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Thursday, August 6, 2009

Mapping the Indian Mujahideen

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad
04 Oct 2008, NewAgeIslam.Com

Mapping the Indian Mujahideen

 

By Praveen Swami 

India's most feared terrorist group isn't so much an organisation as a movement: a loose coalition of jihadists bound together by ideological affiliation and personal ties.

 

Eight days before he was shot dead, top Indian Mujahideen (IM) operative Atif Amin helped to draft the manifesto that the terror group was to issue after the Delhi serial bombings. He insisted on the inclusion of a reference to his heroes.

 

"We have carried out this attack," read the e-mail sent to newsrooms after the September 13 bombings, "in the memory of two of the most eminent mujahids of India: Sayyid Ahmad, shaheed, and Shah Ismail, shaheed, (may Allah bestow His Mercy upon them) who had raised the glorious banner of jihad against the disbelievers."

 

Ahmad and Ismail were killed at Balakote in May 1831, while waging an unsuccessful jihad against Maharaja Ranjit Singh's empire. The two men had set out with 600 followers from Rae Bareilly five years earlier to defend Islam at a time when the Mughal power had, for all practical purposes, given way to British rule.

 

Like his heroes, Amin found the martyrdom he worshipped: his death was the latest success in a string of nationwide intelligence-led operations targeting the IM. But the arrests of a bewildering succession of its operatives — each proclaimed by police to be "leader", "top commander" and "mastermind" — have done little to further the understanding of just what the group is about or the threat it still poses.

 

Mapping the IM isn't easy: it is more a social network than structured organisation; a label used by a loose coalition of jihadists bound together by ideological affiliation and personal linkages. In this, it is not unlike the al-Qaeda, whose operatives are drawn from the multiple transnational terror groups allied under the banner of the International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

 

Who, then, makes up the IM and how do its networks function? India's intelligence services now believe Amin had the overall control of the IM's operations unit: a group of at least two dozen Uttar Pradesh residents, most from the district of Azamgarh. Under Amin's command, the cell's operatives were dispatched nationwide to assemble and plant the explosive devices used in the bombings which began with attacks on three trial court buildings in the State in November 2007.

 

Amin and several other core members of the group are thought to have trained with the Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami in Bangladesh. In time, they passed on their skills to fresh recruits from Azamgarh, raised by local cleric Abul Bashar Qasmi and Lucknow-based Islamist activist and businessman Shahbaz Husain.

 

Gangster Riyaz Batkal — a lieutenant of mafioso-turned-jihadist Aftab Ansari — ran a second group which provided funds and logistics support to the IM. Batkal's associate Afzal Usmani, for example, arranged for the theft of the vehicles used as car bombs in Ahmedabad. More important, Batkal's group provided an interface among jihadists in India, the Harkat in Bangladesh, and the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Investigators in Maharashtra believe that Batkal's cell provided infrastructure for several past terror operations, including the 2006 serial bombings in Mumbai.

 

Ansari himself is thought to have been radicalised by the top JeM operative Syed Omar Sheikh — released in the December 1999 Indian Airlines IC-814 hostages-for-terrorists swap in Kandahar and now on death row in Pakistan — when both were in prison together. Ansari then helped to create an organisation of Indian jihadists named after Asif Raza Khan, a gangster killed in a 2001 encounter with the Gujarat police. Among other operations, the Asif Raza Commando Force executed a 2001 terror attack in Kolkata.

Scattered across India

 

The elements of other IM infrastructure and its top leadership are scattered across India. Qayamuddin Kapadia, leader of the Gujarat-based Students Islamic Movement of India, drew on the banned group's membership for the local guidance and support that Amin and Batkal needed. Bomb components were manufactured at a still unidentified facility near Mangalore. And Mumbai-based Abdul Subhan Qureshi travelled across India, knitting these multiple terror threads into a single, lethal weave.

 

Most of those arrested so far are children of the prosperous, but socially conservative, urban middle class. On his Orkut website, Amin identified his camcorder and laptop computer as his most valuable possessions. He also recorded that a copy of the Koran could be found in his bedroom and that he hated music and dating.

 

Almost all of the Azamgarh cell members studied together in an English-medium school; several went to New Delhi for higher studies in business administration, computers and the media. Parts of the IM manifesto issued after the Delhi bombings, interestingly, were plagiarised from an article by researcher K.K. Shahina for the media critique website, Hoot. The Azamgarh jihadists appear to have been drawn to the IM angered by the horror of the 2002 communal pogrom in Gujarat.

 

For other IM members, those riots were a lived reality. Among them was Vadodara resident Imran Sheikh, in whose home the bombs used to target Surat are alleged to have been assembled. His mother, Hameeda Bano, was seriously injured in the pogrom. Sheikh's father, Ibrahim Sheikh, had already been made invalid by a chronic cardiac condition, and the loss of Hameeda Bano's income forced him to drop out of school. He began to make a meagre living selling saris in Vadodara's Panigate area.

 

It was around this time, investigators say, that Kapadia recruited Sheikh. First, he persuaded the sari salesman to abandon the traditionalist religious practices of his parents and join the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadith, a neo-conservative sect founded by the followers of the Balakote martyrs. Later, in 2005, Kapadia introduced Sheikh to SIMI — and key IM figures like Abdul Subhan Qureshi.

 

By the time Sheikh was recruited, the IM had begun its war against India — but without the name by which we now know it. In September 2002, just weeks after the Gujarat pogrom, at least 14 young men from Hyderabad set out on secret journeys to terror training camps in Pakistan. Gujarat-based mafioso Rasool Khan Pathan arranged for some to train with the Lashkar, while others were routed to the JeM and the Harkat: a fluid dispersion of assets across organisational lines never seen before the 2002 pogrom.

 

Within weeks of their return, the new recruits executed their first successful strikes. Asad Yazdani commanded the assassination of the Gujarat pogrom-complicit, the former Home Minister Haren Pandya. Later, Yazdani organised the June 2005 bombing of the Delhi-Patna Shramjeevi Express, the first post-Gujarat terror bombing of real consequence. Yazdani was shot dead by the police in March 2006, just hours after the bombing of the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi — an operation the IM claimed as its own in a manifesto released after the November 2007 bombings in Uttar Pradesh.

 

Yazdani's killing did little, though, to dent the offensive aspirations of the terror networks which now call themselves the IM. Late in May 2005, the Maharashtra police recovered over 24 kg of Research Department Explosive packed in computer cases which had been shipped across the Indian Ocean to the town of Aurangabad. Investigators later discovered that the explosive was intended for a massive terror campaign targeting Gujarat. Long-time SIMI activist Zabiuddin Ansari, who handled the operation, escaped to Pakistan.

 

Several similar terror attacks were attempted. In May 2006, the Delhi police shot dead Pakistani Lashkar operative Mohammad Iqbal, the author of another attempted bombing in Gujarat. Feroze Ghaswala, a Mumbai automobile mechanic who joined the jihad after witnessing the 2002 pogrom, and Abdul Chhippa, a computer engineer, were held for their role in the plot. Soon after, India's post-Gujarat jihadists finally succeeded in delivering the vengeance they had long sought: the Mumbai serial bombings of 2006.

 

Since the Mumbai serial bombings, though, pressure has been mounted on Pakistan to terminate the jihad against India. Indian jihadists based in Pakistan were told they could no longer have the direct operational support of the Harkat or the Lashkar. Explosives like RDX, which could be traced back to Pakistan-based groups, were no longer to be used.

Altered jihadist strategies

 

Last year, evidence of altered jihadist strategies began to emerge. The police learned from a one-time Andhra Pradesh resident Raziuddin Nasir, who was arrested while planning attacks targeting tourists in Goa, that Rasool Khan 'Party' had ordered an escalation of jihadist operations in India. Funds had been collected from Indian supporters of jihad based in West Asia. Later, the interrogation of top SIMI leaders threw up revelations that dozens of men had been recruited to the IM at camps held in Kerala, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh through 2007 and early 2008.

 

No one is certain just who first thought of the name Indian Mujahideen, and under what circumstances. Most of the men who could provide an answer — among them Qureshi and Kapadia — are missing; Amin, of course, is dead.

 

Where might things go from here? India's police and intelligence services will be focussing on the immediate task: locating and neutralising the IM's surviving leadership before the next big bombing.

 

But politicians in New Delhi could learn lessons from Sayyid Ahmad's failed jihad. The Balakote jihad was defeated, in part, because of the superior military resources and intelligence assets of Ranjit Singh's armies — and also, historian Ayesha Jalal reminds us, because of the resistance of the Pashtun tribes to Sayyid Ahmad's coercive, shariah-based order. India's politicians must reach out to the young people drawn to the jihad if it is to be defeated, and restore faith in the idea that democracy can indeed deliver justice.

Source:

http://www.newageislam.org/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=847

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