I got it thanks to the above comments. I stored the remote urls for the anchor tags that trigger a popup using a data attribute ('data-href') with the anchors class name as 'popup-links' using the following javascript:
$jq191('.popup-links').on( 'click', function( e ){
var remote= $jq191( this ).data( 'href' );
$jq191('.modal-body').load( remote, function( e ){
$jq191( '#myModal' ).modal( 'show' );
});
});