaders of the so-called Ahmadiyya community.
The followers of the Ahmadiyya movement, a Messianic Muslim sect with a substantial following in the Punjab, had taken to the streets to complain of discrimination and harassment by the authorities. According to media reports at the time, Hameed threatened to use the Pakistani army against Ahmadiyya demonstrators if they did not reduce their public protests. These reports mean that some in Pakistan see Hameed as a military extremist and a firm supporter of the military's point of view as guarantor of political normality in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, Indian officials have stated that Islamabad has warned Delhi of a possible al-Qaeda attack in a region of Kashmir administered by India. Media reports said Indian officials were warned by the ISI that al Qaeda forces planned to carry out "a major terrorist attack" in the Pulwama region of southern Kashmir.
Security observers have noted the move as a rare example of intelligence cooperation between the two rival nuclear-armed nations. As a result, India said it had deployed about 500 additional companies of police officers in the southern region of Kashmir.