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| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| Are jihadis waiting in the wings? |
| 2004-07-02 |
| Is Pakistan rid of its terrorists? Is General Pervez Musharraf determined to eliminate the remnants of jihad that turned terrorist? Since they have tried to kill him, will the general refuse to spare them if the Congress government in New Delhi forces him to revive the jihad in Kashmir? Is the jihad in Kashmir more important than his own life? Recent incidents demonstrate that the jihadis are continuing to kill the Shias in Pakistan quite freely. In some cases the police has been found involved in this Shia-killing spree. It has been trying to spare the sectarian killers of Al Qaeda by interpreting murders as family feuds or the doing of the ‘foreign hand’, India or American, in the latter case an extension of what is happening in Najaf in Iran. After a recent Mughalpura-Lahore massacre of a family of Shias, a senior police officer declared that it was, InshaAllah (sic!), not a sectarian crime. The family was shot to death and one member who was absent on the night of the execution was killed later after the police got him to agree to a cooked-up FIR. He was killed after he was allowed to circulate without police protection. The fact that the walls of the house in which the murders took place were spray-painted with ‘kafir’ was ignored by some papers while speculating that someone intent on settling a vendetta had written the sectarian message as a red herring. Everyone ignored that fact that a few days earlier someone had blown up a Shia gathering at the Haideri Masjid in Karachi, which was definitely a part of the country-wide campaign against the hapless community. According to a police source quoted by Herald, there were 25,000 jihadis in Karachi who had taken training in Afghanistan. A worrying development was that Punjab was acquitting Lashkar-e-Jhangvi terrorists standing trial there, and Karachi was receiving them back. Lashkar’s dreaded leader Malik Ishaq was expected to be released by the Lahore courts in the near future. Is Musharraf really getting after the murderers? People are now doubtful. Pakistani journalist Amir Mir writing in the foreword of A to Z of Jehadi Organisations in Pakistan by Amir Rana (Mashal, Lahore) informs us that a five-member ‘coalition’ of the jihadi organisations was launched in 2001 to avenge the invasion of Afghanistan. The coalition was called Brigade 313 (the number of warriors in the battle of Badr in the times of the Prophet PBUH) and comprised Lashkar-e-Tayba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Harkatul Jihad al-Islami, Harkatul Mujahideen al-Alami and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The leaders of these organisations were either in confinement or allowed to remain at large. Those in confinement under state surveillance have been allowed to get out and disappear; at least one is out in the open, publishing extremely provocative statements in the Urdu press on a daily basis. At least two out of the five were crucial to the low intensity conflict in Kashmir. Can one say that he has not killed them so far because he wants to use them again in Kashmir? The two militias are offshoots of Al Qaeda and have served Osama bin Laden well in the past. The leaders, Masood Azhar (absconding) and Hafiz Saeed (making public statements) give rise to all kinds of speculations. Available literature on Al Qaeda reveals close contacts between Lashkar-e-Tayba and Osama bin Laden. The Lashkar was set up by Hafiz Saeed, a lecturer at the Engineering University of Lahore, who was sent to Saudi Arabia for higher studies and later allowed to establish his headquarters near Lahore by the ISI. A follower of the Wahhabi tradition and a rebel from Pakistan’s Ahle Hadith parties, he had his stronghold in Faisalabad from where a top leader and ‘recruiter-trainer’ of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaida, was most dramatically captured and handed over to the United States. Hafiz Saeed was kept in custody for some time by the government but later released. He is a part of the Brigade 313 sworn to kill President Pervez Musharraf, but he is not out in the open issuing statements against him almost on a daily basis. Everyone knows who wants to kill President Musharraf. But why is he allowing the ‘fanatic’ terrorist elements to roam around freely in Pakistan? Jaish, together with Lashkar-Tayba, was the top ‘freedom-fighting’ organisation in Held Kashmir. Its leader Maulana Masood Azhar, a graduate of Karachi’s Banuri Masjid seminary, was on the side of Osama bin Laden in Sudan when the Pakistani troops were representing the UN in Somalia. We know that Osama bin Laden helped Somalian warlord General Eidid kill 24 Pakistani troops in Mogadishu after an ambush. Lahore has always been home to rumours that Pakistani mujahideen were among those who fired and killed the Pakistani troops in Mogadishu in 1993. The militias that would kill President Musharraf are the militias that have spearheaded the Kashmir jihad. They are all Deobandi-Wahhabi in character and aligned with Al Qaeda. If Pakistan is keeping its Kashmir options open, then these very militias are an important part of the jihadi equation. Pakistan has too many internal crises waiting to be addressed to allow space for a reconsideration of the foreign policy changes effected in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. President Musharraf should grasp the nettle of terrorism in Pakistan and get rid of it even if it means no option on the resumption of jihad in Kashmir. The administration is trying very hard to play down the sectarian violence of the jihadi militias to stave off public resentment. The Shia-killers of Brigade 313 are being secured against the stain of fratricide in Pakistan. The price for the ‘Kashmir option’ is very high and the people of Pakistan may finally refuse to pay it with their blood. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |
| #1 Are jihadis waiting in the wings? Do sphincters flutter under pressure? Do bears dine on garbage dumps? Do splodeydopes go boom? Is Osama a Muslim? Are there more airplanes on the bottom of the ocean than submarines in the sky? Does Paris do Paris? Does Mucky's bong go gurgle, gurgle, gurgle? (You go bro'.) The world wonders... |
| Posted by: Zpaz 2004-07-02 6:30:41 PM |