The Army of Prophet Mohammad on the Attack

Radical Islamism & Jihad

03 Dec 2008, NewAgeIslam.Com

The Army of Prophet Mohammad on the Attack

Mumbai in the U.S.? Fort Dix suspects were training for 'jihad' by GEOFF MULVIHILL Father of Mumbai terrorist, Azam Amir Kasab, 'paid by terrorists to hand him over' Al-Qaida's Zawahri praises executed Bali bombers by MAAMOUN YOUSSEF   ------------------   The Army of Prophet Mohammad on the Attack They are Muslim jihadis who believe they are following the doctrine of their faith, the example of the Prophet Muhammad, By Clare M. Lopez Nov 3, 2008 Intelligence experts and Sunday morning talk show guests struggled over the weekend to make sense of the Mumbai terror attacks. The basic facts about the horrific events that riveted the world are now emerging and not so difficult to ascertain. The analytical contortions of national security chiefs, politicians, the mainstream media, and so-called Middle East specialists who all seem desperate to avoid calling this what it is -- Islamic Jihad -- are somewhat less understandable. The basic facts seem to be these: Muslim commandos belonging to the Pakistani Lashkar-e Toiba terrorist organization, likely in coordination with Hindi-speaking attackers belonging to an off-shoot of the Indian Mujahideen (calling themselves the "Deccan Mujahideen"), launched a wave of terrorist assaults against Mumbai last week that has left some 200 people dead and over 300 injured. A couple dozen highly trained, intensely motivated terrorists, perhaps with the logistical assistance of a Mumbai organized crime figure named Dawood Ibrahim, paralyzed a modern urban metropolis of nearly 15 million people for 60 hours. They used basic military assault tactics, employing small arms and grenades against carefully selected and meticulously cased soft civilian targets, including the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Hotels, the city train station, hospitals, and a Jewish cultural center. Lashkar-e Toiba (LeT) is a Pakistani terrorist group founded in the late 1980s to early 1990s by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization to mount a terror campaign against the Indian government and Hindu civilians living in the contested Kashmir valley between India and Pakistan. LeT ('The Army of the Pure') is reported to be a member of Usama bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders, the loose network of Islamists that declared war in 1998 against America, the Jewish people, and liberal democratic civilians everywhere. After LeT was implicated in the 2001 attacks on the Indian Parliament, the Pakistani government in January 2002 banned LeT, but its members simply went underground and continued to train in camps inside Pakistan and Kashmir. Indeed, even as the horrific attacks of last week were ongoing, it is now known from captured SIM cards and satellite phones that the young Islamist gunmen were making phone calls traced back to a LeT training chief inside Pakistan. The previously unknown Deccan Mujahideen are likely affiliated with the Indian Mujahideen, which themselves are an offshoot of the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). After the May 2008 attacks in Jaipur, it was the Indian Mujahideen that issued a statement warning that more attacks would follow unless India decoupled itself from its strategic alliance with the United States. Whatever the many name changes effected by these South Asian terror groups, all of them are Jihadist groups with links back to al-Qa'eda. It is the self-proclaimed jihadist nature of these groups that should leave no doubt about how they view themselves. Their ideological identification with Islam is not disguised; they are not ashamed of it, they do not attempt to deny it or hide it. Only we, who are their intended targets, do that. Sen. Richard Lugar, a respected veteran Republican congressman from Indiana, actually called the Mumbai terrorists "dissidents." The Mumbai terrorists are not dissidents, nor are they merely criminal 'gunmen' or 'militants.' They are Muslim jihadis who believe they are following the doctrine of their faith, the example of the Prophet Muhammad, and the explicit orders of Allah to wage war against unbelievers. They have nearly six centuries of Arab Muslim razzias (or war raids) conducted from the seventh to the 13th centuries to serve as historical precedent, when the followers of Muhammad's early warriors launched wave after wave of savage military campaigns against India's Hindu and Buddhist populations. The partition of British India in 1947 was intended to allow both Muslims and Hindus to live in a state where their own faith predominated. But there are still some 200 million Muslims living in India today -- and in any case, any territory once governed by Sharia under Muslim rule is considered by Islamist jihadis to be Muslim land in perpetuity, to be returned to Islam by force if necessary. Discussion and analysis of the commando-style terrorist tactics employed by the Mumbai attackers will go on. Part will have to examine initial failures by some members of the Indian security services, who actually hid instead of confronting the assailants. The most important lessons to be learned are already clear, however: Islamic jihadis are adaptable and ruthless and all who stand in the way of their quest for domination will be their targets. The recent attacks in Mumbai, India's largest city, its financial center, and its gateway to the globalized world, clearly are intended to inflict economic harm. By striking well-known landmark hotels such as the Taj Mahal, filled with foreign tourists, and demonstrating the ease with which the city's security forces could be utterly immobilized, the jihadis not only destroy physical infrastructure that will have to be rebuilt, but more importantly, they strike fear into the infidel enemy, whose business and tourists will be a long time returning to Mumbai and maybe India itself. This is straight out of Jihadist military doctrine as documented by Pakistani Brig. S.K. Malik in his classic 1971 book, 'The Quranic Concept of War', in which he makes clear that terror is not just the means, it is 'the end itself'. In turn, as his book title indicates, Brig. Malik was only conveying what is commanded by Allah himself in the Quran, which is to 'strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers' (Q 8:12). By singling out American and British citizens and by deliberately targeting the Jewish Chabad House cultural center, these jihadis also made clear that their target is not only Hindus and not only India because it is democratic, free, and Hindu. The selection of these targets, as well as the complete absence of any demands made by the attackers in return for their hostages' lives, indicates the real nature and the real objectives of these jihadis. It is Americans, British, and Jews (including Israelis) because we lead the opposition to their murderous campaign of conquest and are the only ones who can stop it. It is the U.S., the U.K., Israel and our allies that today man the front lines in the war against Islamic Jihad. Now India too must make the decision once again to stand against Jihad. We who value tolerant liberal democracy must wake up and quickly. We are at war. We are at war whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we'd prefer to focus on education and health care or not. The enemy is Islamic Jihad. Jihadis formally declared war on us in 1996 and again in 1998. They are coming for us and intend to conquer our societies in the name of Islam, whether with gunfire and bombs or by the soft jihad of infiltration and subversion. They already have come for us in Baghdad, Bali, Glasgow, Jerusalem, London, Madrid, New York, Washington, D.C., and now Mumbai. We defeated them in Iraq, and we are fighting hard to defeat them in Afghanistan. But this is truly a Long War that already has been going on for 14 centuries; it is not likely to end in our lifetimes. Yet if we wish to bequeath to our children and grandchildren the free societies of equal opportunity and individual liberty that we all cherish, we must confront this enemy across the globe. We must stand and fight for each and every place that he chooses to contest -- because if we don't, those places will fall under Sharia and become bases like Afghanistan under the Taliban or the wild border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan today: places from which jihad will be waged against all of Dar al-Harb until it falls into Dar al-Islam. The Battle for Mumbai is over for now. The Global War of Jihad goes on. Ms. Lopez is the Vice President of the Intelligence Summit and a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies. Source: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=29702 ---------- Informant: Fort Dix suspects trained for 'jihad' Mumbai in the U.S.? Fort Dix suspects were training for "jihad" By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Dec 02, 2008 CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) -- An FBI informant testified Monday that five men accused of plotting to kill soldiers at Fort Dix shopped for guns and practiced firing them during a trip to Pennsylvania they intended as training for a holy war. Besnik Bakalli (BES'-nik bah-KAHL'-ee) said he had hoped the week in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains in February 2007 would be merely a relaxing vacation. Deputy U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick asked him what the trip turned out to be. "Training, for jihad," Bakalli responded. He said the men talked constantly about Islam, war between the Muslim world and America, guns, and their respect for Osama bin Laden. They also shopped for guns, went to firing ranges and played paintball during the trip. No attack at the Army base in New Jersey ever took place. Defence lawyers deny the defendants were seriously planning anything. Bakalli, 31, is the second of two government informants to testify. The five defendants, all in their 20s at the time of their May 2007 arrests, are foreign-born Muslims who lived for years in Cherry Hill. Bakalli testified that the FBI offered him work as an informant while he was in jail in 2006 as the government tried to have him deported. He had been convicted of but pardoned for a shooting in his native Albania, and said he accepted the offer hoping to stay in the United States. In July 2006, his handlers sent him to make contact with three Albanian-speaking brothers - Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka - in a Dunkin' Donuts shop. He got the men's attention by speaking on his cell phone in Albanian, and they drank coffee together that day. Within weeks, he was going to their mosque. He testified he didn't understand at first why his handlers sent him there, but a few weeks later learned why the men might seem dangerous to authorities: On a fishing trip to the Jersey shore, the men laughed as they showed him videos of American troops being shot by snipers in Iraq and U.S. military vehicles exploding. "I was scared," Bakalli told jurors. "I never saw these videos before. I'm thinking, 'Who are these people and what am I doing here?'" The three brothers and two other men are charged with conspiracy to kill military personnel, attempted murder and weapons offenses. If convicted, they could face life in prison. The government built the case against them largely with hundreds of hours of secret recordings made by Bakalli and another paid informant, Mahmoud Omar, who testified earlier. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FORT_DIX_PLOT?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US ---- Father of Mumbai gunman, Azam Amir Kasab, 'paid by terrorists to hand him over' The sole Mumbai gunman to be captured alive has claimed that his father introduced him to the Pakistan-based militant group suspected to be behind last week's bloody attacks in exchange for cash. Azam Amir Kasab, 21, a Pakistani national from the Punjab region, said that his father, Amir, introduced him to a commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a well-known terrorist faction, according to a leaked account of his interrogation. The commander, known as "chacha" (uncle), paid the father. Kasab said he was previously a labourer and came from a poor family. Security experts say that payment is one of three main recruitment tools used by Islamist extremists. The other two are the madrasas, or Islamic seminaries, scattered across Pakistan, and threats of violence, often made to the families of those being recruited. However, they add that it is too early to make definitive conclusions of the background of Kasab and his cohort. It is thought that as many as 15 Indian officials are sitting in on the militant's interrogation, and many are leaking their interpretations of his responses to the media. Others are speculating that the fact that Kasab apparently speaks fluent English indicates he is probably from Pakistan's relatively wealthy middle classes. It is thought he may be what experts term a "high quality" militant – a well educated person, not from an Islamic seminary, who would be unlikely to be in serious financial trouble and vulnerable to bribes. Experts also believe it is unlikely that a recruit who had been coerced would be sent on an attack of the scale of Mumbai. "They would not send somebody who would compromise the mission," Dr Lakshman, of the Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, said Indian officials remain convinced that the attack on Mumbai bears the hallmark of Lashkar-e-Toiba, which was believed to be behind a 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, where terrorists stormed the building with guns and grenades, taking hostages as part of a suicidal mission. They also believe that Lashkar-e-Toiba does not act without the sanction of some part of the Pakistan government – although how far up the chain is a matter of intense debate. Officials are also concerned that five terrorist gunmen might have escaped the carnage and could strike again. Security forces claimed that only ten militants – nine of whom were killed and one caught alive – were behind the coordinated attacks that claimed nearly 200 lives. Rakesh Maria, a joint commissioner of police, said: "Their plan was just to cause maximum damage and return with hostages protecting themselves." However, a hijacked Indian fishing boat used by the gunmen had equipment for 15 men on board when it was discovered adrift – suggesting that several gunmen could still be at large. "Fifteen winter jackets were found, fifteen toothbrushes," a police source said. "That more terrorists are loose is possible." The prospect of more killers added to public anger at the Indian Government's lax handling of the worst terror strike to hit the country in 15 years. Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5272189.ece ---- Al-Qaida's Zawahri praises executed Bali bombers By MAAMOUN YOUSSEF Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader praised the three Bali bombers recently executed in Indonesia and criticized Saudi and other Arab leaders for participating in a U.N. interfaith conference in a recording posted on the Web Monday. Ayman al-Zawahri said in the audio recording on an Islamic Web site that Indonesia and other governments in the Islamic world are protecting the interests of the "Crusaders" and the Jews and preventing Muslims from joining the jihad, or holy war, against them. The 22-minute recording is al-Zawahri third in less than two weeks. The recording contained short statements by two of the men executed in Indonesian in which they call on Muslims to continue the jihad against the United Sates and the West. The three men had urged retaliation for their pending deaths in countless TV interviews broadcast to a national audience in Indonesia before they were executed by firing squad on Nov. 9, prompting some critics to accuse authorities of allowing them to cultivate an image as Islamic martyrs. Al-Zawahri praised the three men as "unshaken heroes who adhered to their faith." The 2002 Bali nightclub attacks, allegedly funded by al-Qaida and carried out by the Southeast Asian terrorist network Jemaah Islamiyah, killed 202 people. Al-Zawahri described a Nov. 13 U.N. interfaith conference as a "ridiculous play organized by the Saudi government under the pretext of interfaith dialogue that other Arab and Islamic governments took part in." He said the meeting was "an exposed trick to hold direct talks with Israel." The 80 countries at the event issued a declaration rejecting the use of religion to justify acts of terrorism and other violence against innocent civilians. The two-day meeting was initiated by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and brought 14 world leaders to New York, including the heads of Pakistan and Afghanistan and Israel's president. The al-Qaida posting included video images from the conference showing Israeli President Shimon Peres addressing the meeting, as well as the Saudi king and two senior clerics from al-Zawahri's native Egypt. "The strange thing is that the Saudi rulers who call for dialogue are far away from talking to their people. ... They are ready for a dialogue with anyone whom the United Sates orders them to talk to," he said. Osama bin Laden's deputy also accused the Saudis of helping the United States form and finance the groups of former insurgents who turned against al-Qaida in Iraq known as awakening councils. The Web posting was produced by al-Qaida's media arm, al-Sahab, and was posted on an Islamic Web site that frequently carries al-Qaida statements. http://newageislam.org/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=1040 --