Author: B.Raman
Publication: South Asia Analysis
Group
Date: October 24, 2001
URL: http://www.saag.org/papers4/paper346.html
"It needs to be noted that the Taliban
units fighting against the Northern Alliance in the forward areas to prevent
their entry into Kabul consist largely of Pakistanis, either madrasa students
from Quetta, Peshawar and Binori in Karachi or ex-servicemen. The
Musharraf junta's anxiety that the US should avoid air strikes in the forward
areas in the North was partly due to fears that this could enable
the Northern Alliance to capture Kabul and partly due to concerns that
the deaths of the Pakistanis fighting in the Taliban militia in this area
due to US air strikes might further inflame the populations of Quetta,
Peshawar and Karachi."-----Extract from the writer's paper titled "USA'S
Afghan OPs: A Critical Analysis" dated October 22,2001, available at http://www.saag.org/papers4/paper345.html
)
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An important spin-off benefit of
the US-UK air strikes for India so far has been the casualties being inflicted
on the Pakistani jehadis of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Jaish-e-Mohammad
(JEM) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), who have been helping the Taliban
forces fighting against the Northern Alliance. It was partly to protect
them that Gen.Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's self-reinstated and self-extended
Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), self-styled Chief Executive, self-promoted
President and self-proclaimed popular leader, was keen that the US and
the UK should not bomb the frontline of the Taliban in the North.
After agreeing with his request
initially, the US and the UK have now started targeting the Taliban's frontline
too for the last few days. These air strikes have been inflicting
heavy casualties on the anti-India jehadis. While details of the
casualties suffered by the JEM and the LET are not yet available, Pakistan's
"News" of October 24, 2001, has reported from Karachi as follows on the
casualties suffered by the HUM:
"Eight of the 23 bodies of the Pakistanis,
killed in fresh US-led attacks on Afghanistan, are expected here on Wednesday
(today).
"Sources told The News on Tuesday
that most of these bodies were of volunteers belonging to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.
Two of the eight bodies would be buried in the city while the rest transported
to other parts of the country, they added.
"According to a senior police official,
two of the victims have been identified as Imran Majeed Bawani, a resident
of Nappier, in his mid-20s and Farooq, a resident of Nazimabad. Both
were the activists of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. Imran is said to be the
son-in-law of the chief of a religious school, Roza-Zainub-ul-Buna'at.
"The police official said that their
funeral prayers would be offered at Numaish roundabout after Asr prayers.
The corpses might be landing by Wednesday morning, he added. Talking
to The News, DIG Karachi Tariq Jamil said: "There are some 23 corpses,
six of which would be landing in Karachi."
"However, police insiders said that
the corpses were six to eight in number.
"Various members of religious groups
and Jihadi outfits are taking part in Jihad alongside the Taliban against
the US-led forces," said a religious figure on condition of anonymity.
"These groups include Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba and others,"
he added,' the "News" report concluded.
A similar report was carried by
the BBC radio on October 23,2001.
According to independent sources,
all the killed jehadis were students of the Binori madrasa in Karachi,
from which many leaders and cadres of the Taliban, the HUM and the JEM
had passed out in the past and which has been an important breeding ground
for jehadis and terrorist ideas for export to the USA.
The following aspects of the HUM
need to be highlighted:
* Apart from Jammu & Kashmir
(J&K) in India, it has been active in a number of other countries and
looks upon the US, Israel and India as enemies of Islam.
* It is one of the two terrorist
organisations of Pakistan, which have an active presence in the US and
have been training Muslim citizens/residents of the US since 1995 for carrying
the jehad to the US. The other organisation is the highly secretive
Jamaat-ul-Fuqra. If it is ultimately established that the present
anthrax scare in the US is the handiwork of jehadi organisations, these
two organisations should be at the top of the suspects' list. Particularly,
the Fuqra had exhibited a capability in the past for orchestrating widespread
incidents in the US, Canada and the Caribbean islands, which were meant
to create more panic and confusion than human casualties. For the
past incidents, it had used the fire-bomb tactics and not biological weapons
and those incidents were directed against the Hindus and the Jewish people
and not against Christians. Details of the Fuqra could be found in
our earlier paper titled "Islamic Jehad & The US and dated 29-10-00
" at www.saag.org/papers2/paper154.html ).
* The HUM used to be known as the
Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA). It changed its name as the HUM after the US
declared the HUA as a foreign terrorist organisation under a 1996 anti-terrorism
law in October,1997.
* Under the name Al Faran, it had
kidnapped five Western tourists inJ&K in 1995. One of them, an American,
managed to escape while the others were suspected to have been killed by
it and it disposed of their bodies.
* It was also responsible for the
assassination of two US nationals in Karachi in 1995.
* At the instance of bin Laden,
its cadres, then led by Maulana Masood Azhar, who split from the HUM in
2000 and formed the JEM, had participated in the attacks on US troops in
Somalia in 1993.
* It is one of the founding-members
of bin Laden's International Islamic Front For Jehad against the US and
Israel formed in 1998 and was a signatory of the Front's fatwa against
the US and Israel. The LET is also a member of the Front, but had
not signed the fatwa and had not threatened American lives in the past.
The name of the JEM does not figure among the members of the Front, but
the Sunni extremist Sipah-e-Sahaba of Pakistan, whose leader Maulana Azam
Tariq is one of the mentors of Masood Azhar, is a member of the Front.
However, the annual reports of the Counter-Terrorism Division of the US
State Department accept that the HUM is a member of bin Laden's Front,
but do not consider the LET and the JEM as members.
* The HUM suffered many casualties
in August, 1998, too when, on the orders of Mr.Bill Clinton, the then US
President, US Cruise missiles attacked what the US thought were the training
camps of the Al Qaeda; many of them turned out to be the training camps
of Pakistan-based jehadi organisations active in J & K. Relevant
extracts from an analysis disseminated by this writer on November 3,1998,
on the US attacks are given below. A full text of the analysis should
be available, on request, from the archives of www.saag.org
* The HUM organised the hijacking
of an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar in December,1999, to demand the
release of Masood Azhar from jail in Jammu. After his release in
Kandahar, he went to Karachi, split from the HUM and formed his JEM.
About 75 per cent of the HUM cadres went over to the JEM, along with its
entire fleet of vehicles. bin Laden replaced them with new vehicles.
* The investigation by the Pakistani
authorities into a 1995 plot by a group of Pakistani Army officers led
by Maj.Gen.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi to assassinate Gen. Abdul Waheed Kakar,
the then COAS, and Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, and seize
power revealed the penetration of the Army at the lower and middle levels
by the HUM, then known as the HUA.
* Despite constant pressure from
the US, Musharraf avoided any action against the HUM. Only after
the post-September 11 freezing of its foreign accounts by the US and the
UK, did he freeze its accounts in Pakistan too, but has not banned it.
(The writer is Additional Secretary
(retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director,
Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com )
ANNEXURE
EXTRACTS FROM THE WRITER'S ANALYSIS
OF THE US AIR
STRIKES OF AUGUST,1998, DISSEMINATED
ON 3-11-98.
BIN LADEN'S INFRASTRUCTURE IN AFGHANISTAN
What is described as Bin Laden's
terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan consists of the training camps
of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which had been in existence even before the
arrival of Bin Laden in Jalalabad in May,1996, the camps of Gulbuddin Heckmatyar,
the Afghan Mujahideen leader, which were taken over by the Taliban and
handed over to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen or Bin Laden and the camps set
up during the 1980s by Jalaluddin Haqqani, another Mujahideen leader, who
has since joined the Taliban. Contrary to the claims of US officials, these
were not sophisticated training facilities, but improvised structures to
put up the trainees. The only sophisticated parts of these camps were the
ammunition storage depots, which were being used during the Afghan war
of the 1980s for storing the arms and ammunition given by the CIA before
their distribution to the Mujahideen by the ISI. Since CIA officials used
to visit these camps, set up with their assistance, during the 1980s, they
were well aware of their location and of the location of the ammunition
storage depots. It was, therefore, surprising that the American bombings
of August 20,1998, failed to hit any of the storage depots. They destroyed
only the improvised residential portions. This doesn't speak well of the
much-vaunted Cruise missiles (Tomahawks).
The available details of the terrorist
training camps are as follows:
(A) The Harkat-ul-Jehad Al-Islami,
runs two camps called Badr I and Badr II- in the vicinity of Khost.
(B) The camp of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
of Pakistan at which Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Filippinos, Bosnian Muslims,
Uighurs from Xinjiang etc were being trained. It was run by one Maulvi
Jabbar, an ISI-trained cadre of the Harkatul-Mujahideen. This camp called
the Salman Farsi camp is located at Jawah, a couple of kms from the Pakistani
border post of Saidgai. This camp was started in 1989 by the Hizbul Mujahideen
of Jammu & Kashmir with the assistance of the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan
for training Kashmiri extremists and Pakistanis. After the Taliban's relations
with the Jamaat-e-Islami deteriorated due to the latter's support to Gulbuddin
Heckmatyar, the Taliban ordered the Hizbul Mujahideen to quit the camp
and handed it over to the Harkatul Ansar, as the Harkatul Mujahideen was
then known. After the US declared the Harkatul Ansar a terrorist organisation
in 1997, it changed its name as Harkatul Mujahideen and that of the camp
as Hazrat Amir Mawia camp after one of the companions of the Holy Prophet.
The Harkatul Mujahideen runs two other camps. One of them located near
Zhavar is called the Khalid Bin Waleed camp and the other (name not known)
is located near the Darwanta power station, close to Jalalabad.
(C) The camp of the Jamiatul Mujahideen,
a splinter group of the Harkatul Mujahideen . It was being used exclusively
for training Pakistanis and Kashmiris. It was being run by one Mufti Bashir,
a resident of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK). The name of the camp is
not known.
(D) The camp of another splinter
group of the Harkatul Mujahideen at Liza near Tanai. It was being run by
Qari Saiful Islam Akhtar, another ISI-trained cadre of the Harkatul Mujahideen.
The Liza camp is located about 40 kms from the camps of the main Harkatul
Mujahideen and the Jamiatul Mujahideen, which, in turn, are located about
5 to 20 kms from the exclusively Arab camps of Bin Laden.
DAMAGES INFLICTED BY THE US BOMBINGS
There are conflicting accounts of
the damages inflicted by the US bombings. To summarise these accounts:
(A) Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Peshawar-based
correspondent of the "News", who was one of the few journalists invited
by Bin Laden for the May 26 press conference at Khost and who had visited
the site of all the camps after the US bombings ( "News" of September 6):
There were only about 25 inmates in the Al Badr complex at the time of
the bombing. Six of them were killed. According to some people, all of
them were Arabs, whereas, according to others, four only were Arabs while
the remaining two were Tadjiks. About a dozen Cruise missiles hit the Arab
camps destroying two residential hutments and three mosques. The only cemented
building in the Al Badr complex in which Bin Laden had held his May press
conference was not hit. Most of the buildings and ammunition storage depots
of the Harkatul Mujahideen camps were also not hit. Only seven or eight
residential hutments were destroyed.
(B) Jalaluddin Haqqani: None of
the ammunition depots of either Bin Laden's organisation or the Harkatul
Mujahideen and its splinter groups was hit by the US missiles. The Salman
Farsi camp emerged largely unscathed and the Al-Badr camps suffered minimal
damage. Only the Khalid Bin Waleed and the Hazrat Amir Mawia camps suffered
substantial damage. ("News" of September 4,1998)
(C) Fazlur Rahman Khalili, the leader
of the Harkatul Mujahideen: While the Arab camps in the Al Badr area came
out almost unscathed, those of the Harkatul Mujahideen suffered damages,
resulting in the death of nine members, including Abu Huraira (not real
name), a well-known instructor. Four mosques were completely destroyed,
while a fifth escaped with minor damages. ('News" of August 26,1998) They
are unlikely to be deterred by the U.S. bombings.
REASONS FOR THE INADEQUATE SUCCESS
OF THE US BOMBINGS
Amongst the important reasons were:
(A) Poor intelligence: Bin
Laden and most of the inmates of the camps had gone to Mazar-e-Sharif in
the beginning of August to assist the Taliban in the capture of the city.
From there, they had gone to Bamiyan. They had not yet returned to their
camps till August 20,1998.Hence, the only inmates of the camps were the
administrative staff and those who could not go to Mazar-e-Sharif due to
illness. The US claim that Bin Laden was to attend a dinner at one of the
camps on the night of August,20,1998, was, therefore, not correct.
(B) Absence of the surprise element:
Ever since July,1997, the Pakistani press had been speculating about a
possible special operation by the CIA and FBI, with the co-operation of
the ISI, to kidnap Bin Laden from the Kandahar area. After the withdrawal
of non-essential American personnel from Pakistan on August 18,1998, most
of the Pakistani newspapers ("Dawn" of August 20, "Nation", "News", "Muslim"
and 'Pakistan Observer", all of August 19,1998) had speculated about the
imminence of an US operation against Bin Laden. The speculation focussed
on the possibility of a helicopter-borne operation to whisk him out of
Afghanistan after he had possibly been rendered unconscious through the
use of drugs or chemical gases. However, none of them had anticipated a
massive Cruise missile attack. The Taliban and the followers of Bin Laden
had time to remove whatever arms and ammunition they had kept in the storage
depots.
(C) The inaccuracy of the Cruise
missiles which seemed to have mostly hit non-essential structures, possibly
due to inaccurate target data fed into them.
