Pakistan faces its jihadi demons in
Iraq By Kaushik Kapisthalam
When it comes to troops for Iraq, it is no secret
that the United States is not too gently pressuring
Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to send
soldiers for peacekeeping purposes. And with the
appointment of the current Pakistani ambassador to the
US, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, as the next United Nations
envoy to Iraq, it appears likely that Islamabad will bow
to the pressure.
Should this happen, among the
threats its soldiers are likely to face are those from a
number of foreign jihadis. While current world attention
- thanks to Washington's conviction - seems to be
largely focused on Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi and his al-Tawhid force, one of the
least-reported foreign jihadi groups in Iraq is one of
Pakistan's very own - Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
LeT's origins LeT is a Pakistani
Salafist (Wahhabi) jihadi group that was formed in 1986
as the military wing of the Markaz Da'wa wal-Irshad
(MDI) or "Center for Religious Learning and Social
Welfare". Pakistani Salafists Zafar Iqbal and Hafiz
Mohammad Saeed, both professors in the Islamic studies
department of the University of Engineering and
Technology of Lahore, set up LeT with seed money from a
Saudi "sheikh" whom many believe to have been Osama bin
Laden. There were also generous contributions from the
Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia. Another
founding member of the LeT was bin Laden's mentor,
Abdullah Azzam, who also had a role in the founding of
the Palestinian Hamas.
LeT and the Markaz soon
set up bases in the eastern Afghanistan provinces of
Kantar and Paktia, both of which had a sizable number of
Ahle-Hadith (Salafi) sect followers of Islam, with the
aim of participating in the jihad against the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan. Because the LeT joined the
Afghan jihad at a period when it was winding down (the
Soviets invaded in 1979), the group did not play a major
part in the fight against the Soviet forces, which
pulled out in 1989. However, the Afghan campaign helped
LeT gain the trust of Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) agency as well as gain a cadre of
war-hardened fighters. In the 1989-90 period, however,
the LeT turned its attention from the internecine
squabble in Afghanistan to Kashmir, which is where it
gained its notoriety.
Although confused by many
analysts as a "Kashmiri" group, LeT in fact is mainly
made up of Pakistani Punjabis, with a smattering of
Afghans, Arabs, Bangladeshis, Southeast Asians and the
occasional Western Muslim recruit. Though the LeT's
nominal goal was to help Pakistan annex
Indian-administered Kashmir, it fit in well with its
grand plans of establishing an Islamic caliphate. LeT
sees Hindu-majority India as an obstacle on a par with
the US and Israel to the Islamist dream of creating a
unified empire that spans the entire Muslim world. LeT
is still active in Kashmir, while simultaneously being
faithful to its original goal.
Dilshad Ahmad
and Fallujah In April, Indian journalist Praveen
Swami, who has long experience in reporting on
terrorism, defense and security matters, broke a story
in Outlook about a leading LeT ringleader named Dilshad
Ahmad being arrested in Iraq by British forces, and then
given over to the US for interrogation. A few other
people were arrested with Ahmad, who went under several
aliases, including Danish Ahmad and Abdul Rehman
al-Dakhil.
After the interrogators determined
Ahmad's identity, they reached out to their Indian
counterparts to find out more about his origins. Ahmad,
a longtime Lashkar operative from the Bahawalpur area
of Pakistan's Punjab province, was LeT's operational
lead for its campaign of violence in India between 1997
and 2001. Ahmad is also known to be a confidant of
Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, the second-in-command in the
Lashkar military hierarchy, and has trained many LeT
fighters in its Maskar Abu Bashir camp in Afghanistan.
In 1998, Ahmad addressed a major LeT conference
in the group's headquarters at Muridke, near Lahore,
arguing for the need to extend the organization's
activities outside Kashmir. Given all this, Ahmad's
presence in Iraq signals an intent on LeT's part to set
up a beachhead in Iraq, and therefore should have sent
alarm bells ringing among US authorities. But so far
there has been little direct mention of the LeT arrest
in Iraq beyond the original report of Ahmad's arrest.
Other media reports, while not directly
talking about LeT in Iraq, have hinted at such a
presence, especially in the violence-torn central Iraqi city
of Fallujah. A June 25 report in the Washington Times
said that jihadis from foreign nations, including
Pakistan, had set up checkpoints throughout Fallujah and were
imposing Taliban-like harsh Islamic laws. Even before
that a few media reports and comments by military
analysts noted the presence of Pakistani jihadis in
Iraq. It is quite possible that LeT operatives had set
up bases in the Fallujah area in the Sunni triangle.
LeT's suitability for Iraq
Among all the Pakistani jihad groups, there are many
reasons the LeT is most suited to operate in Iraq.
First, unlike the Deobandi (Islamic thought) jihadi
groups such as the Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen,
LeT does not have any political ambitions inside
Pakistan. The Deobandis have built a powerful political
movement within Pakistan, but their political
participation has also resulted in periodic tussles with
the Pakistani army, which although highly supportive of
jihad in Afghanistan and India, nevertheless brooks no
challenge to its vise-like grip on political power
within the nation. In contrast, the LeT-led Pakistani
Salafist movement has traditionally stayed apolitical,
and instead focused on global jihad outside Pakistan.
Given this, LeT has had a free hand to operate within
Pakistan.
Another aspect of LeT's activities is its
charitable wing, the Dawa. In fact, the current name of
the LeT's parent group is Jamaat-ud-Dawa, or the Party
for Preaching. Through its charitable wing, LeT attracts
many doctors, engineers and educated professionals
to its cause. This could provide a great cover
for the LeT to infiltrate into a strife-torn nation such
as Iraq. The LeT also has strong links among Saudi Islamists,
as well as some members of the royal family. According
to LeT's own past claims, a significant portion
of its funding comes from Saudi sources, given
its Wahhabi ideals. LeT has a good number of Arab
volunteers, and it also makes it compulsory for its non-Arab
recruits to learn Arabic, which means that its members
can easily mingle with Iraq's Arabic-speaking population.
For all these reasons, it is not surprising
that the LeT sees Iraq as a golden opportunity to
strike at its biggest target - the United States.
LeT's overseas experience LeT
has a proven track record of operating far away
from its Pakistani base. In what has come to be known
as the "Virginia jihad" case, US authorities broke up
a terrorist cell in the state of Virginia this
year. The ringleader of the cell was a man named Randall
Royer, an American convert to Islam. During the trial,
six men pleaded guilty, while three more were convicted
of terrorism-related charges. The men, belonging to
various ethnic backgrounds, admitted to being members of
LeT and the published indictment laid out the dates and
periods when they went to Pakistan to train in LeT's
camps.
The indictment also pointed out
that LeT's own website, which constantly changes its
address, said the group had four facilities for training
mujahideen from around the world, including camps named
Taiba, Aqsa, Um-al-Qura and Abdullah bin Masud. The
trained LeT fighters, the website claimed, participated
in jihad in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya,
Kosovo and the Philippines. The website also prominently
displayed a banner portraying LeT's dagger penetrating
the national flags of the US, Russia, the United
Kingdom, India and Israel. Another LeT cell was recently
broken in Australia, with plans to blow up a nuclear
reactor, among other targets.
A call to
arms LeT's publications, which are still freely
available in Pakistan, have long been a harbinger of the
group's plans. Of late, LeT's official statements have
concentrated on Iraq more than Kashmir. In fact, a
recent editorial in LeT's weekly Urdu publication Ghazwa
(Arabic for a raid against unbelievers; September 11, 2001, is
described by al-Qaeda as a Ghazwa) called for sending
mujahideen to Iraq to take revenge for US actions in the
Abu Ghraib prison scandal as well as for the "rapes of
Iraqi Muslim women". A translated excerpt from that
editorial is below:
The Americans are dishonoring our mothers
and sisters. Therefore, jihad against America has now
become mandatory. We [LeT] should send our mujahideen
to Iraq to fight with the Iraqi mujahideen. Remember
that the mujahideen are the last hope for Islam. If
the mujahideen are not supported today, Islam will be
erased from the map tomorrow.
In
this context, Indian reporter Praveen Swami and
Pakistani correspondent Mohammad Shehzad recently broke a
story that claimed that up to 2,000 Pakistani men had signed
up for LeT's armed operations in Iraq, based on their
leaders' calls for jihad. Pakistan's border with Iran is
porous and could provide an easy opportunity for LeT's
fighters to enter Iraq from the east. Notably, Dilshad
Ahmad was reportedly captured in Basra, which is close
to Iran. LeT's intimate ties with Saudi Arabian
Islamists provide another convenient route into Iraq,
from the largely unguarded southern Iraqi border with
the kingdom.
Banned but free? What
perplexes most analysts is why the US has not pressed
Pakistan to shut down the LeT in the first place. Under
pressure from the US and the military threat from India,
Musharraf banned the LeT, along with some other groups,
in January 2002. While more than 2,000 terrorists were
arrested, all but a handful were released after a few
weeks.
But what happened with the leaders was
egregious. According to the Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan, LeT's Emir Hafiz Saeed was whisked away to a
safe house of Pakistan's ISI. After a few months, he was
released without any charges being pressed against him.
To make up for the inconvenience, Pakistan government
apparently even paid him a stipend during his "arrest".
Soon after his release, Emir Saeed barnstormed
around Pakistan collecting funds and recruiting
volunteers for jihad in Kashmir, Afghanistan and other
places. Things got so blatant that US Ambassador to
Pakistan Nancy Powell had to issue a harsh statement
about the farcical ban, which forced the Pakistanis to
act. Even then, the Pakistanis placed LeT on a
"watchlist". To make clear where things stood, LeT
organized a 150,000-strong rally just hours after being
put on the list, and Emir Saeed promised the faithful
that its jihad would continue in Kashmir, as well as in
Iraq.
LeT also has close ties with al-Qaeda. In
April 2002, top al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida was arrested
from an LeT safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Pakistani
officials did not, however, arrest the local LeT leader
who had housed Zubaida. LeT also prides itself in its
fighters' ability to be brutal. French Islamic experts
Maryam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy note in their recent
book Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan
Connection that LeT teaches its members such skills
as beheading and eviscerating victims to inflict terror.
LeT has also pioneered fidayeen or suicide
attacks with multiple fighters on the same target to
cause maximum damage.
The upshot for the US and
Pakistan This saga of LeT expanding from a home-grown
Pakistani jihadi group focused on Kashmir into a
possible multinational terror network points out the
danger in allowing nations such as Pakistan to make
distinctions between "good terrorists" (who don't attack
Americans or Pakistanis) and "bad terrorists" (who
target Americans or Pakistanis).
For the Pakistanis, the blowback from a policy
of state sponsorship of jihadi groups began in 2002
when a five-member "coalition" of the jihadi
organizations was launched to avenge the US invasion as well
as Musharraf's about-turn in Afghanistan, where
he renounced the Taliban. The coalition was called
Brigade 313 (from the number of warriors in the battle of
Badr in the times of the Prophet Mohammad) and was made up
of the jihadi groups LeT, Jaish-e-Muhammad,
Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen al-Almi and
Lashkar-e Jhangvi. The 313 group is said to be responsible for
the killings of Christians in Pakistan, and also attempts
on Musharraf's life. Despite this, Musharraf has tried
to cut deals with groups such as LeT, instead of shutting them
down. It would be ironic if Pakistan sends its troops to
Iraq, only to end up fighting terror groups fostered by
its own military establishment.
For the US,
the scenario is starker. Perhaps US authorities did not
want to press Musharraf on LeT because they thought the
group was not directly targeting Americans. Or maybe
they figured that the general was sincere in his
promises to shut down the group. But LeT's Iraq campaign
and its ability to recruit fighters openly in Pakistan
to fight Americans abroad has exposed the hollowness of
such a strategy.
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