US AIR STRIKES HELP INDIA
by B.Raman
"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
)
--------------------------------------------------------
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: [email protected]
)
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.
