CHENNAI - Pakistani security agencies on
Sunday killed Amjad Hussain Farooqi, alias Mansur
Hasnain alias Imtiaz Siddiqui alias Hyder alias Doctor,
who, according to them, was the mastermind behind
the two aborted attempts to kill President General
Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi last December. According to them, he
was killed during an encounter with the paramilitary
forces who had surrounded a rented house in Nawabshah in
Sindh province, where he along with some others had been
living for the past two months.
On August 20,
the Pakistani authorities had announced cash rewards
amounting to Rs20 million each (US$330,000) to anyone
giving information leading to the capture of Farooqi, a
Pakistani national, and Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan
national, said to belong to al-Qaeda. Farooqi was
accused of acting at the instance of the Libyan in his
attempts to kill Musharraf.
Talking to the
media at The Hague on Monday, Musharraf was reported to
have stated as follows: "We eliminated one of the very
major sources of terrorist attacks. He was not only
involved in attacks on me, but also in attacks elsewhere
in the country. So a very big terrorist has been
eliminated."
All
accounts from Nawabshah indicate that if the Pakistani
authorities had wanted they could have caught him alive
and questioned him about the role of Pakistani
civilian and military officials in various terrorist incidents
of the past three years, including the kidnapping
and murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl, the attempts to
kill Musharraf himself and Shaukat Aziz, the prime
minister, and the attacks directed against US and French
targets in Pakistan. But they did not want him alive.
In a report under the heading "Real conspirators
in Musharraf case may never be exposed", Kamran Khan, a
Pakistani investigative journalist, stated as follows in
The News of September 28: "Senior lawyers say that the
killing of Amjad Farooqi, the main accused in the
President Musharraf and Daniel Pearl cases, may also
influence the final outcome of the two most important
cases. A nationwide military investigation launched
after two assassination attempts against President
Pervez Musharraf last year had unveiled that some
civilian and low-level military individuals were the
field operatives, while Amjad Farooqi played an anchor
in the abortive bids on General Musharraf's life. Because of
the most sensitive nature of the probe the principal
investigative work was carried out under the supervision
of the Commander Corps 10, who received inputs from all
federal and provincial law enforcement agencies in the
most extensive investigation of a crime case in
Pakistan."
"It was
very important to catch Amjad Farooqi alive," said a
senior law-enforcement official. "Farooqi was the key
link between the foot soldiers and those who ordered the
murder."
"Amjad Farooqi is now
dead with the most important secret and we still don't
know for sure the real identity of the Pakistani or
al-Qaeda or any other foreign elements who had launched
Farooqi into action to remove General Musharraf from the
scene," said a second senior law-enforcement official.
Some circumstantial evidence
collected during the investigation of the Musharraf case
cited some connection between Abu Feraj, an al-Qaeda
operative of Libyan origin, and Farooqi, hence the
suspicion that al-Qaeda could be behind the murder
attempts through Farooqi. The military investigators had
found solid evidence to connect Farooqi with the
suicide bombers involved in the December 25 attacks
on Musharraf. Farooqi's connections were also established
with the group of low-level Pakistani Air Force
(PAF) technicians who had planted bombs under Lai Bridge for
the December 11 bid on the president's life.
The military investigators were also baffled how come the
Air Intelligence, the intelligence wing of the PAF,
detected no signs that about two dozen PAF men posted at
the Chaklala air base had been attending meetings with
religious extremists and in the first week of December
were making active preparations at the heart of the PAF
base to bomb the presidential motorcade.
Pakistani
officials, worried that Farooqi's killing would prevent them from getting the
full knowledge about Farooqi's connections and his actions,
said that if captured alive Farooqi could
have provided crucial information on the plot to kidnap
and murder the Wall Street Journal reporter Pearl in early
2002. Pakistani officials believed that, as in the
murder attempts against the president, Farooqi was an
anchor in the Pearl case. "The gruesome murder of
Pearl and its video filming for the world was the
work of a Amjad Farooqi-Khalid Shiekh Mohammed combine," said a senior
intelligence official who did not want to
be identified, referring to the mastermind of the September
11, 2001, attacks on the US.
The
truth will now never be known. Somebody in the Pakistani
military-intelligence-police establishment did not want
the truth to be known. Why? Who was Farooqi? What were
his links with the army, the Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) and others in Pakistan? To which organization did
he belong? Read on.
The Taliban, cotton and
Afghanistan In April 1992, a coalition of
Afghan mujahideen groups, taking advantage of the revolt
of Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek commander, against
Najibullah, then president of Afghanistan, managed to invade and
capture Kabul. Najibullah, who was overthrown from
power, was taken by the United Nations into its
protective custody and kept in its office in Kabul. The
efforts of the UN to persuade the mujahideen to allow
Najibullah to go to India, where his family was living,
failed.
The mujahideen's success in capturing
power was made possible with the assistance of a large
number of jihadis from Pakistan's madrassas
(seminaries), who had been trained and armed by the ISI
and sent into Afghanistan to help the mujahideen. The
Pakistani contingents which participated in the invasion
of Kabul belonged to the anti-Shi'ite Sipah-e-Sahaba
Pakistan (SSP), the Harkatul Ansar (HUA), as the Harkat
ul-Mujahideen (HUM) was then known, and the
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET). Farooqi, then a late teenager,
entered Kabul as a member of the contingent of the SSP.
In 1994, there was a serious failure of
the Pakistani cotton crop, which threatened to bring
its textile industry to a standstill. Asif Zardari,
the husband of Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister, flew
to Turkmenistan and entered into a contract for the
purchase of a large quantity of cotton. The Turkmen
authorities wanted to send the cotton to Iran and from
there ship it to Karachi.
Zardari did not agree.
Instead, he asked them to send the cotton by road via
Afghanistan. He had the contract for the road transport
of the cotton awarded to a Pakistani crony of his based
in Hong Kong. But the first two cotton convoys from
Turkmenistan were looted by mujahideen groups operating
in the Herat area of Afghanistan.
Zardari thereupon sent retired Major-General Nasirullah
Babbar, Benazir Bhutto's interior minister, and Pervez
Musharraf (then just in the army) to Afghanistan to
provide protection to the cotton convoys. They asked
Mullah Omar, who subsequently became the amir of the
Taliban, to collect a large number of students (Talibs)
from the madrassas of Pakistan and constitute
them into a force for the protection of the cotton
convoys. Thus, in one sense, the Taliban was born as a
force.
Babbar and Musharraf, who had heard of
the exploits of Farooqi in Kabul in 1992, asked him to
help Mullah Omar in organizing this convoy protection
force. He did so. Babbar himself traveled with the
first convoy after this arrangement came into force and
Farooqi and his boys escorted it.
A few
months later, Mullah Omar deputed Farooqi to raid Herat
and capture it with the help of his boys. He did so
without difficulty, in September 1995, to the pleasant
surprise of many, including the ISI. Thus, from a cotton-convoy
protection force, the Taliban became the rulers of
Kandahar and Herat and other areas. Assisted by Farooqi
and his associates, they started gradually extending
their administrative control to other areas.
In
the beginning of 1995, Farooqi had left the SSP and
joined the HUA. The HUA sent him, along with some
others, into India's Jammu & Kashmir, where they,
under the name al-Faran, kidnapped a group of Western
tourists. One of the tourists was beheaded and another
managed to escape. The fate of the remaining is not
known to this day. They are believed to have been
beheaded and buried, but this has not been confirmed.
In October 1995, General Abdul
Waheed Kakkar, then chief of the army staff (COAS) under
Benazir Bhutto, discovered a plot by a group of army
officers headed by Major-General Zaheer ul-Islam Abbasi to have
him and Benazir assassinated, capture power and proclaim
the formation of an Islamic caliphate in Pakistan and
Afghanistan. Abbasi and his associates in the army were
arrested. They were found to have been plotting in
tandem with a group in the HUA led by Qari Saifullah
Akhtar. Abbasi, his associates and Akhtar were arrested
during the investigation. While Abbasi and his
associates were court-martialed and sentenced to various
terms of imprisonment, Akhtar was released without any
action being taken against him.
Before 1990,
there were two main jihadi organizations, the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI). The HUM was headed by
Maulana Fazalur Rehman Khalil and the HUJI by Qari
Saifullah Akhtar. Around 1990, the two merged to form
the HUA, with Khalil as the amir and Akhtar as his
deputy. Farooqi used to work closely with Akhtar.
In the late 1980s, Abbasi as a brigadier
was posted in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi
as the head of the ISI station in India. The government
of India had him expelled. On his return to Pakistan,
he was posted to the Northern Areas (Gilgit and
Baltistan). In the beginning of the 1990s, without the clearance
of the late General Asif Nawaz Janjua, the then COAS
under prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Abbasi organized a raid on
an Indian army post in the Siachen area and was beaten
back by the Indian army with heavy casualties. Janjua
had him transferred out and censured. Since then, he had
been nursing an anger against the Pakistani army's senior
leadership and hobnobbing with Akhtar. A few months
after capturing power on October 12, 1999, Musharraf had
Abbasi released from jail. He formed an anti-US
organization called Hizbollah, which acted in tandem
with the HUJI.
In September 1996, the Taliban
captured Jalalabad and Kabul. A large number of jihadi
students from the Pakistani madrassas joined the
Taliban unit which invaded and captured Kabul. Farooqi
joined the unit at the head of a contingent of the HUA.
After helping capture Kabul, Farooqi and his boys raided
the UN office, where Najibullah was living, lynched him
and hanged him from a lamp-post.
When the Taliban,
with the help of the madrassa students from Pakistan,
captured Jalalabad, Osama bin Laden was living there.
He had been permitted by the Burhanuddin Rabbani government,
which was in power in Kabul until September
1996, to enter Afghanistan and take up
residence in Jalalabad. It had taken the clearance of
the Benazir Bhutto government to do so. After capturing
Jalalabad, the Taliban had bin Laden moved to Kandahar
by Farooqi and his men.
In October 1997, after
establishing the involvement of the HUA in the 1995
kidnapping, the US State Department designated it as a
foreign terrorist organization under a 1996 US law. The
HUA thereupon dissolved itself and the pre-1990 HUM and
HUJI resumed their original existence under their
previous names. Akhtar took over as amir of the HUJI and
made Farooqi his deputy.
In February 1998, bin
Laden announced the formation of his International
Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and
the Jewish People. Among those who joined it at its
inception were the HUM and a Bangladeshi branch of the
HUJI, identified as HUJI (B). The Pakistani branch of
the HUJI, the LET and the SSP joined it in 1999. Farooqi
used to represent Akhtar at the meetings of the
shoora (consultative council) of the IIF.
In December 1999, a group of
Pakistani hijackers, said to belong to the HUM, hijacked an
aircraft of Indian Airlines, which had taken off from
Kathmandu, and forced the pilot to fly it to Kandahar.
They demanded, inter alia, the release of Omar Sheikh, a
British Muslim of Pakistani origin, and Maulana Masood
Azhar, a Pakistani Punjabi belonging to the HUM. The
government of India conceded their demands in order to
terminate the hijacking.
Among the hijackers was
a Pakistani Punjabi by the name of Mansur Hasnain.
Sections of the Pakistani media have since reported that
this hijacker was none other than Farooqi. After their
release from detention by Indian authorities, Maulana
Azhar and Omar Sheikh went to Pakistan. The return of
Azhar led to a split in the HUM. Azhar and his followers
formed a new organization called the Jaish-e-Mohammad
(JEM), which joined bin Laden's IIF. The formation of
the JEM was blessed by the late Mufti Nizamuddin
Shamzai, of the Binori madrassa, Karachi, who
used to be looked on as the mentor of bin Laden, Mullah
Omar and the Pakistani jihadi leaders.
Omar Sheikh took up residence in Lahore and was put in
charge of an office run by al-Qaeda in that city. Among
other tasks, he was made responsible by bin Laden for procuring
medicine and other humanitarian relief for the jihadis
of the IIF. Azhar and Omar Sheikh, who were working for
the ISI before their arrest in India, resumed their
contacts with the ISI. Omar Sheikh used to visit
Kandahar periodically to meet bin Laden. During one of
those visits, he claimed to have come to know of
al-Qaeda's plans for the September 11 terrorist strikes
in the US and passed on the information to
Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq, the present director
general of the ISI, who was then posted as the Corps
Commander in Peshawar.
When the United States launched
its military operations in Afghanistan in October 2001,
the Pakistani components of the IIF called on their
members to proceed to Afghanistan to join in the jihad
against the US. More than 30,000 Pakistani volunteers were estimated
to have gone into Afghanistan. The largest number of
them belonged to the HUJI and were led by Farooqi. The
US air strikes inflicted heavy casualties on them and
the survivors, including Farooqi, fled back into
Pakistan. Farooqi took up residence in the Binori
madrassa of Karachi, where he was sheltered by
the late Mufti Shamzai. From his sanctuary in the
madrassa, he established contact with Omar
Sheikh, who was living in Lahore, and Khalid Shiekh
Mohammed (KSM), who was living in Karachi along with
Ramzi Binalshibh.
On January 12, 2002, under pressure
from the US in the wake of the attempted terrorist
strike on the Indian parliament at New Delhi in
December 2001, Musharraf announced a ban on the LET, the
JEM and the SSP and had their leaders arrested or placed
under house arrest. The whole thing was a farce,
as was seen subsequently. Intriguingly, he did not ban
the HUM and the HUJI, which had many supporters in the
army, and did not take any action against Akhtar or
Farooqi.
Death of Daniel Pearl In January
2002, Daniel Pearl, the correspondent of the United
States' Wall Street Journal in Mumbai (Bombay) in India,
along with his wife Marianne, went to Karachi to inquire
into the Pakistani links of Richard Reid, the shoe
bomber. They reportedly stayed at Karachi in the house
of an American freelance journalist of subcontinental
origin, who had worked for some time as a freelancer
for the Journal, where she had come to know Pearl and
Marianne. She had gone to Karachi in connection with a
book she was writing on the subcontinent.
Before going to Karachi, Pearl had contacted
many people in Pakistan and the US to get introductions
to knowledgeable people in Karachi and elsewhere who
might know about the local contacts of Reid. It was
alleged that among those whose help he sought were James
Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), and Mansoor Ijaz, an American lobbyist of
Pakistani origin who often used to write articles for
the US media jointly with Woolsey.
Pearl was
particularly keen to meet Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani,
leader of the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), a terrorist
organization based in the US and the Caribbean with a
large following among Afro-Americans. Two of Gilani's
four wives are stated to be Afro-Americans. Pearl wanted
to talk to him about Richard Reid, since he had
reportedly heard that Reid was a member of the JUF and
had been trained in a HUM camp in Pakistan in the 1990s.
Even before coming to Karachi, Pearl was
reportedly in e-mail contact with one Khalid Khwaja, a
retired officer of the Pakistani Air Force who had
served in the ISI in the late 1980s, and one Mohammad
Bashir, who later turned out to be none other than Omar
Sheikh. It was alleged that Mansoor Ijaz had given Pearl
an introduction to Khwaja. It is not known how he came
to know of Bashir. According to the Karachi police,
Pearl was keen to meet Gilani and Omar Sheikh. Bashir
promised to help him.
On January 23, 2002, Pearl
went by a taxi driven by one Nasir to the Metropole
Hotel of Karachi. He asked the taxi to stop near the
hotel and got out. He then went to a car parked nearby
in which four persons were waiting. One of them got out,
introduced himself and invited Pearl to get in. He
willingly did so. The car then departed. Subsequently,
after the arrest of Omar Sheikh, Nasir identified him as
the man who got out of the parked car and invited Pearl
to get in. The driver testified during the trial of Omar
Sheikh that from the willing manner in which Pearl got
in it was apparent that he did not suspect a trap.
Subsequently, e-mail messages announcing
the kidnapping of Pearl with his photographs
started arriving in newspaper offices in Karachi. The
Pakistani authorities launched a drive for the recovery of
Pearl. There was no success. They started searching for
Omar Sheikh after finding out that it was he who, under
an assumed name, had laid the trap for Pearl. They
took into custody Omar Sheikh's wife and young child in
order to force him to surrender.On February 5 he
surrendered to retired Brigadier Ejaz Shah, the home secretary of
Punjab, who had previously worked in the ISI and was the
handling officer of Omar Sheikh. The ISI kept him in its
custody until February 12, and then handed him over to
the Karachi police for interrogation. The public
announcement about his arrest claimed he was arrested on
February 12 and did not refer to the fact that he had
been in the ISI's custody since February 5.
Omar
Sheikh told the police that the kidnappers operated in
three groups. Omar himself and Muhammad Hashim Qadir,
alias Arif, a resident of Bhawalpur, won the confidence
of Pearl and made him come to the hotel for a meeting.
They kidnapped him and handed him over to Farooqi for
keeping him in custody. Omar Sheikh, with the help of
Adil Mohammad Sheikh, a member of the staff of the
Special Branch of the Sindh police, and his cousins
Suleman Saquib and Fahad Nasim, arranged for photographs
of Pearl to be taken in custody, for them to be scanned
and sent by email to the media and others with their
demands. According to the police, Saquib and Nasim
belonged to the JEM, thereby indicating the possibility
that the kidnapping might have been jointly planned and
carried out by the HUJI, the HUM and the JEM.
A
few days later, messages arrived announcing the killing
of Pearl, along with pictures showing his throat being
slit. However, his body was not recovered. On May 16,
the Karachi police claimed to have recovered the remains
of an unidentified dead body cut into 10 pieces, which
were found buried in a nursery (Gulzare Hijri) on a plot
of land in the outlying Gulshan-e-Maymar area of
Karachi. They further claimed that the remains were
recovered after a tip-off that the remains were
Pearl's. The local media also reported that there was an
improvised shed on the plot where Pearl was suspected to
have been held in captivity before his murder and that
the plot belonged to the al-Rashid Trust of Karachi. DNA
tests and other forensic examination determined that the
remains were of Pearl.
The al-Rashid Trust,
whose accounts were ordered to be frozen under UN
Security Council Resolution No1373 because of its
suspected links with al-Qaeda, is also closely linked
with the JEM. Before Musharraf's ban on the JEM, the
offices of the two used to be located in the same
buildings in different cities of Pakistan.The two also
had common cadres to undertake fund-raising activities
for both the organizations.
Initially,
it was not
clear who gave the information to the Karachi police about
the burial of the remains - a source as claimed by the
police or by some new suspects who had been picked up
by the police, but whose arrest had not been shown in police
records, lest the US Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) wanted to interrogate them or sought their
extradition to the United States.
The answer came in a report carried by Pakistan's prestigious
daily The News (May 23, 2002) revealing that the
information about the remains was given to the Karachi
police by one Fazal Karim - a resident of Rahim Yar Khan
and a father of five - who was in police custody, but
had not been shown as arrested. According to the paper,
Fazal Karim had identified Lashkar-e-Jhangvi's Naeem
Bukhari as the ringleader of the group that also
included "three Yemeni-Balochs" (father Yemeni and
mother Baloch) who took part in Pearl's kidnapping, his
murder and disposal of his body parts. Naeem Bukhari was
wanted by police in Punjab and Karachi in more than a
dozen cases of anti-Shi'ite killings. Fazal Karim
reportedly confirmed Omar Sheikh's role in planning
Pearl's kidnapping.
According to Karachi police
sources, Farooqi was also taken into custody on the
basis of the tip-off from Fazal Karim, but the ISI
ordered them to release him. Fazal Karim reportedly
named one of the Yemeni-Balochs involved in the
beheading of Pearl as KSM, but the military regime did
not admit this. On the basis of his information, the
police also rounded up some others involved in the
kidnapping and murder.
Intriguingly, on May 14,
two days before the recovery of the remains of the body
of Pearl by the Karachi police, the Punjab police
claimed that Riaz Basra, a long absconding leader of the
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the militant wing of the SSP in which
Farooqi had started his career as a terrorist, and three
of his associates, were killed in an encounter in a
Punjab village when they had gone there to kill a
Shi'ite leader. Sections of the Pakistani media
expressed doubts over the police version and alleged
that Riaz Basra had been in the informal custody of the
ISI since Pearl's kidnapping in January 2002, without
it taking any action against him and that the police,
for reasons not clear, had shown him as having been
killed in an encounter.
During the trial of Omar
Sheikh and his associates, the defense lawyers drew the
attention of the anti-terrorism court to media reports
about the arrest of Fazal Karim and others and urged
that the court should order a reinvestigation of the
case to determine their responsibility for the offence.
The prosecution described the media reports as baseless
and opposed any reinvestigation. The court rejected the
defense plea.
The court sentenced Omar Sheikh to
death and others to various terms of imprisonment. The
appeal against the death sentence filed by Omar Sheikh
has not been disposed of by the court so far under some
pretext or the other. In the meantime, KSM was arrested
in Rawalpindi by Pakistani authorities in March 2003
and handed over to the FBI, which had him flown out of
the country. In an article written in Salon, an online
journal, in October 2003, the freelance journalist in
whose Karachi house Pearl and his wife had stayed said
that Marianne had been informed by the US intelligence
that KSM had admitted having personally killed Pearl.
The defense lawyers of Omar Sheikh again raised the
question of a reinvestigation, but their plea was again
opposed by the prosecution and rejected by the court.
In December 2003, two unsuccessful attempts were
made to kill Musharraf in Rawalpindi with explosives. In
the second incident, suicide bombers were involved.
There were strong indications of the involvement of
insiders from the Pakistani army and police in both
incidents. Until June Musharraf blamed the JEM for the
attempts, just as he had initially blamed it in 2002 for
the kidnapping and murder of Pearl. Subsequent
investigation brought out that it was the HUJI and not
the JEM which was involved. Of all the pro-bin Laden
jihadi organizations of Pakistan, the HUJI has the
largest following in the army. The investigation into
Pearl's kidnapping and murder had also brought out
indicators of a possible HUJI penetration into the air
force.
By the end of January, investigators had
started gathering evidence of the involvement of junior
officials of the army and the air force belonging to the
HUJI and the Hizbut Tahreer in the two assassination
attempts, which, according to them, were orchestrated by
Farooqi at the instance of the Libyan. However,
Musharraf did not openly admit this.
On June 10,
the corps commander of Karachi narrowly escaped an
assassination attempt in Karachi. With the help of a
mobile phone, which the terrorists had left behind at
the scene, the Karachi police established that the
attempt was jointly organized by the HUJI and a new
organization called Jundullah (Army of Allah), which had
been trained by the Uzbeks and Chechens in the South
Waziristan area of the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. The police managed to identify
and round up the Jundullah members involved in the
incident.
During their interrogation,
they reportedly admitted their involvement and said they
were acting under the leadership of Farooqi. The police
had kept the arrest and interrogation of the Jundullah
members a secret lest Farooqi be alerted before they got
him. But Sheikh Rashid, the information minister,
prematurely announced it to the media, thereby alerting
Farooqi before the police could arrest him. He managed
to escape from his Karachi hideout and fled to
Nawabshah.
For the first time, Musharraf
admitted in an interview to a private TV channel in June
the involvement of junior officers of the army and the
air force in the plot against him and the role of
Farooqi and the Libyan in the plot.
The police
launched a manhunt for Farooqi and the Libyan. Before
they could get Farooqi alive, someone in the
military-intelligence establishment would seem to have
ensured that he would not fall alive into the hands of
the police. Who is that somebody?
Qari Saifullah
Akhtar, the amir of the HUJI, was picked up by Dubai
authorities on August 6 and handed over to Pakistani
authorities, who had him flown to Pakistan the next day.
The results of his interrogation are not known so far.
After the suicide bomb attack in Karachi on May
8, 2002, which killed 11 French experts working on a
submarine project, Khaled Ahmed, the well-known
Pakistani analyst, wrote an article titled "The biggest
militia we know nothing about" in the prestigious Friday
Times of Lahore. In this article he gave details of the
HUJI. Extracts from the article are given in the annex.
One of the most mysterious aspects of the
activities of the jihadi organizations in Pakistan is
why Musharraf has always been reluctant to take or even
afraid of taking action against the HUJI. He has avoided
banning it, even after evidence of its penetration into
the army and the air force and its involvement in the
plots against him.
Annex: HUJI
Extracts from the article "The biggest militia
we know nothing about" published in the Friday Times of
Lahore by Khaled Ahmed:
ARY Digital TV's host Dr Masood, while
discussing the May 8 killing of 11 French nationals in
Karachi, named one Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami as one of
the suspected terrorists involved in the bombing. When
the Americans bombed the Taliban and Mullah Omar fled
from his stronghold in Kandahar, a Pakistani
personality also fled with him. This was Qari
Saifullah Akhtar, the leader of Harkat al-Jahad
al-Islami, Pakistan's biggest jihadi militia
headquartered in Kandahar. No one knew the name of the
outfit and its leader. A large number of its fighters
made their way into Central Asia and Chechnya to
escape capture at the hands of the Americans, the rest
stole back into Pakistan to establish themselves in
Waziristan and Buner. Their military training camp
(maskar) in Kotli in Azad Kashmir swelled with
new fighters and now the outfit is scouting some areas
in the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province) to create a
supplementary maskar for jihad in Kashmir. Its
"handlers" (in the Inter-Services Intelligence) have
clubbed it together with Harkatul Mujahideen to create
Jamiatul Mujahideen in order to cut down the large
number of outfits gathered together in Azad Kashmir.
It was active in held Kashmir under the name of
Harkatul Jahad Brigade 111.
The leader of
Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, was
an adviser to Mullah Omar in the Taliban government.
His fighters were called "Punjabi" Taliban and were
offered employment, something that other outfits could
not get out of Mullah Omar. The outfit had membership
among the Taliban too. Three Taliban ministers and 22
judges belonged to the Harkat. In difficult times, the
Harkat fighters stood together with Mullah Omar.
Approximately 300 of them were killed fighting the
Northern Alliance, after which Mullah Omar was pleased
to give Harkat permission to build six more
maskars in Kandahar, Kabul and Khost, where the
Taliban army and police also received military
training. From its base in Afghanistan, Harkat
launched its campaigns inside Uzbekistan, Tajikistan
and Chechnya. But the distance of Qari Saifullah
Akhtar from the organization's Pakistani base did not
lead to any rifts. In fact, Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami
emerged from the defeat of the Taliban largely intact.
In Pakistan, Qari Akhtar has asked the "returnees" to
lie low for the time being, while his Pakistani
fighters already engaged are busy in jihad as before.
The Harkat is the only militia which boasts
international linkages. It calls itself "the second
line of defense of all Muslim states" and is active in
Arakan in Burma [Myanmar], and Bangladesh, with well
organized seminaries in Karachi, Chechnya, Sinkiang,
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The latest trend is to
recall Pakistani fighters stationed abroad and
encourage the local fighters to take over the
operations. Its fundraising is largely from Pakistan,
but an additional source is its activity of selling
weapons to other militias. Its acceptance among the
Taliban was owed to its early allegiance to a leader
of the Afghan war, Maulvi Nabi Muhammadi and his
Harkat Inqilab Islami whose fighters became a part of
the Taliban forces in large numbers. Nabi Muhammadi
was ignored by the ISI in 1980 in favor of [Gulbuddin]
Hekmatyar and his Hezb-i-Islami. His outfit suffered
in influence inside Afghanistan because he was not
supplied with weapons in the same quantity as some of
the other seven militias.
According to the
journal al-Irshad of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami,
published from Islamabad, a Deobandi group led by
Maulana Irshad Ahmad was established in 1979. Looking
for the right Afghan outfit in exile to join in
Peshawar, Maulana Irshad Ahmad adjudged Maulvi Nabi
Muhammadi as the true Deobandi and decided to join him
in 1980. Harkat Inqilab Islami was set up by Maulana
Nasrullah Mansoor Shaheed and was taken over by Nabi
Muhammadi after his martyrdom. Eclipsed in Pakistan,
Maulana Irshad Ahmad fought in Afghanistan against the
Soviets until he was killed in battle in Shirana in
1985. His place was taken by Qari Saifullah Akhtar,
which was not liked by some of the Harkat leaders,
including Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, who then set
up his own Harkatul Mujahideen.
The
sub-militia [of the HUJI] fighting in Kashmir is
semi-autonomous and is led by chief commander Muhammad
Ilyas Kashmiri. Its training camp is 20 kilometers
from Kotli in Azad Kashmir, with a capacity for
training 800 warriors, and is run by one Haji Khan.
Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami went into Kashmir in 1991
but was at first opposed by the Wahhabi elements there
because of its refusal to criticize the grand Deobandi
congregation of Tableeghi Jamaat and its quietist
posture. But as days passed, its warriors were
recognized as "Afghanis". It finally had more martyrs
in the jihad of Kashmir than any other militia. Its
resolve and organization were recognized when
foreigners were seen fighting side-by-side with its
Punjabi warriors.
To date, 650 Harkat al-Jahad
al-Islami mujahideen have been killed in battle
against the Indian army: 190 belonging to both sides
of Kashmir, nearly 200 belonging to Punjab, 49 to
Sindh, 29 to Balochistan, 70 to Afghanistan, five to
Turkey, and 49 collectively to Uzbekistan, Bangladesh
and the Arab world.
The leader of Harkat
al-Jahad al-Islami in Uzbekistan is Sheikh Muhammad
Tahir al-Farooq. So far 27 of its fighters have been
killed in battle against the Uzbek President Islam
Karimov, as explained in the Islamabad-based journal
al-Irshad. Starting in 1990, the war against
Uzbekistan was bloody and was supported by the
Taliban, until in 2001, the commander had to ask the
Pakistanis in Uzbekistan to return to base.
In
Chechnya, the war against the Russians was carried on
under the leadership of commander Hidayatullah.
Pakistan's embassy in Moscow once denied that there
were any Pakistanis involved in the Chechen war, but
the journal Al-Irshad (March 2000) declared from
Islamabad that the militia was deeply involved in the
training of guerrillas in Chechnya, for which purpose
commander Hidayatullah was stationed in the region. It
estimated that "dozens" of Pakistani fighters had been
martyred fighting against Russian infidels.
When the Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami men were
seen first in Tajikistan, they were mistaken by some
observers as being fighters from Sipah Sahaba, but in
fact they were under the command of commander Khalid
Irshad Tiwana, helping Juma Namangani and Tahir
Yuldashev resist the Uzbek ruling class in the
Ferghana Valley. The anti-Uzbek warlords were being
sheltered by Mullah Omar in Afghanistan.
Maulana Abdul Quddus heads the Burmese
warriors located in Karachi and fighting mostly in
Bangladesh on the Arakanese border. Korangi is the
base of the Arakanese Muslims who fled Burma to fight
the jihad from Pakistan. A large number of Burmese are
located inside Korangi and the area is sometimes
called mini-Arakan. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has
opened 30 seminaries for them inside Korangi, there
being 18 more in the rest of Karachi. Maulana Abdul
Quddus, a Burmese Muslim, while talking to weekly
Zindagi (25-31 January 1998), revealed that he had run
away from Burma via India and took religious training
in the Harkat seminaries in Karachi and on its
invitation went to Afghanistan, took military training
there and fought the jihad from 1982 to 1988. In
Korangi, the biggest seminary is Madrassa Khalid bin
Walid where 500 Burmese are under training. They were
trained in Afghanistan and later made to fight against
the Northern Alliance and against the Indian army in
Kashmir. The Burmese prefer to stay in Pakistan, and
very few have returned to Burma or to Bangladesh.
There are reports of their participation in the
religious underworld in Karachi.
Harkat
al-Jahad al-Islami has branch offices in 40 districts
and tehsils in Pakistan, including Sargodha,
Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan, Khanpur, Gujranwala, Gujrat,
Mianwali, Bannu, Kohat, Waziristan, Dera Ismail Khan,
Swabi and Peshawar. It also has an office in
Islamabad. Funds are collected from these grassroots
offices as well as from sources abroad. The militia
has accounts in two branches of Allied Bank in
Islamabad, which have not been frozen because the
organization is not under a ban. The authorities have
begun the process of reorganization of jihad by
changing names and asking the various outfits to
merge. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has been asked to
merge with Harkatul Mujahideen of Fazlur Rehman Khalil
who had close links with Osama bin Laden. The new name
given to this merger is Jamiatul Mujahideen. Jamaat
Islami's Hizbul Mujahideen has been made to absorb all
the refugee Kashmiri organizations. Jaish and
Lashkar-e-Tayba have been clubbed together as
al-Jahad. All the Barelvi organizations, so far
located only in Azad Kashmir, have been put together
as al-Barq. Al-Badr and Hizbe Islami have been renamed
as al-Umar Mujahideen.
B Raman is
additional secretary (retired), Cabinet Secretariat,
government of India, and currently director, Institute
for Topical Studies, Chennai, and distinguished fellow
and convenor, Observer Research Foundation, Chennai
Chapter. E-mail:corde@vsnl.com .
