Asim Umar

Biography

Early life and education He was born Sana-ul-Haq into an influential peasant family (his grandfather was a village pradhan, his grand uncle a freedom fighter and great-grandfather a district magistrate under the British rule), between 1974-76 in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh, India. He attended the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary in Uttar Pradesh, India and graduated from there in 1991. In the late 1990s, he visited Pakistan. Before joining militancy, he was himself a teacher in a madrassa in Karachi and used to translate jihadist literature from Pashto to Urdu.

Militancy Umar is said to have traveled to Afghanistan where he met Osama bin Laden, and later joined Harkat-ul-Jihad Al-Islami (HUJI), a Jihadist group with branches across the Indian subcontinent. After hearing the news, Umar's father promptly inserted advertisements in newspapers where he disowned his son. By April 2014, several months before being named leader of AQIS, Al Qaeda was identifying Umar as the head of its sharia committee in Pakistan.

In September 2014, Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri announced the creation of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and introduced Asim Umar as its leader in a video posted online.

Death On 23 September 2019, Afghan officials announced that Asim Umar was killed in a joint US-Afghan military raid in the Afghan Province of Helmand. 40 Afghan civilians and six other Al-Qaeda militants were also killed in the raid.

Books He wrote "a number of conspiracy theory books", centered around Islamic eschatology and the Dajjal, that he himself translated from Urdu into Arabic, Pashto and Uzbek languages, including: Teesri Jang-e-Azeem Aur Dajjal Dajjal Ka Lashkar: Black Water Imam Mehdi ke Doost aur Dushman Bermuda Tikon aur Dajjal Ghaltiyan