August 29, 2007
Pakistan | The nation's efforts to straddle the fault line between moderate and militant Islam offer a cautionary tale for the post-9/11 world
Pakistan - National Geographic Magazine
If there is an address, an exact location for the rift tearing Pakistan apart, and possibly the world, it is a spot 17 miles (28 kilometers) west of Islamabad called the Margalla Pass. Here, at a limestone cliff in the middle of Pakistan, the mountainous west meets the Indus River Valley, and two ancient, and very different, civilizations collide. To the southeast, unfurled to the horizon, lie the fertile lowlands of the Indian subcontinent, realm of peasant farmers on steamy plots of land, bright with colors and the splash of serendipitous gods. To the west and north stretch the harsh, windswept mountains of Central Asia, land of herders and raiders on horseback, where man fears one God and takes no prisoners.This is
also where two conflicting forms of Islam meet: the relatively relaxed
and tolerant Islam of India, versus the rigid fundamentalism of the
Afghan frontier. Beneath the surface of Pakistan, these opposing forces
grind against each other like two vast geologic plates, rattling
teacups from Lahore to London, Karachi to New York. The clash between
moderates and extremists in Pakistan today reflects this rift, and can
be seen as a microcosm for a larger struggle among Muslims everywhere.
So when the earth trembles in Pakistan, the world pays attention.
Travel
8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) across this troubled country, as I did
recently, and it becomes obvious that, 60 years after its founding,
Pakistan still occupies unsettled ground. Traumatized by multiple wars
with India, a parade of military strongmen (including the current
president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf), and infighting among ethnic
groups—Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi, Pashtun—Pakistan's 165 million people
have never fully united as one nation, despite being 97 percent Muslim.
To hold the country together, successive governments have spent
billions on the military, creating a pampered and self-serving monolith
of mostly Punjabi generals while neglecting the basic needs of the
people, for justice, health, education, security, and hope. Lately,
these grievances have spilled onto the streets, as lawyers and other
opponents challenge Pakistan's military government and demand a return
to civilian, democratic rule. Meanwhile, six years after 9/11, the
forces of Islamic radicalism are gaining strength and challenging
Pakistan's moderate majority for the soul of the country.
It's
not just the surging homegrown Taliban, which in one two-week period
this year scorched and bloodied the streets of half a dozen cities with
suicide bombs. Or the al Qaeda fighters who prowl the western mountains
of Waziristan, butchering anyone suspected of being an American spy.
Just as chilling are the "night letters" posted on public buildings,
warning that all girls, upon threat of death, must wear head-to-toe
burkas and stop attending school. Or, in a rising tide of intimidation,
the murders of teachers and doctors and human rights workers accused of
"crimes against Islam." But perhaps the most telling evidence of all
was my encounter with a 22-year-old woman named Umme Ayman, who seemed
all too eager to die.
I CANNOT
SEE HER FACE, or even her eyes, but I can tell you that Ayman is an
impressive young woman. She wears glasses under a black veil and speaks
in short, eruptive bursts of English that sound like well-rehearsed
lines in a school play. She and a group of 200 female religious
students have taken over a public children's library in Islamabad. They
are protesting the destruction of mosques run by radical clerics that
the government says were built without permits. Riot police, bristling
with sidearms and batons, have encircled the library and ordered the
students to leave. But Ayman is in no mood to listen.
"We are
not terrorists," she says. "We are students. We wish to spread Islam
over all the world. If America wants to end Islam, then we are prepared
to die defending our faith. We have said our goodbyes." Ayman and the
other women sit around the library's circular tables in tiny chairs
meant for children. Amid shelves lined with children's storybooks, they
have posted signs reading "Allah is for Muslims, not infidels." Across
the street, their parents have been holding an anxious vigil for weeks.
"Our fate is with Allah," Ayman says, as other protesters
gather around, "but if the government grants our demands, there will be
no problem." And what are those demands? "To rebuild the mosques and to
make Pakistan an Islamic state." Half a dozen veiled heads bob in
agreement.
From the start, the founders of Pakistan intended
their nation to be a refuge for Muslims, not an Islamic state. Pakistan
was created when India, a British colony for nearly a hundred years,
gained its independence and was partitioned into two countries along a
hastily drawn border. Pakistan's first leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and
his brain trust of secular intellectuals created a fledgling democracy
that gave Islam a cultural, rather than political, role in national
life. Their Pakistan was to be a model of how Islam, merged with
democratic ideals, could embrace the modern world. "Muslims would cease
to be Muslims, not in the religious sense," Jinnah said in his
inaugural address, but "as citizens of the state."
Sixty years
later, having been educated in schools that teach mainly the Koran, the
young women in the library are stunned when I mention Jinnah's secular
vision for Pakistan. "That is a lie," Ayman says, her voice shaking
with fury. "Everyone knows Pakistan was created as an Islamic state,
according to the will of Allah. Where did you read this thing?" Such is
the certainty of Pakistan's Islamists, whose loud assertions give them
political influence far beyond their numbers.
The women
may be on the front lines of this protest, but it's clear the clerics
in the mosque next door are calling the shots. The children's library
is a few yards from one of the most radical mosques in Pakistan, Lal
Masjid, or Red Mosque, which has posted dozens of lean young jihadists
in black turbans around the library, brandishing swords, staffs, axes,
and AK-47s. The men from the mosque include pro-Taliban clerics and
Javed Ibrahim Paracha, a bearded, heavyset former member of parliament
who has been dubbed "al Qaeda's lawyer" for successfully representing
several hundred jihadists captured in Pakistan after 9/11. He explains
what emboldens these young women to risk their lives for Islam: "This
government has lost all credibility," he says. "People look at
Musharraf and they see a U.S. puppet who's willing to declare war on
fellow Muslims to satisfy America. They also see his generals getting
rich, while they're getting poorer every day. People are losing hope.
Pakistan and its government are becoming two different things. This
will have to change, and soon."
A week later, the standoff
comes to an apparent end after the government backs down and agrees to
start rebuilding the mosques. The children's library is stripped of all
books deemed un-Islamic, and the students take over. In the capital, a
mere ten minutes' drive from the presidential palace, the Islamists
have won. (Months later, as this story goes to press, the government
finally stormed the Red Mosque and killed scores of militants. Umme
Ayman survived.)
More than anyone, it was General Muhammad
Zia-ul-Haq who created Pakistan's current generation of Islamic
radicals, and the climate in which they thrive. A Punjabi general with
a pencil-thin mustache and raccoon circles under his eyes, Zia seized
power in a coup in 1977, had the democratically elected prime minister
tried and hanged, and promptly pressed for the Islamization of
Pakistan, calling for more religion in the classroom and the use of
punishments such as flogging and amputations for crimes against Islam.
To Zia, Pakistan's secular founders, with their emphasis on Muslim
culture, had it exactly backward. "We were created on the basis
of Islam," Zia said, and he set out to remake democratic Pakistan as a
strict Islamic state—despite the fact that a large majority of
Pakistanis were, and remain, moderates.
Whether by temperament
or tradition, most Pakistani Muslims are more comfortable with the
mystical and ecstatic rituals of Barelvi Islam, a colorful blend of
Indian Islamic practice and Sufism. For a Punjabi farmer whose crop has
just come in, it has always been more satisfying to hang out at a Sufi
shrine listening to qawwali music and watching dervishes whirl
than reciting the Koran in a fundamentalist mosque. Most Pakistanis,
though powerless to resist, were lukewarm to Zia's Islamization
program, as was much of the outside world.
That all
changed in December 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded neighboring
Afghanistan, driving hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees—mainly
conservative Pashtun tribesmen—across the border into Pakistan. Within
months Zia's Islamist dream got a huge boost: The United States and
Saudi Arabia joined Pakistan in a covert alliance to supply arms,
training, and billions of dollars to an anti-Soviet insurgency in
Afghanistan. The motto of Zia's army—Jihad in the Service of
Allah—became a rallying cry for thousands of mujahideen training in
camps funded by the CIA in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province.
Over time, Zia's agenda, and that of the United States, became
indistinguishable: If Zia wanted to Islamize Pakistan while mobilizing
support for the anti-Soviet jihad, all the more power to him. Besides,
the fundamentalist madrassas of northwestern Pakistan made excellent
recruiting centers for mujahideen—young fighters who saw the struggle
against the Soviets as a holy war.
During the 1980s, as the
mujahideen prevailed against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the winds of
extremism blowing from the northwest began to chill all of Pakistan.
Millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia flowed into the hard-line Sunni
madrassas clustered along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, which
eventually spread across Pakistan. Not all Pakistani madrassas today
are fundamentalist or radical. Some are shoestring operations run by
moderate clerics to meet the educational needs of the poor. But the
majority—more than 60 percent—are affiliated with the fundamentalist
Deobandi sect, an austere interpretation of Islam that calls for a
rejection of modernity and a return to the "pure," seventh-century
Islam of the Prophet Muhammad. Politically savvy and extremely well
funded, more than 10,000 of these schools operate across Pakistan
today, compared with fewer than 1,000 before General Zia took power.
Thousands more operate unofficially.
By the time Zia died in a
mysterious 1988 plane crash, the Islamization of Pakistan was well
under way. The following year, the Soviet Union, preoccupied with its
own implosion, pulled its demoralized troops from Afghanistan. The U.S.
promptly declared victory and returned home, leaving the Afghan people
to the chaotic rule of the mujahideen warlords. One crucial chapter in
the story of radical Islam's ascendancy had come to a close. The one we
are still living had just begun. Osama bin Laden and other leaders of
the Afghan jihad now moved freely in and out of northwestern Pakistan
and its Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The madrassas swelled with
the children of the Zia Generation. In the rugged mountainous land
shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan, the seeds of the Taliban, and al
Qaeda, had been sown.
"YES,
THERE ARE EXTREMISTS here," says Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid. "But
they are a small minority in a nation of 165 million people. Most of us
want nothing to do with violence." This is true. But like moderates
everywhere, those in Pakistan have a hard time being heard over the
racket rising up from their streets and television sets, a raucous
soundtrack of religious sermonizing, Indo-Pakistani saber rattling, and
a general gnashing of teeth that passes for public discourse. Ordinary
people are also stifled by a government and police force that are among
the most corrupt in the world, led by an army that answers to no one.
But it is a measure of the country's underlying goodness, and a sign of
hope, that 60 years after independence the most revered figure in
Pakistan is not a mullah or a sports hero, but a 79-year-old man who
routinely washes dried blood off dead bodies and fishes his clothes
from a donation barrel.
Abdul Sattar Edhi began serving his
fellow citizens a few years after the founding of Pakistan, when he
opened a free clinic in Karachi. Later he bought a dented Hillman
station wagon, its blue paint peeling, and turned it into Pakistan's
first private ambulance. He shuttled poor people to medical care and
collected the bodies of the city's homeless from the gutters, washed
them, and gave them a proper burial. "I felt it was my duty as a human
being," he says, recalling the revulsion he learned to overcome. "It
was obvious the government wasn't going to do it."
Decades
later, that hasn't changed. While the military accounts for a quarter
of the national budget, less than 3 percent is spent on education,
health, and public welfare. And so Edhi still tends to Pakistan's dirty
work, body by body. His one-man charity is now an acclaimed
international foundation. His single, beat-up old station wagon has
grown into a fleet of 1,380 little white ambulances positioned across
Pakistan, tended by thousands of volunteers. They are usually first to
arrive on the scene of any tragedy. In May 2002, when police found the
remains of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in
Karachi, it was Edhi who gently collected the body parts, all ten, and
took Daniel Pearl to the morgue.
Edhi was born in the Indian
town of Bantva, 250 miles (400 kilometers) from Mumbai. As a teenager,
he'd gone with his father to hear Jinnah, the tall, gaunt, visionary
founder of Pakistan, deliver a speech urging local Muslims to join him
in the new country. At first his father hesitated. But during
partition, when Hindu mobs began marauding nearby, the family joined
the more than 14 million people from both countries—Muslims, Hindus,
and Sikhs—who fled their homes and crossed to the other side of the
line. As many as a million people died in sectarian riots, massacres,
and killings along the way.
Edhi's
family came by ship, landing on September 6, 1947, three weeks after
Pakistan came into being, amid throngs of people shouting "Pakistan zindabad—long
live Pakistan!" Within an hour, as he walked the streets of his new
home, he saw a Hindu man murdered by a mob of young Muslim boys. "They
stabbed him over and over with a knife, and I'll never forget watching
him writhe in pain on the ground. All over Karachi, Hindus were packing
up and running away, exactly as we'd done in India. Just like that, our
joy turned to horror and shame. That's what I remember about
partition."
Edhi's adopted city of Karachi has grown from a
population of 450,000 in 1947 to a surging metropolis of more than 15
million people. It may be the most cosmopolitan of Pakistan's cities,
but it is among the most dangerous as well—a place where Pakistan's
widening gap between rich and poor is on full display. Karachi is a
sprawling universe of ramshackle neighborhoods that radiate north,
west, and east from the glitzy seaside hotels, office towers, and
diplomatic fortresses downtown, where car bombs are an occupational
hazard and personal security a billion-dollar-a-year business. Al Qaeda
and other terrorist groups are known to operate in the squalid "no go"
neighborhoods of Karachi, beyond the reach of police and perhaps even
Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's powerful military intelligence
agency.
In the middle of all this sits Edhi, a dignified man wearing a gray shalwar kameez
(Pakistan's national dress) and a furry black cap in the style Jinnah
wore—a fitting touch in a man who describes himself as a "super
patriot." In a neighborhood of litter-strewn streets, Edhi's
headquarters is a cluttered office that adjoins the two small rooms
where he lives with his wife, Bilquis, his partner in the foundation.
Edhi's operation relies on donations; he refuses to accept government
money or even a ride in someone else's car. He travels by ambulance, in
case someone needs help along the way. Outside Edhi's office, a metal
crib is stationed on the stairway beneath a sign reading, "Don't Kill
Your Baby." Every Edhi Foundation office in the country has such a
crib, where a mother can leave an unwanted baby, no questions asked.
Edhi's Karachi office alone receives 90 babies a month, half of them
alive.
Today a young nurse in a head scarf brings in a newborn
left in the crib overnight, a girl wrapped in a soft floral blanket,
perhaps four days old, her arms and legs shrunken and disfigured. The
nurse places her on Edhi's desk, like a gift. He picks up the infant
and gently strokes her malformed hands with his finger, whispering to
her in Gujarati, his native language, his long gray beard tickling her
nose. As this little girl grows, she'll be given medical care in one of
the foundation's clinics, sheltered in its orphanage, educated in one
of its schools, and sent forth into a carefully arranged marriage with
job skills and a dowry. Edhi has given away hundreds of brides at the
foundation's wedding facility, a cross between a Bollywood set and the
Elvis Suite at a Las Vegas hotel, with a bed in the shape of a heart. A
bulletin board in the lobby is filled with dozens of wedding pictures,
each happy bride a miracle child plucked from Edhi's rescue cradle.
Despite his
selfless deeds, Edhi is often attacked as "un-Islamic" by Pakistan's
hard-line mullahs, who cite his policy on infidels. He has none. Edhi
never asks whether an abandoned child, a psychiatric patient, a dead
person, or a battered woman is Sunni or Shiite, Hindu or Christian—or,
for that matter, Punjabi or Sindhi, Baluchi or Pashtun, Mohajir or
Kashmiri. "I'm a Muslim," says Edhi, "but my true religion is human
rights."
In modern Pakistan, that's an increasingly lonely
position. There are many thousands of dedicated doctors, lawyers,
teachers, social workers, and humanitarians—including some in
government—who, like Edhi, are working to move their country forward,
but the space in which they operate is shrinking. Recently, at
Musharraf's bidding, parliament passed a bill to restrict the
activities of NGOs and human rights groups. Even as he promotes
"enlightened moderation," Musharraf accuses such groups of humiliating
Pakistan by publicizing abuses, and declares them a threat to the
national interest.
Such rhetoric only emboldens the Islamists,
whose influence is growing across Pakistan. Edhi gets half a dozen
death threats a week, ranging from crank calls to serious warnings that
made him temporarily flee the country. Religious militants harass his
offices—a campaign orchestrated, Edhi believes, by Pakistan's Islamist
political parties, which compete with him for financial support. A few
years ago, a new Edhi Foundation hospital, which cost three million
dollars to build, was taken over by students from a radical madrassa
north of Karachi. Intimidated by the mullahs, the police refused to act
on Edhi's complaint, and his hospital is now a dormitory, with student
laundry—black turbans favored by the Taliban—flapping from the windows,
like flags over conquered territory.
HIGHWAYS IN PAKISTAN are
a kind of national theater, in which throngs of people, nearly all men,
hunker down on the roadside like spectators at a cockfight, keenly
observing all that passes with an air of amused expectation. Stop along
the roadway for a cup of tea, and you hear things. You hear people talk
about chronic injustice. They tell stories of people losing their land,
their lives, their honor, with no recourse. It is easy to think they
exaggerate. And then you meet someone else who changes your mind.
A
girl called Najma, who is 16, speaks in a cautious monotone, and it is
difficult to know, after what happened, whether she will ever speak
naturally again. She still wears the delicate ring in her nose that
signifies her virginity. On this day she also wears a pink head scarf
wrapped around her face, pretty and round with high cheekbones and
wide-set eyes, though now they are dull and without expression, like a
captive. She sits next to her mother on the bed where the incident
occurred and tries to talk without crying.
Two weeks
ago, at one in the morning, five men, maybe six, burst through the door
of the family's mud-brick home, which sits on a tiny plot of land in
the village of Nizampur in southern Punjab. They identified themselves
as police and said they were searching for weapons. One held a pistol
to her mother's chest while another pinned her nine-year-old brother,
Rizwan, to the floor. And then two men held Najma down on the bed while
a third raped her.
The leader masked his face with a scarf,
her mother says, but she recognized the raspy voice of their neighbor,
a police constable, who lives 200 yards (180 meters) away and wants the
plot of wheat that Najma's family moved here to farm as tenants 40
years ago. According to the complaint Najma's father filed with the
police, the attack resulted from his refusal to vacate the land. After
the rape, the men spent a few minutes ransacking the house. As they
left, they delivered a warning: Leave this place, or we'll be back for
your other daughter.
Rashid Rehman is a veteran human rights
lawyer who volunteered to represent Najma for the Human Rights
Commission of Pakistan. Rape is epidemic in parts of the country,
Rehman says, where it is used as a barbaric instrument of tribal
justice; a village might punish a husband's adultery, for example, by
gang-raping his wife. Najma's case is typical in southern Punjab, he
says, where the British rewarded their local allies with grants of land
and autonomy; after partition, these feudal landlords became a law unto
themselves. In their world, rape is a tool of intimidation wielded by
powerful, politically connected landowners to terrorize peasants, to
scare them off their land. If a family doesn't comply, Rehman says,
they are often killed. "Who's going to stop them?" he asks.
In
this case, he says, the family did everything right. They went to the
police the next morning and sought medical help for Najma. She was
examined by a doctor, who submitted a medical report confirming the
rape. But the local police, who are of the same clan as the constable,
refused to file charges. Incensed, Rehman appealed to officials in the
nearby town of Khanewal.
Najma shows great dignity for a
brutalized teenager. Today, as Rehman heads off to hear the outcome of
the appeal, she asks for one last word. "I don't know what my life will
be in the future," she tells him quietly, "but I'm ready to face my
attackers in public and demand justice for what they did." Of the
rapist, she says, "He must be hanged. He must."
At the police
station in Khanewal, Rehman meets first with the acting superintendent,
a stocky man in aviator glasses with a black baton in his hand and a
portrait of Jinnah hanging behind his desk. As Rehman briefs him, the
superintendent glances nervously at the six large men in plainclothes,
intelligence types, who sit against the far wall, sipping tea. The
superintendent takes a few notes, makes a phone call, hangs up. He
turns his baton over and over. Finally, the phone rings. Long
conversation. He hangs up and says that the forensic evidence in
Najma's case has been, unfortunately, misplaced. Rehman asks to see the
supervisor.
The
afternoon light fades from gold to gray as Rehman waits in another
empty office. The electricity is out—yet another rolling blackout.
Finally, the police inspector, a Mr. Khan, arrives and pulls up a
battered chair. Wearing a shalwar kameez the color of old mustard, Khan
is a rangy, loose-limbed speed-talker with a cigarette-scorched voice.
He has studied Najma's case in detail, he says, and he's sure what he's
about to say will please Rehman, since it will resolve the legal issues
once and for all. He pauses, as if waiting for a drumroll.
Najma
is lying, he announces, to protect her father from a previous charge of
having assaulted the police constable. (Her father is a small, defeated
man pushing 70, who can barely walk.) The medical evidence, Khan
continues, reveals Najma to be a "habitual fornicator," based on
certain measurements he is not at liberty to divulge. To conduct his
investigation, he says, he personally traveled to the village and
interviewed "60 or 90 people in the village mosque." All declared the
police constable incapable of committing such a crime. The case, he
says, is closed. It is dark by the time Rehman pulls away from the
police station, musing on what will happen to Najma's family. "If they
don't leave immediately, they will be in danger," he says. "The
constable could send men to rape the other sister, or to rape Najma
again. Or he might kill them all, to make an example of them or to
punish them for going to the police."
It was a similar
lawlessness that drove the people of Afghanistan into the arms of the
Taliban in the mid-1990s. The country was then in the midst of a civil
war and run by warlords, who grew rich on the opium trade, terrorized
the countryside, and seized the lands and daughters of any poor farmer
they chose. One day near Kandahar, a mullah and former mujahideen
commander named Mohammad Omar said enough was enough. With the Koran in
one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other, he rallied his students, or
taliban, and launched a new jihad: to cleanse Afghanistan of
lawlessness and corruption. Backed by Pakistan, the Taliban triumphed
in 1996, took Kabul, and imposed their own extreme vision of Islamic
law. Ordinary Afghans, at first, regarded the Taliban's dictates as a
small price to pay for an end to civil war.
Rashid Rehman
hears stories such as Najma's and fears what lies ahead for Pakistan.
In the car on his way back to his office in the Punjabi city of Multan,
he sits in the dark, looking out the window at the feeble lights of
passing villages. When he speaks, he is calm and clear. "When
government fails them, people get angry," he says. "They lose faith in
the system and look for alternatives. Think how easy it would be for
the Islamists—or Taliban or al Qaeda—to go to the brothers of this girl
now and say, 'What happened to your family is not justice. This man
dishonored your sister, he dishonored your father and your family name.
Join us and we will help you get justice. We will make him pay.' When
citizens are denied their basic human rights, they become radicalized.
When people are powerless, they are easily manipulated. This is what
worries me the most."
MY NEW
FRIENDS want to know why Americans think they are terrorists. It's a
good question, and an innocent one, judging by the young and open faces
of the dozen or so students sharing their evening meal with me. They
don't look like terrorists as they sit in a semicircle on green mats in
the courtyard of Jamia Uloom-ul-Quran, a small Deobandi madrassa
located in a historic downtown mosque in Peshawar. This provincial
capital served as headquarters for the Afghan resistance against the
Soviets, and jihad is still a going concern here. A block away from the
madrassa, at shops selling shoes and used clothes, I'd bought a 50-cent
al Qaeda DVD of a suicide bomber preparing for a mission. At the end of
the disc, over religious music, the bomber is shown in his car at a
distant crossroads, blowing up a convoy. "We know that shop," the
students say. "But we're not terrorists."
A few of the
students appear to be ten or younger, but most are in their late teens
or early 20s. They say their dream for Pakistan is "a peaceful nation,
in which justice prevails, in keeping with Islamic law." But they
believe, as many here do, that Islam is under attack. By America, by
the West, by India, by their own government. Under these circumstances,
they say, jihad is justified. What about suicide bombing? Is it
sanctioned by Islam? "You must think we have classes here in making
bombs or AK-47s!" exclaims one boy, and they all laugh.
"In
any Muslim land that's occupied, suicide bombing is allowed," says a
personable older boy named Rafiullah, who has bright brown eyes and the
beginnings of a beard. A few mention Iraq and Palestine as places where
such bombings are justified. Another boy mentions Afghanistan. "But
it's not allowed in Pakistan," Rafiullah says, "since we're not an
occupied country." ("Not yet!" somebody else interjects, to laughter.)
"Nobody has a right to blow you up, even if you're a non-Muslim, or an
infidel. If you are here as a guest, you are welcome." He reaches to
shake my hand, as if to reassure me.
The call for jihad is
rising across Pakistan, but it is here, in the northwest, that the
Islamists are taking control. Ever since 9/11, thousands of Taliban
fighters have found refuge among their fellow Pashtun tribesmen in
Peshawar, Quetta, and the mountainous tribal areas along the Afghan
border, especially North and South Waziristan. A year ago this month,
the government agreed to a cease-fire with the tribes and abandoned
most of North Waziristan to the militants. It's a sign of the local
Taliban's strength that the agreement was signed not by tribal elders
but by Taliban commanders.
Pakistan's turnabout on the
Taliban, which it had strongly supported since 1994, came shortly after
9/11. When Afghanistan's Taliban government, which had sheltered Osama
bin Laden, disintegrated under the firestorm meted out by the United
States and its coalition partners, President Musharraf confronted a
stark choice: Cooperate or suffer the consequences. He immediately
sided with the U.S. against the Taliban. It was not a popular decision.
Today, Pakistan is under pressure to contain the Taliban and al Qaeda
to the tribal areas along the Afghan border, although it's clear that
they're gaining in other parts of Pakistan. Many Deobandi madrassas are
believed to have an al Qaeda recruiter on the premises. But Muhammad
Hanif Jalandhry, who runs a madrassa in Multan, says the reputation of
Pakistan's madrassas as factories for terrorists is "propaganda. I tell
you, it's the oppressive system we live under that's bringing people to
these seminaries. People are seeking refuge and security—and dignity.
They are seeking a future."
About a third of the students at
the Deobandi madrassa in Peshawar, for instance, are poor kids from
far-flung regions of the North-West Frontier Province or the tribal
areas. They are like Mir Rahman, 16, a sweet-faced boy from a family of
poor herders in the Mohmand Tribal Area. The family lives miles from
the nearest public school, which is so badly run that few kids attend.
It's not unusual in Pakistan to hear of public schools that receive no
books, no supplies, and no subsidies from the government. Thousands
more are "ghost schools" that exist only on paper, to line the pockets
of phantom teachers and administrators. Faced with choosing between bad
public schools and expensive private ones, many poor parents send their
children to the madrassas, where they get a roof over their heads,
three meals a day, and a Koran-based education—for free.
Pervez
Hoodbhoy lives every day with the consequences of the lack of public
education in Pakistan. An MIT-trained professor of nuclear physics at
Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, he was speaking to a
graduate-level class in physics a few days after the huge earthquake
that devastated Kashmir in 2005, describing the geophysical forces that
produced the disaster. "When I finished, hands shot up all over the
room," he recalls. "'Professor, you are wrong,' my students said. 'That
earthquake was the wrath of God.' "
This, he says, is the
legacy of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose education ministry issued
guidelines on bringing an Islamic perspective to science and other
subjects in the public schools. "The Zia Generation has come of age,"
he says. "It isn't Islamic to teach that earthquakes are caused by the
movement of tectonic plates. Instead, you are supposed to say, by the
will of Allah, an earthquake happens." Today a government commission is
working to modernize education, but "it goes deeper than updating
textbooks," he says. "It's a matter of changing society."
A
few miles from Hoodbhoy's classroom, I come upon a crowd of children in
a vacant lot. It turns out to be another school—this one a free school
for hundreds of street children run by a fireman named Muhammad Ayub,
who founded the school 25 years ago because he felt sorry for the kids
running wild in the neighborhoods nearby, dropouts who seemed destined
for a jail cell, or a slab at Edhi's morgue. Ayub hands me his business
card. It bears the name of the school: Second Time Civil Defense
Educational Institution on Self Help Basis. "All my teachers are former
students," he says proudly, gesturing to two men and a young woman with
freckles, standing before the kids, who are laughing and carrying on.
"See the looks on their faces?" he says. "This is the future I want for
our country."
On a small hill nearby, a group of three or four
students from a nearby madrassa, stern young men in their early 20s,
are watching Ayub's class. Perhaps they are drawn to the laughing girl
with the freckles, who isn't wearing a veil, or perhaps it is something
more sinister. They are looking across the divide that runs down the
middle of Pakistan, and it's not clear what they are thinking.
August 29, 2007 at 06:45 PM in Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Middle East, Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 02, 2006
India: The Islamist Militant Threat During Rioting
Summary
Violent protests continued Nov. 30 across the Indian state of Maharashtra, home of India's financial hub, Mumbai. While Indian security forces are moving quickly to prevent the protests -- which are being led by thousands of low-caste Hindus -- from spreading, Islamist militants operating in the state could take advantage of the situation to stage an attack and provoke Hindu-Muslim riots while security forces are preoccupied.
Analysis
Violent Hindu riots erupted in the Indian state of Maharashtra late Nov. 29, as thousands of low-caste Hindus (known as Dalits) went on a rampage and burned more than 100 buses and cars, clashed with police and threw stones at vehicles in traffic. Five coaches of the Mumbai-Pune Deccan Queen train were torched by a mob of more than 6,000 Dalits at Ulhasnagar, in Thane district, about 35 miles from Mumbai, disrupting train service between Kalyan and Karaj. As the riots continued Nov. 30, Hindu mobs in Mumbai reportedly blocked roads and forced shops throughout the city to close. Three people have been reported dead and more than 60 injured thus far. More than 1,500 protesters in Ahmedabad have been arrested by police, who fired tear gas and beat back crowds with bamboo sticks. A curfew has been imposed in the town of Nanded, in the Marathwada region, Pimpri, Chinchwad, Negdi and Akurdi in Pune district and the town of Nandurbar. Schools and markets in Mumbai have been shut down and local police have asked the state government to declare a local holiday.
The riots are being led primarily by factions of the Republican Party of India, the main political platform in Maharashtra for low-caste Hindus, who are protesting the alleged Nov. 28 desecration of a statue of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar in Kanpur, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Ambedkar is a low-caste Hindu leader and the author of the Indian Constitution, which prohibits caste-based discrimination. The protests in Maharashtra could also spread to Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, where Ambedkar has a strong following. Security forces have been deployed throughout the state, but sources in the area say the situation is extremely tense.
These types of protests have been known to break out spontaneously in India, but Islamist militant groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), have been desperately trying to incite communal tensions in recent months by attacking both Hindus and Muslims, particularly in Maharashtra, where Hindu-Muslim strife runs deep. The July railway attacks in Mumbai and the September mosque bombings in Malegaon failed to produce the reaction that Kashmiri militant groups, such as LeT, Al Badr and Jaish-e-Mohammed, had anticipated. The objective of these groups is to provoke riots between Hindus and Muslims across India in order to enflame Muslim anger and revitalize the Kashmir cause.
There is a possibility these groups could take advantage of the current instability to stage an attack in order to further escalate the riots while security forces are preoccupied. Companies operating in Maharashtra should be aware of this threat and are urged to shut down their businesses until the demonstrations are brought under control.
December 2, 2006 at 01:40 AM in Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
November 18, 2006
I was an LeT member: Former military official
I was an LeT member: Former military official: South Asia : Hindustan Times.com
A former Pakistan military official who is now the Parliamentary Secretary of Defence startled the National Assembly on Wednesday by disclosing that he was an activist of the banned militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba.
"I want to inform the house that I have been a member of this (LeT) organisation," retired Major Tanvir Hussain Syed who later joined ruling pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Q said in the Assembly on Tuesday.
Hussain was taking part in the Assembly debate on the Pakistan army attack on a madrasa in Bajaur tribal area killing 80 persons and the subsequent suicide bomb attack on Pakistani troops in Dargai in which 42 soldiers were killed.
"The government wanted to resolve all disputes through dialogue, but if someone opens fire on the army, our jawans will reply," he was quoted as saying by Daily Times.
Hussain, however, did not explain what role he played in LeT whose leader, Hafeez Sayeed has started yet another outfit called Jamat-ud-Dawa, which was also kept under the watch list by Pakistan government.
Another newspaper, The Post, quoted him as saying that he was still a member of LeT even though it was banned. "I am still a member of the LeT. I go to its congregations and deliver speeches," he said.
He said he has no hesitation in "swimming against the tide" even though the government in which he is a part was trying to wash away the pro-jihad past from the memories of its people.
He added that he extends support to jihadi activists when they approach him, though he did not clarify the nature of support.
Press Trust of India
Islamabad, November 15, 2006|18:56 IST
November 18, 2006 at 08:10 PM in Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 08, 2006
British hire anti-Taliban mercenaries
British hire anti-Taliban mercenaries - Sunday Times - Times Online
Christina Lamb, Kabul
BRITISH forces holed up in isolated outposts of Helmand province in Afghanistan are to be withdrawn over the next two to three weeks and replaced by newly formed tribal police who will be recruited by paying a higher rate than the Taliban.
The move is the result of deals with war-weary locals and reverses the strategy of sending forces to establish “platoon houses” in the Taliban heartland where soldiers were left under siege and short of supplies because it was too dangerous for helicopters to fly in.
Troops in the four northern districts of Sangin, Musa Qala, Nawzad and Kajaki have engaged in the fiercest fighting since the Korean war, tying up more than half the mission’s available combat force. All 16 British soldiers killed in the conflict died in these areas.
“We were coming under as many as seven attacks a day,” said Captain Alex Mackenzie of the 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, who spent a month in Sangin. “We were firing like mad just to survive. It was deconstruction rather than reconstruction.”
Lieutenant-General David Richards, commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, has long been critical of tying up troops in static positions, while the British government has grown increasingly concerned that it was affecting public support for the mission.
Since taking command of the British forces at the end of July, Richards has been looking for a way to pull them out without making it look like a victory for the Taliban.
“I am confident that in two to three weeks the securing of the districts will be achieved through a different means,” he said. “Most of the British troops will then be able to be redeployed to tasks which will facilitate rapid and visible reconstruction and development, which we’ve got to do this winter to prove we can not only fight but also deliver what people need.”
The districts will be guarded by new auxiliary police made up of local militiamen. They will initially receive $70 (£37) a month, although it is hoped that this will rise to $120 to compete with the $5 per fighting day believed to be paid by the Taliban. “These are the same people who two weeks ago would have been vulnerable to be recruited as Taliban fighters,” said Richards.
“It’s employment they want and we need to make sure we pay more than the Taliban.”
The withdrawal of the British troops will coincide with the departure of 3 Para, whose six-month deployment is coming to an end. The battalion will be replaced by Royal Marines from 3 Commando Brigade who started arriving last week.
Locals in these districts are fed up with the fighting that has led to the destruction of many homes, bazaars and a school. A delegation of more than 20 elders from Musa Qala met President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday evening and demanded to be allowed to look after their own security. “The British troops brought nothing but fighting,” they complained. They pledged that if allowed to appoint their own police chief and district chief, they would keep out the Taliban.
The other crucial factor has been Nato’s success last month in inflicting the heaviest defeat on the Taliban since their regime fell five years ago. The two-week Operation Medusa in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province left between 1,100 and 1,500 Taliban dead, many of whom were believed to be committed fighters rather than guns for hire.
“Militarily it was against the odds — it was only because the Taliban were silly enough to take us on in strength when we had superior firepower and because of very, very brave fighting on the part of Americans, Canadians, British and Dutch, as well as the Afghan national army,” said Richards.
The Taliban, emboldened by their successes in Helmand, had changed their strategy from hit-and-run tactics to a frontal attack, apparently intending to try to take the key city of Kandahar. They had taken advantage of a change of command of foreign troops in the south from American to Canadian and eventually Nato to move large amounts of equipment and men into the Panjwayi district southwest of the city. The area was a stronghold of the mujaheddin during the Russian occupation and contains secret tunnels and grape-drying houses amid orchards and vineyards alongside the Argandab River.
After initial setbacks, including the crash of a British Nimrod aircraft in which 14 servicemen died and an incident in which an American A10 bomber strafed Canadian forces, killing one and wounding 35, Nato forces turned the situation around. Wave after wave of Taliban arriving on pick-ups to join the fight were mown down. More than 100 are believed to have been captured and reports from Quetta in neighbouring Pakistan suggest that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, has instructed his men to return to their old guerrilla tactics.
The number of daily “contacts” between troops and insurgents has since dropped from a high of 24 in September to just two, although the lull in fighting may be partly because of Ramadan, the fasting month.
Richards believes that the victory has won his forces a six-month window during which the international community must make visible changes for the people of southern Afghanistan or risk losing everything.
“Fighting alone is not the solution,” he warned. “We’ve got to win over the 70% of people in southern Afghanistan who are good peasant stock and basically want security and the means to feed their families. If it’s only fighting they see ahead of them for the next five years, chances are that they will say well, we’d rather have the Taliban and all that comes with it.
“The means to persuade them is not just to show we can win, as we have done, but also that it’s all worth it, which means pretty visible and ready improvements.”
He added: “The military can’t do much more — it’s up to the government and development agencies. At the moment somehow it isn’t happening and we’re beginning to lose time.”
The military is locked in a debate with the Department for International Development (DFID) which has £20m to spend in Helmand but feels that the situation is too insecure for development and believes the focus should be on long-term projects.
Asked last week what reconstruction it had carried out in Helmand so far, a DFID representative could cite only the rebuilding of market stalls in two districts. The official added that the department did not want to draw attention to any improvements because that might make them targets.
The military want the DFID to hand over some of its funds to enable them to carry out work. “We have to prove to the population today that tomorrow is worth waiting for,” said Richards.
He said that in Helmand’s main town of Lashkar Gah last month, only one young man in a group of 20 he met had a job. “If there aren’t any jobs and the Taliban come along and say we’ll offer you $5 a day for taking pot-shots at the Brits then they will,” he said.
“That’s where we should be spending our money — creating jobs. And it really isn’t good enough just doing the long-term stuff.”
Karzai will chair a meeting on reconstruction this week, including ministers and foreign donors, in the hope of kickstarting programmes such as road building and irrigation.
“We’ve got six months to prove to the 70% that it’s all worth it, that we can not only deliver security but the things they really want,” Richards said. “If we do, I think things will be much better and we will have turned the curve. If we don’t, then my prognosis is that next year will be even worse than this year.”
October 8, 2006 at 02:28 AM in Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The phoney war on terror
The phoney war on terror - Sunday Times - Times Online
hristina Lamb
So President Musharraf is military dictator turned tease, making us wait for his book launch in New York tomorrow for more details of the Bush administration’s crudely worded threat against Pakistan if it did not support the war on terror.
“Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,” was the graphic warning from deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, though admittedly it came one day after September 11. Armitage has disputed the wording but the fact that such a threat had to be made (followed by a nice little package of $5 billion of aid) raises the question of whose side Pakistan is really on.
Pakistan’s chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Lieutenant-General Ehsan-ul-Haq, was in London last week talking about how no other nation has suffered so much in the service of the war on terror.
His forces deployed in the badlands that border Afghanistan have lost more than 500 soldiers — “more than the whole of the coalition combined”. Musharraf himself has narrowly escaped three assassination attempts.
Pakistan’s military intelligence, the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), last month helped foil the alleged Heathrow plot to blow up transatlantic flights and the six most senior Al-Qaeda officials to be caught so far, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, were all arrested in Pakistan.
So far, so impressive. On the other hand, how come those Al-Qaeda leaders were living in Pakistan not in caves but in residential areas, even a military cantonment in Khalid’s case? American special forces searching for Osama Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are convinced the ISI tipped off al-Zawahiri on two occasions when they got near.
Why do most would-be suicide bombers regard Pakistan as a finishing school? And while military planners in Washington focus on Tehran’s nuclear programme, remember where the Iranians acquired their uranium enrichment capability.
No country has done more for nuclear proliferation to rogue states than Pakistan through Abdul Qadeer Khan, the godfather of its own bomb. Khan was even using army planes to transport the parts.
In 2003 I spent a week with American troops from the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan at a godforsaken firebase called Shkin on the border with Pakistan. Every day fighters would come and take potshots at the Americans then run back across the invisible border. The soldiers could do nothing because Pakistan refused to allow hot pursuit.
For those of us who have followed Pakistan for some time, it’s a familiar story. Remember General Zia ul-Haq, the short military dictator with the big teeth who seized power in 1977? He, like Musharraf, spent two years as an international pariah. When the Soviet army crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan in 1979, he suddenly became the West’s most crucial ally.
Because US support to the Afghans was a covert operation, it was channelled through the ISI. But what the West ignored then, and again after 9/11, was that the ISI had its own agenda. Under Zia the army had been Islamicised and the ISI made sure most aid and arms went to its favourite fundamentalist warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, even though he openly preached anti-Americanism.
It was the ISI’s idea in the mid-1980s to ship in young Arabs, including Mr Bin Laden, and train them to fight. When the Russians left, and the West overnight abandoned Afghanistan (and slashed aid to Pakistan), the ISI supported the creation of the Taliban.
After 9/11, Musharraf had little option but to join the war on terror. Even if the Pakistani leader was genuinely committed, the ISI saw no reason to stop supporting those same Afghans they had been helping for more than two decades.
Besides, these training camps had become useful for providing militants to fight in Indian-held Kashmir, Pakistan’s single most important policy objective. So whenever Musharraf has come under pressure from Washington, he has banned jihadi groups and watched them reform under new names. Or he has agreed to regulate madrasahs, the Islamist schools, then done nothing.
In almost five years since the fall of the Taliban in Kabul, not a single Taliban leader or commander has been arrested in Pakistan. Yet they operate openly from there, particularly around the town of Quetta, long known as Taliban Central.
“Is Pakistan playing a malevolent role by supplying training?” asked a diplomat involved in drawing up our Afghan policy. “Well, we haven’t found a smoking gun. It seems Musharraf is guilty of the sin of omission.” He pointed out that with 2.5m Afghan refugees still in camps in Pakistan, there is a plentiful source of fighters, and with 650 crossing points, the border is impossible to monitor.
Whether Islamabad is simply turning a blind eye to training and recruitment inside its own borders or actively involved, the West’s failure to see Pakistan as the real battleground of the war on terror is undoubtedly one of the reasons the Taliban have re-emerged as such a threat.
For obvious reasons, most leaders wait till they are no longer in office to release their memoirs. Musharraf’s choice of title is intriguing. In the Line of Fire was a Hollywood movie starring Clint Eastwood as a veteran secret service agent haunted by his failure many years earlier to save President John F Kennedy from assassination.
Is the general trying to tell us something?
October 8, 2006 at 01:43 AM in Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
September 30, 2006
Pakistan 'role in Mumbai attacks'
BBC NEWS | South Asia | Pakistan 'role in Mumbai attacks'
Pakistan's intelligence agency was behind the train blasts in Mumbai in July that killed 186 people, Indian police say.
The attacks were planned by the ISI and carried out by the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, based in Pakistan, Mumbai's police chief said.
AN Roy said the Students' Islamic Movement of India had also assisted.
Pakistan rejected the allegations and said India had given no evidence of Pakistani involvement in the attacks.
"We have solved the 11 July bombings case. The whole attack was planned by Pakistan's ISI and carried out by Lashkar-e-Toiba and their operatives in India," Mumbai (Bombay) police commissioner AN Roy told a news conference.
'Baseless'
Tariq Azim Khan, Pakistan's minister of state for information, rejected the allegations.
"We are still studying the Indian statement. Needless to say, this is once again baseless allegations - yet another attempt by India to malign Pakistan," he told the BBC.
"Both the president and the prime minister condemned this terrorist attack on the train when it happened. But India also must look at home for reasons for this growing insurgency at home," he said.
Forensic investigator at scene of one of the Mumbai train blasts
The Mumbai police chief said the 11 July case was "solved"
On 11 July 2006, seven co-ordinated blasts within 15 minutes ripped through trains on Mumbai's busy commuter network.
Mr Roy said 15 people had been arrested, and that some of the bombers had received training in Pakistan.
He said the bombs were made using a total of 15-20kg of an explosive called RDX, which was smuggled into the country and packed into seven pressure cookers.
Timers were attached to the bombs, which were put into bags and concealed using newspapers and umbrellas, he said.
He said 11 Pakistanis were involved in the operation, and had crossed into India in small groups from Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.
Seven teams, each made up of one Indian and one Pakistani militant, transported the bombs by taxi before placing them on the trains, Mr Roy said.
Peace talks
Indian security officials suggested early on in their investigations that the bombings bore the hallmarks of Lashkar-e-Toiba, a leading militant group fighting in Kashmir and based in Pakistan.
But Pakistan denied any involvement in the blasts and Lashkar-e-Toiba condemned the attacks.
India postponed talks with Pakistan after the bombings, but Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf met recently in Cuba and said they had agreed to resume talks.
The two nations, both nuclear armed, have fought three wars since independence, two over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
September 30, 2006 at 01:08 PM in Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
August 16, 2006
Worldwide Terror Organisations
Worldwide Terror Organisations
Group
Center of Gravity
Status
Al-Qaeda
Pakistan
Active
Hezbollah
Lebanon
Active
Militant Sunni Islamic Groups
Al-Qaeda in Iraq
Iraq
Active
Mujahideen Shura Council
Iraq
Active
Ansar al-Sunna
Iraq
Active
Jemaah Islamiya
Indonesia
Active
Taliban
Afghanistan
Active
Hizb-I Islami Gulbuddin
Afghanistan
Active
Abu Sayyaf
Philippines
Active
Al Gamaa al-Islamiyaa
Egypt
Reconciliating?
Egyptian Islamic Jihad
Egypt
Merged with al-Qaeda
Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat
Algeria
Active
Al-Badhr Mujahedin
Pakistan
Active
Harakat ul-Jihad-I-Islami
Kashmir
Active
Harakat ul-Mujahedin
Kashmir
Active
Hizbul-Mujahedin
Kashmir
Active
Jaish-e-Mohammed
Kashmir
Active
Jamiat ul-Mujahedin
Kashmir
Active
Jammat ul-Furqan
Kashmir
Active
Lashkar e-Tayyiba
Kashmir
Active
Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade
Chechnya
Active
Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance
and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs
Chechnya
Active
Special Purpose Islamic Regiment
Chechnya
Active
Al-Ittihad al-Islami
Somalia
Armed Islamic Group
Algeria
Defunct?
Asbat al-Ansar
Lebanon
Active
East Turkistan Islamic Movement
China
Active
Jamaatul-Mujahedin Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Active
Harakat-ul-Jihad-I-Islami Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Active
Hezba Nahda
Tajikistan
Islamic Army of Aden
Yemen
Active
Yemen Jannubi Group
Yemen
Islamic Jihad Group of Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan
Active
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan
Active
Jamaat e Jihad Eritrea
Eritrea
Kumpulan Mujahedin Malaysia
Malaysia
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
Libya
Active
Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group
Morocco
Active
People Against Gangsterism and Drugs
South Africa
Sipah-I-Sahaba Pakistan
Pakistan
Active
Tunisian Combatant Group
Tunisia
Active
Al-Qaeda Organizations
Al-Qaeda Fatwah Committee
Afghanistan
Al-Qaeda Finance Committee
Pakistan
Al-Qaeda majlis al shura
Afghanistan
Al-Qaeda Military Committee
Afghanistan
Al-Qaeda Travel Subcommittee
Sudan
Al Hijra
Sudan
Defunct
al Themar al Mubaraka
Sudan
Defunct
Jamat Nasiyah Dawa
United Kingdom
Khartoum Tannery
Sudan
Defunct
Ladin International
Sudan
Defunct
Qudarat Transport Company
Sudan
Defunct
Sajana Tower Fruit and Vegetable Company
Sudan
Defunct
Taba Investments
Sudan
Defunct
Wadi al Aqiq
Sudan
Defunct
Operational Cells
UK-US airline bomb plotters
United Kingdom
Captured?
9-11 plotters
United States
Dead or Captured
Hamburg Cell
Germany
Dead, captured or at-large
Bojinka Cell
Philippines
Captured
Palestinian Groups
Hamas
Palestine
Active
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade
Palestine
Active
Palestine Islamic Jihad
Syria
Active
Palestine Liberation Front
Lebanon
Active
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Palestine
Active
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
-General Command
Syria
Active
Other Groups
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)
Colombia
Active
Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia Group (AUC)
Colombia
Reconciliating
Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN)
Colombia
Reconciliating?
Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path)
Peru
Active
Page maintained by John Lumpkin
August 16, 2006 at 12:00 AM in Al Qaeda, Current Terrorism, Espionage - general, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
August 14, 2006
Pakistani Charity Under Scrutiny in Plot
Pakistani Charity Under Scrutiny in Plot - New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS and SOUAD MEKHENNET
Published: August 14, 2006
LONDON, Aug. 13 — British and Pakistani investigators are trying to determine whether the group of Britons suspected of plotting to blow up as many as 10 commercial airliners may have received money raised for earthquake relief by a Pakistani charity that is a front for an Islamic militant group.
The charity, Jamaat ud Dawa, which is active in the mosques of Britain’s largest cities, played a significant role in carrying out relief efforts after last October’s earthquake in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.
It is one of the most militant of the groups battling the part of Kashmir controlled by India. In May, it was labeled a terrorist organization by the United States government.
British and Pakistani investigators are looking into the possibility that the group, whose name means the Association of the Call to Righteousness, passed the earthquake donations raised in British mosques to the plotters, according to two people familiar with the investigation.
One former Pakistani official close to the intelligence officials there said Jamaat ud Dawa provided the money that was to be used to buy plane tickets for the suspects to conduct a practice run as well as the attacks themselves. The money is believed to have come directly from the group’s network in Britain and was not sent from Pakistan, the former official said.
“The Pakistanis have been asked by the British to examine the links between Jamaat ud Dawa and the suspects in the airplane attack,” the former Pakistani official said.
According to a former British security official familiar with the investigation, some of the money raised in British mosques also went to the group’s militant activities in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Both the former Pakistani official and the former British official spoke only on the condition of anonymity.
On Wednesday, Pakistani officials detained Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the head of the organization.
On Sunday, a senior American law enforcement official said that the British police and intelligence officials had identified several suspected accomplices of the plotters who were believed to have provided support to the plot outside Britain. The new suspects were identified by checking the arrested men’s computers, the official said.
After the earthquake, which killed some 73,000 people, Jamaat ud Dawa raised funds in British Pakistani areas in London, Birmingham and Manchester. The group also urged British people of Pakistani origin to go to the region to help in the relief efforts, and hundreds did.
Several of the 23 suspects still in custody after the arrests by British police on Thursday — most of them Britons of Pakistani descent — traveled to Pakistan last year, ostensibly to help with earthquake relief efforts, said Nasir Ahmed, a leader among Britain’s Pakistanis and a member of the House of Lords.
Mr. Ahmed said he was not sure how many of the suspects rounded up last week had gone to Kashmir to help, but among those who had gone were the suspects arrested in High Wycombe, west of London. The former Pakistani official said several of the suspects had gone to Pakistan at the time of the earthquake.
The official declined to say whether the suspects were believed to have been organizers or people who had provided support, like passports and safe houses.
Mr. Ahmed said it was possible that those who went came into contact with the militant Islamic organizations that were doing the relief work on the Pakistani-controlled side of Kashmir, where most of the casualties were. Indeed, at the time, Jamaat ud Dawa was welcomed by people in the area for stepping in where the Pakistani government had failed. The group was praised as one of the few providing aid efficiently, while Muslims around the world complained that Pakistanis had been abandoned.
“In the first few days, it was only religious organizations, the militant organizations, that were prepared to dig out people and provide relief supplies,” Mr. Ahmed said. “It is possible that young people, many people, who have gone from U.K., may have fallen into hands of organizations like Jamaat Ud Dawa.”
As both a militant group and a social welfare organization, Jamaat ud Dawa resembles its brethren in other parts of the Muslim world, like Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States government shut down many Muslim charities that it said were financing militant activities.
No one from Jamaat ud Dawa could be located Sunday in Britain. Its Web site says the organization has provided food to some 54,000 families who were struck by the earthquake. It also claims to be “one of the most feared militant groups fighting in Kashmir.” The Web site displays a photograph of Mr. Saeed leading a demonstration protesting the United States government’s designation of his group as a terrorist organization.
The details of the suspected plot to blow up the airliners began to emerge Thursday, when the police in Britain detained 24 people. The authorities said the suspects, most of them British-born young men of Pakistani descent, intended to smuggle liquid-based explosives onto 9 or 10 commercial airliners headed for the United States and detonate them as they approached. British officials said the plot, had it been successful, could have killed thousands.
The day before, on Wednesday, the police in Pakistan had arrested a British-born man they said was linked to Al Qaeda. They say they have at least one other British man in custody and are looking for at least one other suspect.
American and Pakistani officials have long believed that Jamaat ud Dawa is the successor organization to Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was banned in 2002 by the Pakistani government, under American pressure, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
It has called for holy war against the United States, India and Israel. Although it has avoided direct association with Al Qaeda, links between the groups have often surfaced. Abu Zubaida, the senior Qaeda member captured by Pakistani forces in the city Faisalabad in 2002, was found hiding in a safe house for Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Don Van Natta contributed reporting from New Jersey for this article.
August 14, 2006 at 03:46 PM in Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Former LT chief placed under house arrest
Alternative & Independent Source of Indian Subcontinent News
LAHORE, Aug. 14, 2006: Authorities have placed under house arrest the former head of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) which Indian police suspect had a role in the Mumbai train bombings, officials said on Thursday.
Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, was being held in Lahore for a one-month period, a Punjab home department official said. "Hafiz Saeed has been detained to maintain law and order," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Saeed abandoned Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2001 - a day before it was banned by President Pervez Musharraf - and set up a charity called Jamaat-ud-Dawa and regarded as its political wing. Jamaat-ud-Dawa spokesman Yahya Mujahid said the detention order was served by a provincial official late on Wednesday, ahead of a public meeting Dawa had planned to mark Independence Day.
The authorities have also withdrawn permission granted earlier to stage the rally on Saturday in Lahore, Mujahid said. Police have been posted outside Saeed's house in Johar Town and the building has been declared a "sub-jail" which he is forbidden from leaving, Mujahid said. "We will challenge the detention orders in a court of law if they are not withdrawn," he said.
August 14, 2006 at 03:44 PM in Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The usual suspects (Lashkar-e-Taiba) & (Jamaat-ud-Dawa)
The Mumbai bombing | The usual suspects | Economist.com
Jul 27th 2006 | DELHI
From The Economist print edition
India debates how to punish Pakistan for the slaughter
MANY in India were swift to blame the co-ordinated bombing of Mumbai's commuter railway on July 11th on Pakistan. The police say their investigation into the onslaught—in which 179 people were killed and more than 500 injured—has indeed uncovered evidence of indirect Pakistani involvement. There has been much discussion about how to make Pakistan “pay” for this. But whatever the price demanded of Pakistan, it might prove too costly for India.
In the two weeks after the bombing, the police detained several hundred people for questioning and formally arrested six of them. All, they say, were linked with a group called the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which was banned in 2001. The police are now claiming a “breakthrough” in one arrest, of Tanvir Ahmed Ansari, a Mumbai-based practitioner of traditional medicine. They say that he had been recruited by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based group fighting India's rule of part of the divided territory of Kashmir. The group is blamed for many acts of terrorism in India. Last year, Mr Ansari is said to have slipped illegally into Pakistan through Iran, and spent six weeks at a Lashkar training camp near Muzaffarabad, in the Pakistani part of Kashmir.
After such an atrocity, the police are naturally enough under huge pressure to show results. So such details, emerging in off-the-record briefings, may well be embroidered. But the substance of the allegation is widely accepted in India. The bottom line, as the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has said, is that “terrorist modules are instigated, inspired and supported by elements across the border.”
This is not, however, the same as accusing Pakistan's government of directly ordering the bombing, which has hardly served its interests. But most senior Indian officials believe that, because of perceived political advantages at home, Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, has deliberately chosen not to suppress terrorist groups. Lashkar itself is, in theory, banned in Pakistan, but has reappeared under the name Jamaat-ud-Dawa.
India's anger with Pakistan, however, is hard to vent in more than symbolic gestures. It has postponed talks, due this month, between the two countries' senior diplomats to review the progress of a “composite dialogue” on a range of issues, including Kashmir, that started in 2004 in order to build confidence and lead to peace. It has demanded, again, that Pakistan ban Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and hand over Dawood Ibrahim, a Mumbai gangster with terrorist links, and Syed Salahuddin, who heads another militant group, Hizb-ul Mujahideen. Pakistan denies harbouring the former and says the latter is a legitimate politician. It shrugs off charges of involvement in the bombing and chides India for playing “the blame game”.
This leaves India's government punching at shadows. Some members of the press and the political opposition call for revenge—as they did after an attack on India's parliament in December 2001, which brought the two countries close to war. But the government does not want to throw away the progress made in the three-year peace process with Pakistan. It probably feels it has little choice but to revive it—perhaps as early as next week, when both countries' top diplomats will attend a regional meeting in Bangladesh.
Each outrage, however, makes it harder for India to make concessions on the central dispute, over Kashmir, since that might appear to be bowing to terrorism. Each also reduces whatever faith India still has in General Musharraf as a worthwhile negotiating partner.
August 14, 2006 at 03:22 PM in Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
August 13, 2006
A war with three fronts
PRAVEEN SWAMI
in Srinagar
Violence continues to decline in Kashmir, but Islamists launch new military, ideological and political wars.
The handout picture of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's northern Kashmir commander Salahudin alias Bilal alias Haider, issued by the Jammu and Kashmir Police.
LATE in June, the Lashkar-e-Taiba's top commander for northern Kashmir emerged from the forests above the small mountain hamlet of Sumlar and ordered its residents to gather in the local mosque.
"I don't want to see young girls and boys roaming around with mobile phones," said the imposing 6-foot 6-inch Pakistani national, who is known only by the multiple aliases `Bilal', `Salahuddin' and `Haider', "for it will lead to immorality and vice". Three terrified teenage girls who were found to be in possession of the offending instruments were dragged into the centre of the mosque and tonsured in full public view.
What happened in Sumlar seems a world away from Srinagar, a city in the midst of a tourism-driven economic boom, its landscape peppered with the kinds of icons of modernity Bilal was so incensed with. Yet, Srinagar has also been the centre of the most aggressive Islamist mobilisation in years, driven by claims that the uncovering of a prostitution racket which has led to the arrest of top politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and police officials has revealed the true character of the Indian nation-state.
Similar actions are not hard to come by. June saw Srinagar host a highly successful festival of Sufi music from India and Pakistan while Lashkar terrorists attacked one of the revered mystics in the town of Sopore, just a three-hour drive from the State capital. And not weeks after the politicians focussed their energies on shaping a new constitutional future for the State, the Lashkar carried out horrific massacres of both Muslim and Hindu villagers across the State.
Even as the peace process proceeds apace, it would seem, Islamist forces have renewed their fighting on three fronts: military, religious-ideological and political.
The military war
Notwithstanding some ill-informed claims on the issue, levels of violence in the State this summer are actually somewhat lower than last year, in line with the trend since 2001.
However, two significant variations are evident. Grenade attacks have almost doubled in comparison with the figures for April-June 2005. Killings of police personnel too have increased, in stark contrast to declining fatalities of terrorists, civilians and all other security forces.
What sense might one make of these figures? Some insight is offered by an intelligence-led police operation targeting the Lashkar cell that carried out the May 21 suicide-squad attack on a Congress rally in Srinagar on the eve of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's round table conference on Jammu and Kashmir. Five people were killed in the attack, which targeted Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, and 21 people, including Inspector-General of Police K. Rajendra, were seriously injured.
Much of the cell's energies, though, were focussed on operations of lower intensity. Directed by Bilal's key lieutenant, Mudasir Gojri, a north Kashmir resident, the cell executed eight separate grenade attacks - seven of which took place simultaneously on April 14 - as well as a series of shootouts and assassinations. Notably, the cell's operatives assassinated two policemen on May 11, and murdered Mohammad Riyaz, a Sopore resident whom the Lashkar had earlier attempted to kill for the crime of gambling.
Each of these were militarily low-grade attacks - directed at tourists, bystanders, or supposed religious offenders making effective use of limited resources to broadcast the Lashkar's power to its civil society audience. Indeed, the Lashkar has been increasingly using grenades, rather than the more personnel-intensive tactic of suicide-squad attacks. Significantly, a Lashkar arms shipment interdicted by troops along the Line of Control (LoC) on June 20 included a staggering 338 hand grenades, which probably were meant for urban use.
While large attacks do take place still, terror groups such as the Lashkar appear to be conserving their resources in well-established bases such as the Bandipora mountains of north Kashmir. Ever since 1999-2000, the Lashkar started developing fortified hideouts in the Patwan and Chatarnar forests, which served as receiving stations for terrorists who crossed the LoC. Protected by an elaborate system of lookouts, Lashkar operatives proceeded to establish weapon caches and communications centres.
Most important of all, the Bandipora base served as a centre from which operatives and explosives could be despatched for high-profile operations, such as the 2004 attack on the Prime Minister, the New Delhi serial bombings last Diwali, the assassination of State Minister Ghulam Nabi Lone - and, of course, the operation targeting the Chief Minister. While local Lashkar cadre facilitated the operation of the Bandipora-based strike squads, they did not involve themselves directly in executing the attack.
As such, the Lashkar has been able to conserve key cadre for major operations, expending only low-grade operatives for its low-grade urban terror campaign. Bilal Ahmad Mir, charged with having carried out a June 11 grenade attack in Jammu, was a school dropout who agreed to work for money. Shabbir Ahmad Mir, another Srinagar cell member alleged to have bombed a bus carrying tourists in Srinagar, also told interrogators that he agreed to join the Lashkar in return for hard cash.
Clearly, the arrest of such operatives does little to dent the Lashkar's operational abilities. Sources told Frontline that, at a June 20 briefing organised for United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the Northern Army Commander, Lieutenant-General Deepak Kapoor, argued that the core problem was the lack of will among the 31,000 men of the Jammu and Kashmir Police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) who have been committed to the State capital.
DANISH ISMAIL/REUTERS
The funeral procession of a civilian and suspected militants, who were killed in Bandipora.
At a subsequent meeting with National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan though, police and intelligence personnel hit back. Officials argued that it was impossible to secure Srinagar unless the Lashkar's mountain bases were destroyed. Local operatives working for the Lashkar had repeatedly been arrested since 2002, Narayanan was told, but their commanders in Bandipora continued to operate with relative impunity because of the Army's unwillingness to flush terrorists out of the forests.
Targeting the Lashkar's north Kashmir fortress - or similar strongholds such as the Yaripora-Shopian mountain in southern Kashmir and the Harwan forests in central Kashmir - is not, however, a simple project. Since at least 2000-01, military strategists have considered the prospect of a pincer action against the Bandipora forests, involving simultaneously pushing troops south from the Bod Kol river near Gurez and north through Patwan and Chatarnar.
However, such action has been deterred by the twin prospects that the estimated 50-75 Pakistani terrorists hidden in the Bandipora forests might evade a large military operation - or, in the alternate, that an offensive push against well-defended positions could result in casualties not commensurate with the potential dividends. An offensive of this scale and the task of ensuring that the forests remain free of terrorists could require an additional Army division, a politically contentious move in the midst of a peace process.
Just what solutions will be found are impossible to predict but solutions are needed if the peace process in the State is not to remain mired in an impasse. Continued killings have worked to undermine the legitimacy of the peace process among audiences in and outside of Jammu and Kashmir. Meanwhile, renewed summer infiltration across the LoC have put paid to hopes that cross-border terrorism would gradually wither away. What some mistook as the end of the storm, it seems likely, was just a lull.
Islamists are also attempting to hammer in the keystone of their project in Jammu and Kashmir: the destruction of indigenous religious identities that challenge their vision of the future. Late in June, the Lashkar-e-Taiba attempted to assassinate the venerated mystic Ahad Ba'b Sopore, one of the best-known custodians of the State's Sufi traditions. While Ahad Ba'b survived the attack unhurt, two members of his congregation were killed and nine injured in the attack.
Eyewitnesses have identified the terrorist who executed the grenade attack as Qayoom Nassar, a well-known Lashkar operative hailing from Sopore's Batpora area. Nassar joined the Lashkar five years ago, when he was just 16 years old, after having dropped out of school after Standard VIII. Interestingly, Nassar's recent actions include the murder of two Sopore residents in May for having engaged in gambling, an activity the Lashkar and other terror groups have repeatedly condemned as anti-Islamic.
Ustad Gh. Mohammad Saaznawaz along with his team performs at the inauguration of a five-day India-Pakistan Sufi music festival in Srinagar on June 11.
Islamists in Sopore and other parts of northern Kashmir have long opposed the influence of Ahad Ba'b, who left his job as policeman and became a mystic after undergoing what he describes as a spiritual experience three decades ago. He then renounced key trappings of the material world, notably clothing. Over time, Ahad Ba'b came to wield enormous religious and temporal power in Kashmir, drawing support from peasants and political leaders - something that incensed the clerical establishment.
As early as 1991, the Hizbul Mujahideen carried out a near-successful assassination attempt on the mystic. However, he escaped unhurt on that occasion as well. In Sopore mythology, the Hizbul Mujahideen was forced to beg forgiveness of the mystic, since as many of its cadre began to die as the grain he fed birds each morning. Ahad Ba'b is also credited by his followers with performing several other miracles in which Islamists who sought to discredit him came off second-best.
At the core of the conflict are ideological disputes between folk religion and Islamist groups that believe that practices such as the veneration of holy relics, or belief in intercession between humans and God through mystics are heretical. Both the Jamaat-e-Islami, from which the Hizbul Mujahideen emerged, and the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadith, the Lashkar's patron, have long believed, as the scholar Mohammad Ishaq Khan has noted, that "Kashmiri Muslims need to be converted afresh".
After 1989, this ideological battle turned violent. Terrorist groups began targeting Sufi shrines, which they assert are antithetical to Islam. As early as June 1994, for example, Lashkar terrorists stormed the historic Baba Reshi shrine at Tangmarg, and fired on pilgrims. Perhaps the most prominent incident in the Islamist campaign was the siege at Chrar-e-Sharif in May 1996, which led to the destruction of the town's famous 700-year-old shrine.
Unnoticed, such attacks continued over the years: a grenade attack in June 2001, for example, killed four women at Chrar-e-Sharif. Earlier, in 2000, Lashkar terrorists destroyed the sacramental tapestries Bafliaz residents had offered at the shrine of Sayyed Noor. Lashkar cadre were also responsible for a May 2005 arson attack that led to the destruction of the shrine of the saint Zainuddin Wali at Ashmuqam. In June 2005, Lashkar operative Bilal Magray threw a grenade at a congregation in Bijbehara, injuring 15 people.
The political war
Barring Hizbul Mujahideen prisoners at Jammu's Kot Bhalwal jail, who attacked their Lashkar counterparts after the attack on Ahad Ba'b, political forces in the State confined their response to the bombing to verbal condemnation: there was not one organised street protest, a sign of the willingness of secular formations to cede ground, as well as authorship of its political future, to Islamist organisations and their terrorist armies in Jammu and Kashmir.
On June 16, a seven-member Lashkar squad targeted the village of Nehoch-Dunga, in the Gulabgarh area of the district of Udhampur, to punish villagers it believed had helped security forces eliminate terrorists in the area. The terrorists beheaded 65-year-old Abdul Ahad in the presence of the entire village, and then cut off the noses and ears of Roshan Din and Ghulam Rasool. Six other villagers, including Abdul Ahad's elderly wife Fatima Bi, received a brutal beating.
National politicians, who had competed to express their outrage after the killings of 13 Hindus in the same area in April, remained silent on the hideous violence in Nehoch-Dunga, as did civil rights groups and secessionist politicians such as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. The Chief Minister, who, like all politicians of State-level significance, chose not to attend the last rites of the nine Nepali labourers killed by terrorists at Kulgam in June, displayed a similar unwillingness to travel to Nehoch-Dunga.
Silence on the prostitution scandal too has helped the Islamist campaign proceed unchecked. Precipitated by charges that a teenage girl had been coerced into prostitution, the case has since expanded to include clients of adult sex-workers employed by a Srinagar brothel-owner. Those arrested in the course of the ongoing investigation include former Ministers G.A. Mir and Raman Mattoo, Border Security Force officer K.C. Padhi, former Additional Advocate-General Anil Sethi and top bureaucrat Iqbal Khanday.
While all of this ought to be evidence that the democratic system does deliver - the investigation, after all, has been carried out by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and is supervised by the Jammu and Kashmir High Court - the failure of mainstream parties to mobilise in support of the victim has allowed Islamist groups to market themselves as the sole spokespersons of an ethical political order. Notably, no organisation has intervened to seek psychiatric help and legal counselling for the victim herself.
Astoundingly, the Kashmir Bar Association, whose Islamist-affiliated leader Abdul Qayoom has spearheaded judicial intervention in the scandal, even passing a resolution prohibiting its members from defending those arrested on scandal-linked charges. One lawyer who defied the ban, Maulvi Aijaz, was assaulted by cadre of the Islamist women's group, the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, while Jammu-based counsel for the accused were threatened with assassination, sparking off a strike in the State's winter capital.
If something is to be salvaged from the five-year-old dialogue process in Jammu and Kashmir, democratic forces need to find a voice - and soon. As things stand, the constitutional consultative processes that emerged from the round table conference last month already seem faintly absurd, severed by political apathy from the violence and pain of peoples' lives in Jammu and Kashmir. No process, after all, can deliver peace unless its participants commit themselves to political action.
August 13, 2006 at 01:47 PM in Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
August 12, 2006
Pakistan once again terrorism central
Pakistan once again terrorism central
Peter Goodspeed, National Post
Published: Saturday, August 12, 2006
Once again, the road to terror runs through Pakistan. Despite Islamabad's claims to have played a crucial role helping Britain uncover a plan to blow up airliners flying to the United States, Pakistan remains a breeding ground for terror and is the most likely hiding place for Osama bin Laden.
Terror groups operating out of Pakistan may already have taken over al-Qaeda's functions in a global terror network. Operating virtually unmolested under dozens of different identities, they are recruiting, radicalizing and training young militants for future attacks on Western targets.
As details of a plot to blow up as many as 10 U.S.-bound airliners surface, it not only highlights Pakistan's role as an active partner in the war on terror, it underlines the fact that Pakistan remains a global centre for terrorism linked to al-Qaeda.
Yesterday, senior government officials in Pakistan proudly announced it was their own counterterrorism work that triggered a global terror alert and Britain's moves to arrest 24 alleged plotters who intended to stage the largest terrorist attack since 9/11.
Pakistani officials say they arrested two British nationals of Pakistani origin last week who provided information on the latest plot. The men were detained in Lahore and Karachi.
Yesterday Pakistani officials identified a "key suspect" in the case as Rashid Rauf, a British citizen whom they described as "an al-Qaeda operative with linkages in Afghanistan." It's believed Mr. Rauf may be the brother of Tayib Rauf, arrested in Birmingham on Thursday as part of the airline bomb plot.
"We arrested him from the border area and on his disclosure we shared the information with U.K. authorities, which led to further arrests in Britain," Pakistan's Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao said.Pakistan is believed to have arrested 10 others in the airline bomb plot whom it has identified as local "facilitators" who met with or assisted the foreign terror suspects.
Yesterday, ABC News in the United States reported U.S. counter-terrorism officials think the ringleader of the airliner plot may be Matiur Rehman, a 29-year-old al-Qaeda commander who once tried to assassinate Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf.
The Guardian newspaper in Britain also reported investigators there rushed to arrest airliner bomb suspects after being tipped off by Pakistan that it had intercepted and decoded a message sent to the British plotters telling them to "Do your attacks now."
The go-ahead message was issued immediately after the arrest of the two British suspects in Pakistan.
Other British news reports say Pakistani officials tipped their Western counterparts to the fact substantial sums of money were wired from Pakistan to two alleged bomb plot ringleaders in Britain to help them buy airline tickets.
As details of the plot trickle out, it reinforces the image of Pakistan as a politically fragile and chaotic state that increasingly has become a magnet for religious fanatics and terrorists.
Following last year's July 7 subway bombings in London, which killed 52 innocent people and injured 700, it was learned three of the four suicide attackers were British Muslims of Pakistani origin.
One of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, had travelled to a pro-Taliban madrassa or seminary run by the hardline Jamaat al-Dawat group in Lahore just before the attacks.
Jamaat al-Dawat claims to be a religious-based charity but the United States has branded it a terrorist front group with close links to Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Pure), which has recruited volunteers to fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan and sponsored terrorism in Kashmir. Most recently, Lashkar-e-Taiba was implicated in the bombing of crowded commuter trains in Mumbai, India, on July 11.
Lashkar-e-Taiba has also been linked to an alleged terrorist plot in Canada in which police have arrested 18 men on charges of plotting to attack government targets in Toronto and Ottawa.
International terrorism officials claim Lashkar-e-Taiba has direct links to al-Qaeda and now serves as a stand-in for the group, attracting young Islamic militants to Pakistan, where they receive terrorist training and indoctrination before returning to their homelands bent on launching attacks of their own.
Pakistan's military and intelligence services are also riddled with Islamic extremists who played major roles in establishing the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan. Lately they have been criticized for not doing enough to stop pro-Taliban and al-Qaeda forces from trekking over Pakistan's western border to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Yesterday, the U.S. embassy in India highlighted the threat posed by Pakistani-based terrorists when it issued a travel advisory warning U.S. citizens of possible al-Qaeda-sponsored bomb attacks in New Delhi and Mumbai ahead of India's 60th Independence Day celebrations on Aug. 15.
The same day the British airline bomb plot was revealed, Pakistan slapped a month-long period of house arrest on Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, who now operates Jamaat al-Dawat. It also ordered the expulsion of all foreign students attending some 13,000 madrassas, which frequently preach the glories of jihad and martyrdom in the name of Islam.
Still, even as Pakistan co-operates in the war on terror, there is a growing chorus of complaints it isn't doing enough to suppress militant Islamist groups, which merely change their names to avoid periodic government crackdowns.
Pakistan's tortured politics has created a political vacuum in which radical Islamist parties thrive. As a result, while the vast majority of Pakistanis are overwhelmingly secular, Pakistan is still fast becoming a stronghold for militant Islamic fundamentalists.
© National Post 2006
August 12, 2006 at 03:06 PM in Lashkar-e-Taiba, Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The truth about Lashkar-e-Taiba
Pakistan Facts - The truth about Lashkar-e-Taiba
Friday, May 21 2004 @ 09:40 PM Central Daylight Time
Pakistan TerrorismKaushik Kapisthalam
When it comes to the common terrorist thread between Willie Brigitte, Izhar-ul-Haque, David Hicks and Faheem Lodhi, Australians constantly hear the name "Lashkar-e-Taiba" (LeT) bandied about. Given the preponderance of LeT connections to terror plans within Australia therefore, it is critical that Australians understand the origins and activities of Lashkar-e-Taiba. To begin with, one must be disabused of the notion that the LeT is a "Kashmiri" group. It is not. The LeT was founded in Pakistan and is made up of mostly Pakistani Punjabis with a smattering of Afghans, Arabs, Bangladeshis, South East Asians and the occasional Western or Indian Muslim recruit. To understand the LeT, it is critical to appreciate its position in the Pakistani as well as the global jihadist movement.
Islamists today are a fractious bunch, but they can agree on the notion that the creation of a 'pure' Islamic state represents the best hope for salvation in both this world and the next, and as such Muslims everywhere are obliged to strive for such a goal. The Jihadist movement represents a subset of Islamists who intensely believe that near-perpetual war, pursued by any and all means against the unbeliever offers the best way to meet their obligations and make the Islamist dream real. In particular those inspired by the 18th century Saudi preacher Ibn Abd al-Wahhab - often known as 'Wahhabis' or 'Salafis'- are among the most persistent, energetic and emphatic promoters of this kind of jihad.
Salafis have been active since the 19th century in the sub-continent, where they are also became known as the "Ahle-Hadith" (People following the Prophet's Tradition.) The connections were renewed as thousands of Arabs armed with billions of petro-dollars streamed in to Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. One result was the Lashkar-e-Taiba or the "Army of the Pure" is the jihadi or military expression of the Pakistani Ahle-Hadith movement.
While the Salafi LeT represents one part of the Pakistani jihadi community, the other major grouping consists of the more numerous Deobandi sect with terrorist groups like the Sipah-i-Sahaba-Pakistan (SSP) Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM.) Unlike the Ahle-Hadith, the Deobandis have built a powerful political movement within Pakistan but their political participation has also resulted in periodic bouts of serious tension with the Pakistani Army, which although highly supportive of jihad in Afghanistan and India, nevertheless brooks no challenge to its vice-like grip on political power within the nation. In contrast, the LeT led Ahle-Hadith movement has traditionally stayed apolitical and instead focused on its main goal - the dream of establishing an Islamic Caliphate that stretches from Indonesia to Morocco, including Northern Australia by means of a violent jihad.
Due to its eschewing of political confrontation with the Pakistani army and thanks to the strength of its ties to Saudi Arabia the LeT steadily grew in to one of the largest and most capable jihadist groups in Pakistan, despite the relatively small size of the Ahle Hadith followers in that nation. Even though the LeT elects not to take part in politics, it does have an unarmed wing, the Markaz Da'wa wal-Irshad (MDI) or "Centre for Religious Learning and Social Welfare". At the inspiration and by some accounts seed money from Osama bin Laden, Pakistani Salafists Zafar Iqbal and Hafiz Mohammad Saeed of the University of Engineering and Technology of Lahore, founded the MDI in 1987. One of the other founding fathers of the MDI was Palestinian promoter and scholar of jihad Abdullah Azzam of the Muslim Brotherhood. Azzam was also one of the inspirations behind the creation of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Many consider Azzam the "Godfather" of the modern jihadist movements. Azzam was in fact the religious and political mentor of Osama Bin Laden and the inspiration behind the "Arab-Afghan" phenomenon of international, particularly Arab volunteers hijacking local conflicts involving Muslims in the name of Islam and turning them into a part of a global jihad. To this day, Lashkar uses Azzam's speeches and publications to train and motivate its cadres. Also noteworthy is the fact that the Lashkar-e-Taiba, before it renamed itself "Jamaat-ud-Dawa"(JuD) in 2002, linked on its website to the Hamas official website and the then English mouthpiece of al Qaeda, Azzam.com. Before Israeli forces killed him, Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin routinely addressed LeT rallies in Pakistan through phone. It is to be noted that Hafiz Mohammad Saeed became the supreme leader or the "Emir" of the LeT following Azzam's death.
The 190 acres large headquarters of the MDI/LeT is located in the town of Muridke, about 45 kilometres from Lahore. Its vast campus contains a huge mosque for the construction of which Osama bin Laden had reportedly contributed 10 million Pakistani Rupees, along with a garment factory, an iron foundry; a wood works factory, a swimming pool and three residential colonies for the volunteers. During the days of the US-Saudi funded jihad in Afghanistan to drive out the Soviets, the MDI was allowed its LeT volunteers to fight along with the Afghan Mujahideen. The Muridke campus also served as a base camp for Arab fighters to rest and recuperate and even train for jihad.
Reports say that Bin Laden also paid for the construction of a lavish and secure guesthouse in the LeT's Muridke campus. Other than staying in the guesthouse occasionally, Bin Laden also used to chair LeT's annual conclaves. After he became a global fugitive in the early to mid 1990s, Bin Laden preferred not to stay in the Muridke guesthouse due to security concerns. While Osama bin Laden stopped attending LeT's annual moots, he has addressed them over the phone until a few years ago from his hideout in the Sudan and, since after 1996 from Afghanistan. Addressing the November 1997 LeT annual meeting on the phone from Kandahar, bin Laden reportedly said: "Those who oppose jihad are not true Muslims." The LeT like other Pakistani jihadist groups also benefited greatly from Al Qaeda training at its camps in Afghanistan. In those camps, LeT fighters gained access to suicide bombing techniques, learned how to build large truck bombs that could destroy reinforced concrete structures, how to conduct surveillance on targets without being noticed, how to plan for spectacular operations covertly etc.
It was only after the Mujahideen's capture of Kabul in 1992 that the LeT aimed its attention on Kashmir. Urged on and materially assisted by the ISI, Pakistan's sinister intelligence agency, with whom it had a working relationship during the Afghan jihad, the LeT started a mass recruitment campaign in Pakistan to fight Indian troops in Kashmir. Though the LeT's nominal goal was to help Pakistan annex Kashmir, it fit in well with its grand plans of establishing an Islamic Caliphate. The LeT saw Hindu majority India as an obstacle on par with the US and Israel to the Islamist dream of creating a unified empire that spans the entire Muslim world. At a press conference at the Lahore Press Club on February 18,1996, LeT's Emir Saeed said: "The jihad in Kashmir would soon spread to entire India. Our Mujahideen would create three Pakistans in India." The LeT is still active in Kashmir while simultaneously being faithful to its original goal.
To finance its day-to-day activities, the LeT leverages its contacts in Saudi Arabia as well as launches donation campaigns with overseas Pakistanis, especially middle class and wealthy Punjabis in Britain, Australia and the Middle East. According to Jane's Terrorism & Insurgency Centre, Osama bin Laden has also financed LeT activities until recently. The LeT, under its new name JuD, uses its outreach networks including schools, social service groups and religious publications to attract and brainwash recruits for jihad in Kashmir and other places.
While LeT apologists try to use its connection to Kashmir to palm it off as a "Kashmiri freedom fighter" group, the reality is that it has always used brutal terrorist tactics in Kashmir and elsewhere in India. LeT members have perpetrated and even claimed responsibility for scores of attacks on Hindu pilgrims, temples and innocent farmers. In fact, the LeT boldly claimed responsibility for a May 2002 attack on the wives and children of Indian troops at a time of war-like situation between India and Pakistan. European Union External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten noted at that time that he was repulsed by the sheer savagery of the attack where sleeping infants were machine-gunned to death at close range. Despite this, the LeT openly praised the attack and glorified it on its website.
August 12, 2006 at 02:02 PM in Al Qaeda, Current Terrorism, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home