In the shadows

What is the Lashkar's agenda in India? Who are its leaders and what is their relationship with the Directorate of the ISI?

FOUR weeks before the first shots of the Kargil conflict rang out, the head of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's military operations proclaimed that another war was already imminent."We are extending our network in India," Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi told The Nation on April 9, 1999, "and carried out attacks on Indian installations successfully in Himachal Pradesh last year. To set up mujahideen networks across India is our one target. We are preparing the Muslims of India and when they are ready, it will be the start of the disintegration of India."

Now in the midst of an intense Islamist terror campaign directed at its major cities, India is at last waking up to the significance and seriousness of Lakhvi's words. Police in Mumbai have asserted that Lakhvi's subordinates planned the July 11 serial bombings, financed their architects, and trained the perpetrators.

Key questions however are yet to be answered. What is the Lashkar's agenda in India? Who are its leaders and what is their relationship with the Directorate of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)? Most important of all, is the military regime of President Pervez Musharraf an enemy of the Lashkar's jehad, or, in fact, its author? To most of these questions there are no firm answers. Both the marionettes who enact the Lashkar's jehad in India and the masters who hold the strings are out of sight. Like audiences of Indonesian Wayang Kulit theatre, we may follow the story only through the shadows the puppets cast.

If the Mumbai Police is correct, the men who carried out the July serial bombings trained at a five-room building on the Multan Road in Bahawalpur. Police Commissioner A.N. Roy described the building as a "fortress". Two Bahawalpur residents contacted by Frontline were more prosaic in their description of the Lashkar facility but left no doubt that the well-guarded building does in fact exist.

Inside the building is a man his students call `Baba': the Lashkar operative who the Mumbai Police says taught the men who executed the serial bombings their tradecraft. Born into a lower-middle-class Punjabi family in 1953, Muhammad Azam Cheema went on to teach Islamic religious studies at the Government Municipal Degree College in Faisalabad.

During his tenure there Cheema came into contact with a circle of far-Right professors at the Department of Islamiat (Islamic culture and religion) in Lahore's Engineering University. Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, Zafar Iqbal, Hafiz Abdul Rehman Makki and other scholars linked to the ultra-conservative Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis sect were engaged in setting up what was then called the Markaz Dawa wal'Irshad. Sited on a 160-acre campus near Lahore donated by former Pakistan President General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Markaz was in essence a platform to draw recruits for the anti-communist jehad in Afghanistan.

By 1986, aided by generous contributions from the ISI, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Osama bin Laden's close aide, Abdullah Azam, the Markaz had set up the foundations of its new armed wing. Lashkar-e-Taiba cadres were trained at camps in the Afghan provinces of Kunnar and Paktia. By 1989, though, factional feuds among Islamist groups in Afghanistan led the Lashkar to shut down its facilities there.

Its energies now turned east. From the outset, the Lashkar was clear about its objectives. "The jehad," Saeed said in 1999, "is not about Kashmir only. It encompasses all of India." As the scholar Yoginder Sikand has noted, the Lashkar's strategic goal was "to extend Muslim control over what is seen as having once been Muslim land, and, hence, to be brought back under Muslim domination, creating `the Greater Pakistan by dint of jehad'".

By 1993, the Lashkar had put in place the infrastructure needed to realise this ideological project. Even as it carried out its first major military operations in Jammu and Kashmir, the terrorist group demonstrated its desire to act on a larger stage. On the first anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Lashkar operatives Jalees Ansari, Azam Ghauri and Abdul Karim "Tunda" carried out a series of bombings across north and west India. While Ansari was soon arrested, Ghauri and Karim went on to set up elaborate Lashkar networks in alliance with the now-proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).

Working under the command of Lakhvi, Cheema is believed to have been assigned the task of enhancing the capabilities of these networks. His efforts however achieved little. In July 1998, the Delhi Police arrested Abdul Sattar, a resident of Pakistan's Faisalabad district who had set up a covert terror cell in the town of Khurja. A year later, the Jammu and Kashmir Police broke up a cell run by another Pakistani, Amir Khan, with operatives in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi. Mohammad Ishtiaq, the son of a shopkeeper from Kala Gujran in Pakistan's Jhelum district who had risen to become one of the Lashkar's top field operatives, was also arrested.

Despite its grand polemic, then, the Lashkar had little to show for its efforts outside Jammu and Kashmir. After 1999, the pressures on the organisation became intense. The newly formed Jaish-e-Mohammad, with which the Lashkar competed for both cadre and resources, won applause among Islamists with a series of increasingly spectacular strikes, culminating in the December 2001 attack on Parliament House. Put simply, Cheema had expended the enormous assets at the Lashkar's command - with nothing to show for it.

From the interrogation records of Abdullah Mujahid, a terrorist arrested from Afghanistan in July 2003 and now held in Guantanamo Bay, we know that the Lashkar reached out to its old friends in Al Qaeda for help. At a February 2003 meeting in the Lashkar's Muridke headquarters, Mujahid was appointed chief of operations against India. A veteran of the jehad in Afghanistan, Mujahid had been put in charge of security for the city of Gardez after the fall of the Taliban regime. However, he was removed from office on suspicion of colluding with the Taliban and Al Qaeda; and could, as far as is known, never take up his new assignment with the Lashkar. The Lashkar had to look elsewhere for renewal.

In mid-September, two Lashkar terrorists and the Indian Army traded fire across the main market street in the small north Kashmir village of Sumlar. Houses and shops were destroyed in the firefight. The sprawling Bandipora forests, home to the largest concentration of Lashkar cadre in Jammu and Kashmir, lie about a hundred metres beyond the ruins. It was to this area that the terror group's command now turned to - commanders who, unlike Cheema, had seen real fighting.

Mohammad Muzammil, if that is indeed his real name, and Abu Alqama, who is still known only by his chosen nom de guerre, were to present themselves as the leaders of the next phase of the Lashkar's jehad.

Ever since it began its operations in Jammu and Kashmir, the Lashkar's field commanders had confronted significant odds. One major problem was the absence of a well-established overground network, of the kind the Jamaat-e-Islami had provided to the Hizb-ul Mujahideen. In Pakistan, the Lashkar was able to draw on the resources of the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis. But while the group's presence in Jammu and Kashmir dated back to at least 1923, the ultra-conservative organisation had won relatively few followers.

Indeed, its assaults on traditional religious practices provoked a hostile backlash from mainstream clerics. "Several Ahl-e-Hadis activists were physically attacked," Sikand has recorded, "a social boycott was instituted against them; they were turned out of their localities; and, being branded as apostates, they were refused entry into the mosques." The Ahl-e-Hadis remained, the scholar has noted, "a largely elitist phenomenon, with its core support base among a limited section of the urban lower middle and middle classes."

Lashkar leaders in the Bandipora area, as in other parts of Jammu and Kashmir, used fear to overcome their lack of legitimacy. Opponents of the jehad were mercilessly silenced. In 2002, soon after he was elected Sarpanch of Sonarwani village in defiance of Lashkar fiat, Ghulam Hassan Khan received a bullet through the arm. He was among the lucky ones. Ghulam Ahmad Wani, a local accountant who refused to conduct the marriage rites for a terrorist, was tortured to death in the forests. Ghulam `Lala' Wani, a small-time politician, was beheaded in the middle of the village. "We could all hear him screaming," recalls Khan, "no one wanted to be next."

At once, the Lashkar's field commanders made adroit use of patronage to draw new recruits. Some were won with cash and others with mafia-like favours. Mohammad Isaak, one of the Lashkar's top ethnic-Kashmiri operatives, joined the organisation soon after his wife eloped with Sher Khan, a member of a powerful pro-India militia. "Isaak wanted to be paid compensation of Rs.20,000," recalls Arigam villager Noor Alam Mir, "but Sher Khan wouldn't pay. He had a gun, so Isaak got one of his own from the Lashkar." Sher Khan was shot dead by the Lashkar in 2003, while he was playing cricket with children in the village field.

Muzammil soon demonstrated that the assets the Lashkar had built up in Jammu and Kashmir could be used to hit targets across India. In September 2002, he supervised the storming of the Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar. Manzoor Zahid Chowdhury, a Jammu and Kashmir-based Lashkar operational commander was ordered to despatch two Pakistani nationals to carry out the attack. Lashkar cadre in Ahmedabad, working under Muzammil's overall command, facilitated the final strike.

Among Muzammil's best-known ambitious operations was a June 2004 plot to assassinate former Union Home Minister L.K. Advani. A Pune resident, Javed Sheikh and his Mumbai-based girlfriend Ishrat Jehan Raza, were tasked with conducting two Pakistani nationals to Ahmedabad for the strike. Sheikh was also involved in a separate Lashkar plan to bomb the Bombay Stock Exchange. An ethnic Kashmiri medical student in Pune, Manzoor Ahmad Chilloo, was tasked by his Lashkar controllers in Srinagar with liasing between Sheikh and the operatives who would have carried out the Mumbai attack eventually.

Investigations into last year's serial bombings in New Delhi demonstrated similar networks at work. Abu Alqama, who had charge of the Lashkar's operations in Jammu and Kashmir, tasked a Bandipora-based commander code-named Abu Huzaifa and his immediate subordinate, Abdul Rehman `Mota' to execute the strike. Tariq Ahmad Dar, a Srinagar-based pharmaceuticals salesman was then charged with its physical execution. Abu Alqama is also believed to have had charge of an abortive bombing operation in Mumbai in January. Khurshid Ahmad Lala, Arshad Badru and Mohammad Ramzan Qazi were arrested from a safehouse in the city, where they had stored detonators brought in from Jammu and Kashmir.

Were the Mumbai serial bombings Cheema's effort to restore his `honour' and his place in the Lashkar hierarchy? Or was he just a small part of the conspiracy, responsible only for training the actual perpetrators? We do not know and that is not the only question that remains unanswered.

Just why the Lashkar committed so many Pakistani nationals to the operation when it had operatives within India to carry out the strike; why men were trained in Pakistan for a month when their sole role was to place bombs on trains; why the perpetrators chose to stay on in India when they could have crossed the border into Nepal and Bangladesh: all these are issues to which investigators so far have offered no answers. Key members of the Lashkar's western India operations who might have insights to offer, such as Rahil Ahmad Sheikh, Fayyaz Ahmad Kagdi and Zabiuddin Ansari, are thought to have long escaped to hideouts in Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Unless the still-nascent India-Pakistan joint counter-terrorism mechanism throws up new evidence, credible answers may never emerge. It is unlikely that the Pakistani Lashkar operatives involved in the serial bombings were known to their Indian counterparts by anything other than their Arabic kuniyats - nom de guerre drawn from the names of the companions of the Prophet Mohammad.

Such limited information is of little more value than none at all. For example, Mumbai Police officers claim a dead body discovered from one bomb site is that of a Lahore-based Lashkar operative named Salim - an assertion so vague as to be useless.

What is clear, though, is that Pakistan's covert services could help fill in the blanks if they ever chose to do so. Leaving aside the mass of scholarly work on the issue, independent eyewitness accounts demonstrate the Lashkar's close links with the ISI.

Writing in Time magazine's February 5, 2001 issue, journalist Ghulam Hasnain described how he watched Lashkar operatives monitoring wireless transmissions from their field units on a fidayeen suicide-squad attack on Srinagar airport. During the attack, he wrote, a Colonel-rank ISI officer called to ask for details of the operation. Hasnain noted that other "militant groups in Pakistan can listen to the same frequency. So can the Pakistani military". So, of course, can the communications-intelligence experts in India's covert services - one reason why Pakistan's claims that the Lashkar operates outside its control receive so sceptical a hearing in New Delhi.

Much of the world agrees. Official reports released by the United States Department of State, notably, have been dismissive of Pakistan's claims that the Lashkar-e-Taiba's training camps have been shut down. Earlier this year, the BBC's Newsnight programme released the contents of a confidential research paper prepared by the military-funded Defence Academy. "Indirectly," the paper asserted, "Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism, whether in London on 7/7 or in Afghanistan or Iraq." Western states, it asserted, had chosen to turn "a blind eye" towards the problem, and its solution: requiring "Pakistan to move away from Army rule and for the ISI to be dismantled".

"Pakistan," said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in responses to questions on Musharraf's repeated commitments to help end terrorism, "will have to walk the talk." For him, as for Prime Ministers before, the real question is how India can best push Islamabad to deliver on its promises.