05-23-2006, 11:40 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The wages of hate: Islamist terror in India </b>
Praveen Swami & Anupama Katakam
Two Lashkar cells targeting Gujarat are discovered, preventing major terror strikes. Their stories underline the disastrous fallout of the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002.
"ISLAM IS our nation," thundered Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad at a Students Islamic Movement of India conference in 1999, "not India."
Sitting in the audience was one of the founding fathers of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's Indian operations, Azam Ghauri. For months after the speech, intelligence operatives carefully monitored Ahmad's movements, certain that he was linked to Ghauri. Not the slightest bit of evidence emerged, though, that Ahmad had links to the Lashkar. Ahmad barked loudly, investigators concluded â but had no intention of biting.
Earlier this month, Ahmad's name surfaced again: now as a core member of one of two independent Lashkar cells assigned with executing major terrorist strikes in Gujarat. Operating without knowledge of each other's existence, the twin cells had been ordered to carry out bombings that would demonstrate the Lashkar's commitment to avenging the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 â and provoke a fresh wave of violence that would bring the terrorist group's dream of tearing apart India along communal lines closer to realisation.
Ahmad's story has once again cast light on the organic relationship between Hindu communal violence and Islamist terrorism. Coupled with emerging evidence on a separate Lashkar cell that was also planning to execute major terror strikes in India, investigations into the planned assault on Gujarat have thrown up evidence that makes clear serious political intervention â not just policing â will be needed if the growth of Islamist terror in India is to be checked.
<b>The twin cells </b>
Last month, the Intelligence Bureau learnt that a major consignment of arms was to be ferried through Maharashtra to a Lashkar unit in Gujarat. Late on May 9, after an hour-long chase, the jeep was found abandoned on the outskirts of Aurangabad. Inside, police found over two dozen kg of lethal RDX packed inside ten computer central processing unit cases, along with 11 AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition.
While nine arrests have been made, just where the explosives came from is still being investigated. Officials are particularly concerned that they were landed on the Maharashtra coast by sea â the same route used to move in the RDX used for the 1993 serial bombings of Mumbai. If so, it would suggest that Karachi-based trafficking networks of mafia baron Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar have once again been committed to the Islamist terror campaign against India.
Links between Islamist terror groups and the Karachi mafia have long been evident. Dawood Ibrahim-affiliated ganglord `Chhota' Shakeel Ahmad Babu, for example, helped transport several Ahmedabad residents recruited by the Jaish-e-Mohammad from Dhaka to Karachi in 2001. Another Dawood Ibrahim aide, Fahim Machmach, helped a separate group of terror recruits transit through Bangkok, including two Bangalore residents who identified themselves using the code names `Iqbal' and `Sohail.'
Machmach is alleged to have supervised a 2003 attempt on the lives of Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Bharat Banot and Ashok Bhat, using the services of a longstanding mafia hit man, Ali Mohammad Kanjari. Other mafia figures have also played a direct role in several terror attacks. Aftab Ansari, who executed a 2002 attack on the United States Information Service building in Kolkata, was recruited by Jaish-e-Mohammad co-founder Syed Omar Sheikh while both were in Tihar Jail.
While the Aurangabad cell may have tapped organised crime networks, the second cell used very different kinds of resources. At its core was Feroze Abdul Latif Ghaswala, a Mumbai-based engine mechanic of Gujarati origin, who had decided to join the Islamist jihad against India after the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom. He tapped his contacts among local clerics and, in the summer of 2004, was put in contact with Harkat ul-Jihad Islami operatives in Srinagar.
Ghaswala had initially hoped to cross the Line of Control into Pakistan for training in a Harkat camp. His contacts, however, eventually arranged for him to head east to Bangladesh. Under the tutelage of Mufti Abdul Hannan â a Peshawar-trained HuJI commander responsible for a 2002 assassination attempt on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as well as the 2005 serial bombings that rocked Bangladesh â he learnt the basic tradecraft of terrorism, such as fabricating bombs from easily available chemicals.
During his time in Bangladesh, Ghaswala met one of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's most aggressive young operatives, a Hyderabad resident named Asad Yazdani. Operating under the code name `Naved Gul,' Yazdani had joined the Lashkar in the wake of the Gujarat pogrom along with 13 other men from Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. After training in Pakistan, Yazdani had organised the assassination of the former Gujarat Home Minister, Haren Pandya, in 2003, as well as a series of bombings in northern India.
Using his riot-revenge credentials to good effect, Yazdani persuaded Ghaswala to work with the Lashkar. In June 2005, Ghaswala caught a Mumbai-Teheran flight, after obtaining a visa to visit shrines in Iran. Ghaswala's intentions, though, had little to do with piety. His handlers wished to ensure that there would be no documentation that ever linked him to Pakistan. A Lashkar operative helped him cross the porous border into Pakistan's Balochistan province, from where he was driven to a safehouse in the town of Bahawalpur.
After completing his training, Ghaswala relocated to Ahmedabad. Mohammad Iqbal, a Bahawalpur resident who had operated in Jammu and Kashmir under the code name Abu Hamza in 2002-2003, was assigned direct charge of the operation. Nine kg of high-grade explosive, along with two assault rifles and a Thuraya satellite-phone set, a communications system known to be resistant to penetration by Indian signals intelligence, were smuggled across the Bhuj border under his supervision.
Even as Iqbal and Ghaswala finalised targets, though, their operation was nearing its end. In February 2006, an Intelligence Bureau-led operation had led the Delhi Police to two Bangladeshi nationals from whom Yazdani had sourced explosives. Days later, Yazdani himself was shot dead. Delhi Police investigators developed information that became available in the course of this operation. On May 9, Iqbal was killed in an exchange of fire with the Delhi Police, while Ghaswala and an associate were arrested.
<b>Terror networks </b>
Despite the interdiction of the twin cells, though, there is plenty of evidence other Lashkar units are still active. The Delhi Police's failure to coordinate with the Gujarat and Maharashtra Police and the Intelligence Bureau, resulted in the escape of at least two Pakistan-trained members of Ghaswala's group, including a Bhuj resident instrumental in facilitating the cross-border movement of explosives, once news of the arrests broke. Nor have the men who helped Ghaswala make contact with HuJI been detected so far.
Just where are these recruits coming from? Few, unlike Ghaswala, have direct Gujarat pogrom links. Ahmad's story is instructive. A school dropout from an impoverished Aurangabad family, Ahmad, like thousands of other young men from ghettoised urban communities, found meaning and purpose in the now-proscribed ultra-right Students Islamic Movement of India. But his sole run-in with the law came after he was charged with being part of a mob that attempted to burn Vishwa Hindu Parishad banners.
Gujarat 2002 seems to have been the moment when many of Lashkar's new recruits chose to turn from ideological conviction to terrorism. In this, they are much like Azam Ghauri, Jalees Ansari, and Abdul Karim `Tunda,' the founders of the Lashkar in India, or the mafia figures who carried out the 1993 serial bombings, for whom the demolition of the Babri Masjid was a catalytic moment. While the numbers of recruits organisations like the Lashkar are picking up are small, they are large enough to point to a serious malaise.
Interestingly, none of the members of either of the twin cells had directly experienced the violence in Gujarat. Aurangabad has not had a riot since 1999; nor has it ever experienced the kinds of large-scale pogroms seen in Bhiwandi or Mumbai.
Part of the answer may lie in the fact the denial of opportunity, both educational and economic, as well as the ghettoisation of Muslims by sustained communal violence, has vacated space for organisations of the religious right.
Aurangabad has, as a consequence, seen the flourishing of organisations seeking to impose an Islamist social order. One example is the Islah Mashara, which was founded in November 2005 by three former SIMI members. The Islah promotes what it believes to be social order by beating up Muslim boys seen with Hindu girls, and harassing women who do not wear the burkha. Another Islamist group, the Markazi Majlis-e-Shura, has been seeking to build religion-based legal institutions.
Despite self-congratulatory official polemic on Indian Muslims' minimal participation in Islamist terrorism, there is real reason for concern. Not a decade ago, the Lashkar's pan-India operations were heavily reliant on Pakistani nationals.
As late as 1998, Cheema had to assign Pakistani national Salim Junaid for its operations in Andhra Pradesh. Junaid married a Hyderabad woman and set up a spare-parts enterprise to build a cover identity. Today, neither the Lashkar nor HuJI has great trouble finding local recruits.
India's covert services and police forces deserve not a little credit for preventing major terror strikes in Gujarat: one, ironically, that would have served the political interests of the perpetrators of the 2002 pogrom nothing. However, their work is a palliative, not a cure.
http://www.sulekha.com/news/nhc.aspx?cid=451055<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Praveen Swami & Anupama Katakam
Two Lashkar cells targeting Gujarat are discovered, preventing major terror strikes. Their stories underline the disastrous fallout of the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002.
"ISLAM IS our nation," thundered Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad at a Students Islamic Movement of India conference in 1999, "not India."
Sitting in the audience was one of the founding fathers of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's Indian operations, Azam Ghauri. For months after the speech, intelligence operatives carefully monitored Ahmad's movements, certain that he was linked to Ghauri. Not the slightest bit of evidence emerged, though, that Ahmad had links to the Lashkar. Ahmad barked loudly, investigators concluded â but had no intention of biting.
Earlier this month, Ahmad's name surfaced again: now as a core member of one of two independent Lashkar cells assigned with executing major terrorist strikes in Gujarat. Operating without knowledge of each other's existence, the twin cells had been ordered to carry out bombings that would demonstrate the Lashkar's commitment to avenging the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 â and provoke a fresh wave of violence that would bring the terrorist group's dream of tearing apart India along communal lines closer to realisation.
Ahmad's story has once again cast light on the organic relationship between Hindu communal violence and Islamist terrorism. Coupled with emerging evidence on a separate Lashkar cell that was also planning to execute major terror strikes in India, investigations into the planned assault on Gujarat have thrown up evidence that makes clear serious political intervention â not just policing â will be needed if the growth of Islamist terror in India is to be checked.
<b>The twin cells </b>
Last month, the Intelligence Bureau learnt that a major consignment of arms was to be ferried through Maharashtra to a Lashkar unit in Gujarat. Late on May 9, after an hour-long chase, the jeep was found abandoned on the outskirts of Aurangabad. Inside, police found over two dozen kg of lethal RDX packed inside ten computer central processing unit cases, along with 11 AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition.
While nine arrests have been made, just where the explosives came from is still being investigated. Officials are particularly concerned that they were landed on the Maharashtra coast by sea â the same route used to move in the RDX used for the 1993 serial bombings of Mumbai. If so, it would suggest that Karachi-based trafficking networks of mafia baron Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar have once again been committed to the Islamist terror campaign against India.
Links between Islamist terror groups and the Karachi mafia have long been evident. Dawood Ibrahim-affiliated ganglord `Chhota' Shakeel Ahmad Babu, for example, helped transport several Ahmedabad residents recruited by the Jaish-e-Mohammad from Dhaka to Karachi in 2001. Another Dawood Ibrahim aide, Fahim Machmach, helped a separate group of terror recruits transit through Bangkok, including two Bangalore residents who identified themselves using the code names `Iqbal' and `Sohail.'
Machmach is alleged to have supervised a 2003 attempt on the lives of Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Bharat Banot and Ashok Bhat, using the services of a longstanding mafia hit man, Ali Mohammad Kanjari. Other mafia figures have also played a direct role in several terror attacks. Aftab Ansari, who executed a 2002 attack on the United States Information Service building in Kolkata, was recruited by Jaish-e-Mohammad co-founder Syed Omar Sheikh while both were in Tihar Jail.
While the Aurangabad cell may have tapped organised crime networks, the second cell used very different kinds of resources. At its core was Feroze Abdul Latif Ghaswala, a Mumbai-based engine mechanic of Gujarati origin, who had decided to join the Islamist jihad against India after the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom. He tapped his contacts among local clerics and, in the summer of 2004, was put in contact with Harkat ul-Jihad Islami operatives in Srinagar.
Ghaswala had initially hoped to cross the Line of Control into Pakistan for training in a Harkat camp. His contacts, however, eventually arranged for him to head east to Bangladesh. Under the tutelage of Mufti Abdul Hannan â a Peshawar-trained HuJI commander responsible for a 2002 assassination attempt on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as well as the 2005 serial bombings that rocked Bangladesh â he learnt the basic tradecraft of terrorism, such as fabricating bombs from easily available chemicals.
During his time in Bangladesh, Ghaswala met one of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's most aggressive young operatives, a Hyderabad resident named Asad Yazdani. Operating under the code name `Naved Gul,' Yazdani had joined the Lashkar in the wake of the Gujarat pogrom along with 13 other men from Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. After training in Pakistan, Yazdani had organised the assassination of the former Gujarat Home Minister, Haren Pandya, in 2003, as well as a series of bombings in northern India.
Using his riot-revenge credentials to good effect, Yazdani persuaded Ghaswala to work with the Lashkar. In June 2005, Ghaswala caught a Mumbai-Teheran flight, after obtaining a visa to visit shrines in Iran. Ghaswala's intentions, though, had little to do with piety. His handlers wished to ensure that there would be no documentation that ever linked him to Pakistan. A Lashkar operative helped him cross the porous border into Pakistan's Balochistan province, from where he was driven to a safehouse in the town of Bahawalpur.
After completing his training, Ghaswala relocated to Ahmedabad. Mohammad Iqbal, a Bahawalpur resident who had operated in Jammu and Kashmir under the code name Abu Hamza in 2002-2003, was assigned direct charge of the operation. Nine kg of high-grade explosive, along with two assault rifles and a Thuraya satellite-phone set, a communications system known to be resistant to penetration by Indian signals intelligence, were smuggled across the Bhuj border under his supervision.
Even as Iqbal and Ghaswala finalised targets, though, their operation was nearing its end. In February 2006, an Intelligence Bureau-led operation had led the Delhi Police to two Bangladeshi nationals from whom Yazdani had sourced explosives. Days later, Yazdani himself was shot dead. Delhi Police investigators developed information that became available in the course of this operation. On May 9, Iqbal was killed in an exchange of fire with the Delhi Police, while Ghaswala and an associate were arrested.
<b>Terror networks </b>
Despite the interdiction of the twin cells, though, there is plenty of evidence other Lashkar units are still active. The Delhi Police's failure to coordinate with the Gujarat and Maharashtra Police and the Intelligence Bureau, resulted in the escape of at least two Pakistan-trained members of Ghaswala's group, including a Bhuj resident instrumental in facilitating the cross-border movement of explosives, once news of the arrests broke. Nor have the men who helped Ghaswala make contact with HuJI been detected so far.
Just where are these recruits coming from? Few, unlike Ghaswala, have direct Gujarat pogrom links. Ahmad's story is instructive. A school dropout from an impoverished Aurangabad family, Ahmad, like thousands of other young men from ghettoised urban communities, found meaning and purpose in the now-proscribed ultra-right Students Islamic Movement of India. But his sole run-in with the law came after he was charged with being part of a mob that attempted to burn Vishwa Hindu Parishad banners.
Gujarat 2002 seems to have been the moment when many of Lashkar's new recruits chose to turn from ideological conviction to terrorism. In this, they are much like Azam Ghauri, Jalees Ansari, and Abdul Karim `Tunda,' the founders of the Lashkar in India, or the mafia figures who carried out the 1993 serial bombings, for whom the demolition of the Babri Masjid was a catalytic moment. While the numbers of recruits organisations like the Lashkar are picking up are small, they are large enough to point to a serious malaise.
Interestingly, none of the members of either of the twin cells had directly experienced the violence in Gujarat. Aurangabad has not had a riot since 1999; nor has it ever experienced the kinds of large-scale pogroms seen in Bhiwandi or Mumbai.
Part of the answer may lie in the fact the denial of opportunity, both educational and economic, as well as the ghettoisation of Muslims by sustained communal violence, has vacated space for organisations of the religious right.
Aurangabad has, as a consequence, seen the flourishing of organisations seeking to impose an Islamist social order. One example is the Islah Mashara, which was founded in November 2005 by three former SIMI members. The Islah promotes what it believes to be social order by beating up Muslim boys seen with Hindu girls, and harassing women who do not wear the burkha. Another Islamist group, the Markazi Majlis-e-Shura, has been seeking to build religion-based legal institutions.
Despite self-congratulatory official polemic on Indian Muslims' minimal participation in Islamist terrorism, there is real reason for concern. Not a decade ago, the Lashkar's pan-India operations were heavily reliant on Pakistani nationals.
As late as 1998, Cheema had to assign Pakistani national Salim Junaid for its operations in Andhra Pradesh. Junaid married a Hyderabad woman and set up a spare-parts enterprise to build a cover identity. Today, neither the Lashkar nor HuJI has great trouble finding local recruits.
India's covert services and police forces deserve not a little credit for preventing major terror strikes in Gujarat: one, ironically, that would have served the political interests of the perpetrators of the 2002 pogrom nothing. However, their work is a palliative, not a cure.
http://www.sulekha.com/news/nhc.aspx?cid=451055<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->