Author: Alex Perry
Publication: Time
Date: October 14, 2002
URL: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,364423,00.html
Signs abound that Bangladesh has become a
safe haven for Islamic jihadis-including Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters fresh
off the boat from Afghanistan
[Note from the Hindu Vivek Kendra: This article
is from five years ago. Today things are only worse than what they were then.]
As it headed for port through the midwinter
dusk, there was little about the M.V. Mecca that stood out from the other
boats plying the waters off souther/n Bangladesh. Portworkers and fishermen
noted the same squat deckhouse and plump hold that for centuries have sheltered
fishermen from the cyclones of the Bay of Bengal. The Mecca had the usual
rusted rigging and smoke-blackened stern. And the crew too was like most others
working off Chittagong: pure Rohingyas?stocky Muslim refugees from western
Burma. Only the thick salt marks high on the Mecca's bow hinted that it was
ending a voyage longer than most fishing trips. But this was Chittagong, South
Asia's premier hub for pirates, gunrunners and smugglers. When the dockworkers
saw the Mecca anchoring on a sandbank three kilometers out to sea on the night
of Dec. 21, it was a signal to all not to ask questions.
For nine months the exact nature of the Mecca's
cargo or the shipment's eventual destination remained unknown. But there were
clues. Portworkers that night said they saw five motor launches ferry in large
groups of men from the boat wearing black turbans, long beards and traditional
Islamic salwar kameez. Their towering height suggested these travelers were
foreigners, and the boxes of ammunition and the AK-47s slung across their
shoulders helped sketch a sinister picture. Then in July, a senior member
of Bangladesh's largest terrorist group, the 2,000-strong al-Qaeda-allied
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), told TIME the 150 men who entered Bangladesh
that night were Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan. Three senior
Bangladeshi military sources also confirmed this was the case. And on Oct.
7, Indian police arrested Burmese-born HUJI fighter and weapons courier Fazle
Karim (alias Abu Fuzi) as he arrived in Calcutta by train from Kashmir. A
veteran of al-Qaeda's camps in eastern Afghanistan who told his interrogators
he had twice met Osama bin Laden, Karim said he recognized two people he had
trained with in Afghanistan while visiting HUJI hideouts in Bangladesh in
August. The pair told him they were part of a group of "more than 100
Arabs and Afghans belonging to al-Qaeda and the Taliban who had arrived by
ship at Chittagong in winter," Karim said, according to transcripts of
his interview with Indian police.
The arrival of a large al-Qaeda group in the
capital Dhaka that night raises pressing concerns that Bangladesh may have
become a dangerous new front in America's war on terror. Indeed, one Bangladeshi
newspaper last month even quoted an unnamed foreign embassy in Dhaka as saying
Osama bin Laden's No. 2, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been hiding out in
the country for months after arriving in Chittagong. (Last week, in an audio
message that authorities have tentatively authenticated, al-Zawahiri warned
of further attacks against the U.S., vowing that it will not go "unpunished
for its crimes.") According to a source inside a Bangladeshi Islamic
group with close ties to al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri arrived in Dhaka in early March
and stayed briefly in the compound of a local fundamentalist leader. It's
unclear how al-Zawahiri came to be in Bangladesh, or whether he's still there.
However, a source in the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (dgfi),
a Bangladeshi military intelligence agency, told TIME that al-Zawahiri is
believed to have left Bangladesh this summer, crossing over the eastern border
into Burma with Rohingya rebels. U.S. intelligence, however, has no evidence
this report is true.
As for the Mecca, its passengers' plans remained
a mystery. One military source says most of the men stayed in Bangladesh rather
than merely transiting, although he adds it was not clear whether the group
sought only refuge or planned to establish a new base of operations. On Sept.
24, a fuller picture finally began to emerge when Bangladesh's domestic intelligence
agency arrested four Yemenis, an Algerian, a Libyan and a Sudanese at three
houses in the upper-crust district of Uttara in Dhaka. Bangladeshi intelligence
sources said they received information from "several" foreign agencies
that the men?Abu Nujaid of Libya, Sadek Al Nassami, Abu Sallam, Abu Umaiya
and Abul Abbas of Yemen, Abul Ashem of Algeria and Hassan Adam of Sudan?were
involved in militant arms training at a madrasah in the capital run by a Saudi-backed
charity, al-Haramain. In September, Indonesia's al-Qaeda supersnitch Omar
al-Faruq told the CIA that al-Haramain was the foundation used to channel
bin Laden's money to him from the Middle East. An American expert in the region
concurs that branches of the ultraconservative foundation have funded terrorism
around the world?a fact that earned two al-Haramain foreign offices a blacklisting
by Washington in March?although probably without the knowledge of al-Haramain's
headquarters in Riyadh. "Disreputable folks have penetrated al-Haramain
and used its offices, funds and personnel for nefarious purposes," he
says.
The seven al-Haramain members were questioned
by interrogators from domestic intelligence, police and the DGFI. Bangladeshi
agents also fanned out across the country to investigate al-Haramain's 37
other branches, which promptly ceased operations. Although Bangladeshi intelligence
sources confirmed the suspects were being questioned about links to al-Qaeda,
they cautioned that no relationship with bin Laden's terror network had been
discovered, nor any evidence of training. They added that the men had been
in Bangladesh for three years and were also being interrogated over allegations
of child trafficking. Sources within Bangladesh's intelligence community,
however, told TIME the authorities had been embarrassed not to find any evidence
at al-Haramain's five-story offices in Dhaka and were trying to play down
the raid. They said the passports and entry stamps indicating that the seven
arrested men entered Bangladesh in 1999 were most likely fakes. Whatever the
case, after being held for five days at a secret location, the men were driven
to court and released on Sept. 29. No charges or proceedings were brought.
After they were freed from custody, the seven were driven to Dhaka's Sheraton
hotel where they spent the night, and then disappeared. TIME's HUJI source
claimed the trafficking story was merely an official smoke screen. "These
are the same guys from the Mecca," he said. "These are bin Laden's
people. They've been hiding here for several months."
Bangladesh, it is true, is no Afghanistan,
or even Pakistan. For centuries, Bengalis have been united by a culture of
tolerance that defies the familiar South Asian divide between Hindu and Muslim.
After Sept. 11, the CIA did set up a new five-man base in Dhaka, but merely
as part of a global policy of establishing a presence in all Muslim countries.
The American intelligence community's view is summed up by one U.S. source
who told TIME that Bangladesh is "not a real hot account." But Bangladesh
also has its fundamentalists. And its southern coastal hills and northern
borders with India are lawless and bristling with Islamic militants armed
by gunrunners en route from Cambodia and southern Thailand to Sri Lanka, Kashmir,
Central Asia and the Middle East.
Today, southern Bangladesh has become a haven
for hundreds of jihadis on the lam. They find natural allies in Muslim guerrillas
from India hiding out across the border, and in Muslim Rohingyas, tens of
thousands of whom fled the ethnic and religious suppression of the Burmese
military junta in the late 1970s and 1980s. Many Rohingyas are long-term refugees,
but some are trained to cause trouble back home in camps tolerated by a succession
of Bangladeshi governments. The original facilities date back to 1975, making
them Asia's oldest jihadi training camps. And one former Burmese guerrilla
who visits the camps regularly describes three near Ukhia, south of the town
of Cox's Bazar, as able to accommodate a force of 2,500 between them. The
biggest, he claims, has 26 interconnected bunkers complete with kitchens,
lecture halls, telephones and televisions concealed beneath a three-meter-high
false forest floor that stretches between two hills. Weapons available for
training there include AK-47s, heavy machine guns, rifles, pistols, rocket-propelled
grenades and mortars. Mantraps and mines, which can be triggered by spotters
hiding in tree houses, protect approaches to the camp.
Over the years, the former guerrilla says,
Ukhia has hosted militant visitors from the southern Philippines, Indonesia,
southern Thailand, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, even Uzbekistan and Chechnya.
Videotapes showing al-Qaeda in training that were unearthed by CNN in August
include footage from 1990 that feature Rohingya rebels. And one of the five
signatories to bin Laden's Feb. 23, 1998 call for a jihad against America
was Fazjul Rahman, who signed in the name of "the Jihad movement of Bangladesh."
Fighters trained and given new identities in Bangladesh also regularly find
their way to conflicts in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Indian intelligence says
the Islamic hijackers of an Indian Airlines plane with 189 passengers and
crew on board, which they forced to fly from Kathmandu to Kandahar in December
1999, had traveled to Nepal from Bangladesh.
"With the right amount of money, whoever
you are, you can do anything," says one Western diplomat based in Dhaka.
"If 150 militants want to come in here and buy themselves new passports
and new identities, stock up on any weapons they might want and maybe do a
little refresher training before heading off again, there's nothing to stop
them." Indeed, December was a repeat visit for the Mecca, according to
the HUJI source. In June 2001, he says the boat sailed from Karachi to Chittagong
with 50 other militants who had completed their training in bin Laden's camps
in Afghanistan.
The Bangladeshi government typically reacts
with fury to reports of jihadi camps or fundamentalism within its borders.
The reason isn't hard to fathom. In October 2001 two Islamic fundamentalist
parties with a history of links to terror groups were elected as part of a
four-way electoral alliance led by Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh
Nationalist Party (BNP). The accession of Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic Oikya
Jote to power in Bangladesh rang alarm bells. Islamic Oikya Jote is open about
its sympathies: it is well known for its support of Islamic fundamentalism,
the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The party's membership largely duplicates that of
the HUJI, which was founded in 1992 by Bangladeshi mujahedin returning from
Afghanistan with orders from bin Laden to turn the moderate Islamic state
into a nation of true believers. The HUJI has been involved in scores of bombings,
including two attempted assassinations of then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina
in July 2000. And while Jamaat now projects a moderate face, its student wing
Islami Chhatra Shibir has been behind a string of bomb attacks and killings.
At gatherings during the campaign, Jamaat leaders spoke of breathing the "Islamic
spirit of jihad" into the armed forces while supporters rallied around
posters of bin Laden and the HUJI slogan: AMRA SOBAI HOBO TALIBAN, BANGLA
HOBE AFGHANISTAN. ("We will all be Taliban and Bangladesh will be Afghanistan.")
Jamaat is also the main force behind the phenomenal
growth of unlicensed madrasahs, known as qaumi madrasahs, in the past decade.
There are now an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 in Bangladesh, of which 30 to
40, run by mujahedin veterans, are known to shelter militants and recruit
fresh fighters. Such militants sometimes receive explicit encouragement from
Bangladesh's spiritual leaders. Mullah Obaidul Haque, head of the national
mosque in Dhaka and a Jamaat associate, told a gathering of thousands in the
capital last December: "America and Bush must be destroyed. The Americans
will be washed away if Bangladesh's 120 million Muslims spit on them."
So controversial were the BNP's partners in government and so infuriating
did they find reports of rising fundamentalism that earlier this year Zia
twice denied that there were any "Taliban" in her government, or
even in Bangladesh. But a Bangladeshi government official tells TIME that
while Zia's administration is aware of the fundamentalist threat inside the
country, tackling it head-on might trigger a violent backlash. Foreign Minister
Morshed Khan took the same line, telling TIME that it was better to have such
groups inside the government, looking out.
Al-Qaeda's links to the leadership of Jamaat
or Islamic Oikya Jote may be largely rhetorical. But the DGFI, Bangladesh's
military intelligence service, may have more to hide. Its agents maintain
contact with their counterparts in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence
and have a long history of supporting rebels fighting Indian rule across the
border, including providing safe houses in Dhaka for the leaders of the United
Liberation Front for Assam (ULFA). The HUJI source and the portworkers who
saw the Mecca arrive claim that the man who greeted the new arrivals was a
major in the DGFI. The major checked the visitors in by name and led them
to a fleet of suvs lined up on the docks, add the portworkers. A spokesman
for the DGFI denied knowing that members of al-Qaeda had ever set foot in
Bangladesh. He even denied that the major existed, although diplomatic registration
records show the officer is a long-standing member of the service and was
stationed in Calcutta in the mid-1990s. The HUJI source and a Bangladeshi
military source maintain the major was the last link in an operation that
began in Afghanistan. After leaving the Taliban's headquarters in Kandahar
as the city fell in early December and crossing into Pakistan, the fugitives
traveled to Karachi, hired the Mecca and made the sail around India.
The emergence of al-Qaeda in Dhaka is merely
the latest sign that Bangladesh's more radical Islamic groups are coming out
from the forests. The former Burmese rebel says three of the camps near Cox's
Bazar have closed since October?not because of the kind of governmental pressure
being applied in Pakistan, but because the militants feel safe enough to transfer
their operations to like-minded madrasahs, some of them in the capital. On
May 9 and 10, 63 representatives of nine Islamic groups?including Rohingya
forces, the Islamic Oikya Jote and the ULFA?met in Ukhia to form the Bangladesh
Islamic Manch, a united council under HUJI's leadership. So far, the Manch
has restricted itself to circulating speeches by bin Laden and Mullah Masood
Azhar, a Pakistani militant leader. But it has big plans, says the HUJI source:
"The dream is to create a larger Islamic land than the territorial limits
of Bangladesh to include Muslim areas of Assam, north Bengal and Burma's Arakan
province." That dream, if Islamic terrorists are allowed to continue
their operations in Bangladesh, could be a nightmare for the rest of the region.
With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington,
Simon Elegant/Jakarta and Scott Macleod/Cairo
