After a brief encounter, the Commander of the unified council for Lashker-e-Toiba (LET) and Harkat-Ul-Ansar (HUA), `General' Badshah Khan lay prostrate in a pool of blood. The local Kashmiri militants had taken their revenge. And the Army was ecstatic for Badshah was the top most Afghan militant active in the Jammu province.

Intelligence sources say that for the first time in the nine-year-old militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, the local Kashmiri militants have started flashing coded messages through their wireless sets that tip off the Army about the mercenary movement in a particular area. The exercise started a fortnight back and the results have been astounding for the Army. Last week four HUA mercenarieswere gunned down in Sangla forest, two Afghan militants killed near Tipper village and LET militants ambushed and killed at Surankote on all these occasions the source was the same, local Kashmiri militants through their wireless sets.

Army officials claim that the turnaround, which has tilted the balance in their favour, has been ensured by the bitterness creeping in between the local militants and the foreign mercenaries over the reported sidelining of the former by the ISI-backed mercenary groups like the LET and the HUA.

Cashing in on this, the Army has managed to tap some of the disillusioned local Kashmiri militants who in turn have accessed the Army about the movement of mercenaries. A common course has been charted out between the forces and the local militants as both of them perceivably had one common enemy -- mercenaries.