Jihadist Violence: The Indian Threat - 3: An examination of a terrorist group, a loosely organized indigenous Islamist militant network known as the Indian Mujahideen
By Stephen Tankel
Phase 2
By the end of the 1990s, it was becoming clear that the guerrilla war in Indian-administered Kashmir was not bearing fruit. At a November Jihadist Violence: The Indian Threat 1999 rally organized by leT’s parent, Markaz Dawat wal ‘Irshad, the group’s leader Hafiz Mohammed Saeed announced the advent of a new phase in its pan-India operations. In December 2000, two Pakistani LeT militants entered the historic Red Fort in Delhi, which at the time was being used as an army garrison, and killed two Indian soldiers and a guard before escaping. The low body count belies the large-scale significance of the attack. This was the first Fidayeen assault conducted beyond the borders of Indian-administered Kashmir and took place in the heart of India’s capital. It was also the first attack against India outside Kashmir for which the group claimed credit. When interviewed by Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussein a month after the attack, Hafiz Saeed declared, “The action indicates that we have extended the jihad to India.”
In December 2001, JeM launched an assault on India’s parliament. Whereas LeT’s attack had failed to engender any significant response from New Delhi, JeM’s was significantly more brazen. Equally important, it also came after 9/11. New Delhi used America’s invasion of Afghanistan to justify a more aggressive posture against Pakistan. India launched a massive military mobilization, Pakistan responded in kind, and the two countries came to the brink of war. U.S. pressure on Pakistan—which included a push to ban LeT, JeM, and other jihadists groups—helped avert a conflict. Although theses bans were cosmetic, the international environment had changed such that blatantly overt support for militancy against India was untenable. As a result, the importance of Indian operatives who could launch their own attacks, and thus provides greater deniability to Pakistan and to Pakistan-based groups, grew. Empowering Indian militants to launch their own strikes also provided the potential to exacerbate already extant communal tensions in India, an objective that took on added resonance after the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Neither LeT nor JeM ceased launching Fidayeen attacks. LeT remained more active, executing several successful assaults after 2001, including one in September 2002 intended to avenge the Gujarat riots.92 However, its leaders are believed to have decided around 2003 to direct additional resources toward recruiting, training, and supporting Indian jihadists to accelerate further the pace of plausibly deniable attacks against the hinterland.93 According to a high-ranking IM commander who was arrested not long before this report went to press, Pakistani intelligence first considered increasing assistance for Indian militants the same year.
The purpose of this endeavour, since dubbed the Karachi Project, allegedly was to help sustain a home-grown Indian network that could be more aggressive than Pakistani militants about launching attacks without incurring the negative international repercussions. David Headley, the captured LeT operative who performed reconnaissance on all of the targets hit during the 2008 Mumbai attacks, revealed the existence of the so-called Karachi Project, which he said included two set-ups dedicated to supporting operations in India using indigenous actors. He alleges that the militants in charge of these set-ups were in contact with and received assistance from ISI officers for their operations.
Bangladesh also remained a major transit point for Indian and Pakistani militants, and ISI officers there were known to provide passports and money, and to intervene with local authorities when necessary. Since the mid-1990s, control of the government in Dhaka has alternated between the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). A military caretaker government was in place from late 2006 through early 2009. The Awami League historically was friendlier to India and less tolerant of Islamist-cum- jihadist actors than the BNP, but at different times both parties were guilty of turning a blind eye to jihadist activities aimed at India. This included domestic groups, such as HuJI-B, to some degree and more so foreign ones, such as LeT, that did not directly threaten the Bangladeshi government or state.
External support acted as a force multiplier for Indian militancy, rather than being a key driver of it. Indian jihadists remained motivated primarily by domestic grievances. By the turn of the millennium, some SIMI activists were already gravitating away from the organization out of frustration with its failure to move quickly enough toward violently confronting the Hindu majority. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, India banned SIMI. This gave police the right to raid its offices, seize material without warrants, and prosecute people just for belonging to the group, which they quickly began to do in earnest.
It also drove SIMI members underground and triggered a cleavage between those who, though extreme, were not prepared to take up arms and hardliners looking to launch a terrorist campaign. Less than six months after the SIMI ban, in early 2002, a train carrying Hindu activists caught fire in the Godhra station in North Gujarat, killing fifty-eight people. The Hindu passengers were returning from Ayodhya, where they were campaigning for the construction of a temple honouring the Hindu god Ram on the site of a sixteenth-century mosque destroyed by Hindu militants in 1992.
Allegations that a Muslim mob started the fire triggered widespread communal riots in the state of Gujarat afterward. As Human Rights Watch described it, Between February 28 and March 2, 2002, a three-day retaliatory killing spree by Hindus left hundreds dead and tens of thousands homeless and dispossessed, marking the country’s worst religious bloodletting in a decade. The looting and burning of Muslim homes, shops, restaurants, and places of worship was also widespread.
The riots claimed the lives of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus according to official statistics. Unofficial estimates put the death toll as high as two thousand. In addition to the dead and injured, scores of Muslim girls and women were brutally raped before being mutilated and burnt to death. The police were implicated directly in some of the attacks, killing victims themselves or steering them toward murderous mobs. In other cases, they passively allowed the violence to occur. Witnesses later testified that calls for assistance were met with responses such as, “We don’t have any orders to save you” and “We cannot help you, we have orders from above.” In short, though undoubtedly motivated by communal sentiment, the police also were reportedly acting on orders from their superiors. It was widely alleged that officials from the BJP-led state government, whose (then and current) chief minister Narenda Modi is the BJP’s candidate for prime minister in the coming 2014 elections, encouraged and assisted Hindus involved in violence.
In 2012, a state legislator and former state education minister who was among Modi’s confidants was one of thirty-two people convicted for their role in the riots. The involvement of state officials followed by the failure to bring them to justice also “confirmed the worst fears of the already radicalized SIMI youth.” Not only was the violence barbarous and were the accusations of official complicity numerous, the Gujarat riots were also captured on video. The riots mobilized a section of India’s Muslim population already prone to radicalization at a time when Pakistani groups and inchoate indigenous networks were increasing recruitment efforts. According to police and intelligence officials, almost every arrested militant they interrogated mentioned the Babri mosque, Gujarat riots, or both as a major motivator. The riots are mentioned frequently in later Indian Mujahideen messages, including a fourteen-page text entitled “The Rise of Jihad, Revenge of Gujarat.”
NextGen Jihad The inchoate networks formed during the 1990s matured, new ones were born, and, though Hyderabad and Maharashtra remained key geographical nodes, the jihadist movement became more far-flung. A few men emerged as important focal points in these disparate networks, which were often based on familial ties, criminal connections, and associations with SIMI or other Muslim organizations. Some of the militants who constituted these focal points went on to form the Indian Mujahideen. Others were or became notable LeT operatives. Still others remained independent activists with their own networks, but often with ties to Pakistani militant groups, especially LeT, the HuJI branch in Bangladesh (HuJI-B) or both. The nuances that defined, and in some cases separated, the types of networks these militant focal points formed are explored in greater detail later in this report. Here, the purpose is to begin distinguishing among the major networks, discuss how and where they evolved, and to identify points of continuity with the previous phase. We look first at the activities of proper LeT operatives, then at a network centered around an independent operator in Hyderabad with ties to LeT and HuJI-B, and finally at the network that coalesced into the Indian Mujahideen.
Based in Uttar Pradesh, an LeT operative Salim (aka Salar) is alleged to have sent up to twenty Indian youths to Pakistan for training before police killed him in 2006. Sabauddin Ahmed, from Bihar, is his most famous recruit. He was among those who flocked to LeT after the Gujarat riots in 2002. That year, one of his fellow students at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), where SIMI was established, convinced him of the need to “fight against the injustice meted out to Muslims” and introduced him to Salim. Sabauddin returned to Indian in 2004 via Kathmandu, Dhaka, Colombo, and the United Arab Emirates, and established residence in Bangalore. One year later he and a Pakistani commander known as Abu Hamza (an alias) launched a Fidayeen assault at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
Abu Hamza escaped to Pakistan and Sabauddin fled to Nepal, where he went on to become a top LeT commander and allegedly oversaw the movement of operatives transiting between India and Pakistan. Sabauddin’s experience was relatively exceptional—most Indian militants enlisted by LeT were used to support or execute bombings, not high-profile Fidayeen assaults.
Salar’s base in the environs around AMU was one obvious area for recruitment. Mumbai was another. India’s largest city and its financial centre, it is the capital of Maharashtra, India’s wealthiest state and its second most populous. Mumbai draws millions of migrants every year, fuelling fierce competition for jobs and limited state resources and, with it, the rise of communal organizations such as the Shiv Sena. Founded in 1966, the Shiv Sena demanded preferential treatment for Marathi-speaking Maharashtrians over migrants—Hindu or Muslim—to the city. Within a decade, however, Shiv Sena was attempting to expand beyond its Maharashtra base. It evolved from advocating a purely Marathi agenda to supporting the broader Hindu nationalist and, elatedly, became involved in communal violence.
Many of the Muslims living in the city were already suffering from real and relative deprivation, and had experienced or at least lived in the shadow of communal violence that plagued the city on multiple occasions. Because of the sheer size of the population, the pool of possible would-be militants was larger than in many other areas. Moreover, the city’s status as a magnet for migrants ultimately enabled it to become a melting pot for those who did become involved in Islamist militancy. It also enabled foreign operatives from Pakistan or Bangladesh to blend in easily. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, as the largest city in India and its financial capital, Mumbai offered a plethora of possible targets for terrorist attacks. For example, the city was hit by a string of bombings in 2003. LeT members in Dubai are believed to have recruited the three Indians responsible for the August 25 blasts at the Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazaar in South Mumbai that killed fifty-two people.
The attack was intended to avenge those Muslims killed during the Gujarat riots. Rahil Abdul Rehman Sheikh, a native of Beed in Maharashtra who relocated to Mumbai, became another key LeT recruiter. Within a year of the Gujarat riots, he was arranging training for dozens of freshly motivated would-be militants. Many had filled SIMI’s ranks before its ban by India. Sheikh’s recruits often flew to Tehran (pretending to be Shia pilgrims) and then crossed the border into Balochistan. In addition to recruiting and facilitating travel to Pakistan, Sheikh also coordinated the receipt of weapons and explosives coming from Pakistan for use in terrorist attacks.
Syed Zabiuddin Ansari (aka Abu Jundal), a SIMI member also from Beed and one of Sheikh’s recruits, was tasked to take delivery of a shipment coming into Aurangabad. However, in April 2005, the Maharashtra police intercepted the massive weapons cache, which included 24 kilograms of RDX, along with grenades, assault rifles and ammunition, all shipped across the Indian Ocean by LeT. Additional consignments were recovered in the days that followed. In total, the Aurangabad arms haul, as it is known, included 43 kilograms of RDX, sixteen AK-forty-seven assault rifles, 3,200 live cartridges, sixty-two magazines for the rifles, and fifty hand grenades, making it one of the largest ever in Maharashtra. Incredibly, the Aurangabad arms haul was only part of a larger quantity of explosives LeT was smuggling into western India. For example, additional shipments flowed into Gujarat. Rahil Sheikh and Ansari absconded separately to Pakistan.
The latter rose through LeT’s ranks and was in its control room during the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Later, he became a LeT interface with the Indian Mujahideen. Many of the new Indian recruits motivated by the communal violence in Gujarat trained with LeT, but others were steered to JeM and HuJI. As Praveen Swami, a noted expert on Indian jihadist networks, observed, this was a “fluid dispersion of assets across organizational lines not seen before the 2002 [Gujarat] pogrom.” However, it is also important to note that, unlike LeT, Pakistan’s Deobandi groups, including JeM and HuJI, experienced internal turmoil after the Musharraf regime supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban. Moreover, LeT had the best Indian networks of any Pakistani jihadist group and so was best positioned to leverage the heightened interest among a subset of Indian Muslims in militancy after Gujarat. D-Company assisted with recruitment and facilitation. According to the testimony of Javed Hamidullah Siddiqui, a mafia operative arrested in 2004, it arranged passage to Pakistan for new recruits via Bangkok and Dhaka. Rasool Khan Yakub Khan Pathan, a mobster better known by his alias Rasool “Party” with long-standing connections to the now Pakistan-based Dawood Ibrahim, coordinated the process, receiving many of the recruits on their arrival in Karachi and helping to steer them toward the different militant groups ready to offer training.
It is unclear whether Pathan was doing this on Dawood’s behalf, with his blessing or whether this was an independent effort. A significant number of those who leveraged connections to Pathan came from Hyderabad. The capital of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad was nominally independent when India was under British rule, led by a Muslim Nizam but with a majority Hindu population. The Nizam declared his intention to remain independent after Partition, but the Indian army invaded in September 1948. Once his forces were defeated, the nizam agreed to Hyderabad’s accession to India. Communal tension had simmered in the decades leading up to India’s independence, and the new state became a flashpoint for Hindu-Muslim violence thereafter. Communal parties—Hindu and Muslim—predominated in the city’s politics and violence became institutionalized. Although communal parties often organized eruptions of violence, until the 1990s this took the form of rioting rather than terrorism attacks.
Azam Ghauri, one of TIM’s most prominent members and LeT’s first Indian operatives, was a Hyderabadi and his return to India in 1998 heralded the advent of terrorism in his native city. Ghouri leveraged strong anti-Hindu sentiment and drew on the Islamist infrastructure that existed. Notably, Hyderabad was an important ideological focal point for Lashkar-e-Taiba, which, because it had been under the rule of a Nizam, considers the city to be occupied Muslim land. Familial linkages with Pakistan, where many Hyderabadis fled following Partition, also helped to make the city an important safe haven and area of activity for Pakistani militants who infiltrated into India.
Hence, Hyderabadis remained active contributors to the burgeoning Indian jihadist project after Ghauri’s death in 2000.Beginning in September 2002, at least fourteen men from Hyderabad leveraged connections to Rasool “Party” to acquire training in Pakistan. Mohammad Abdul Sahed (aka Shahid Bilal) was at the centre of the network sending these men for training. Born in Bangladesh, Sahed became a resident of Hyderabad and a follower of Maulana Nasiruddin, a prominent local cleric who founded the Tehreek-Tahaffuz-e-Shaair-e-Islam (protection of Islamic shrines and monuments). Muslim persecution at home and abroad was a central theme of Nasiruddin’s sermons, which sometimes urged Hyderabadi youth to rebuild the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. The Gujarat riots fuelled the fire in Nasiruddin’s sermons and contributed to Sahed’s recruitment efforts. He leveraged connections to Rasool “Party” to facilitate travel and training there. Arrested militants, such as Sheikh Abdul Khwaja (aka Amjad), who took control of Sahed’s network after Sahed was mysteriously gunned down in Pakistan years later, told interrogators they were met at Karachi airport on arrival, escorted out of the airport without going through immigration, and then taken for training, often in LeT camps.
Sahed and a number of associates assassinated Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya in 2003 to avenge the communal riots that took place on his watch the previous year. Thereafter, Sahed fled to Pakistan, where he lived under Rasool Party’s protection and continued to facilitate recruitment of Hyderabadis for training in LeT camps. Sahed’s brother relocated to Saudi Arabia, where he assisted with these efforts.129 despite sending recruits to LeT camps, Sahed never joined the group, instead remaining independent and also working with HuJI’s Bangladeshi branch, HuJI-B. Sahed fled via Bangladesh, and appears to have returned there on occasion to recruit and facilitate training in Pakistan for Bangladeshi militants. He also turned to HuJI-B when weapons were needed for attacks in India, in return using his Hyderabad-based network to provide HuJI-B cells assistance with logistics, including the provision of safe houses and a communications infrastructure. During the early to mid-2000s, cells connected to Sahed’s network and to HuJI-B launched a number of bomb attacks. This included engineering a suicide bombing in Hyderabad. In October 2004, the Gujarat police killed a man named Salim, the son of another firebrand cleric, outside the Andhra Pradesh police’s counterterrorism Special Task Force headquarters in Hyderabad when they came to arrest Nasiruddin for 34 Stephen Tankel his alleged role in the Haren Pandya murder case. Sahed travelled to Bangladesh in 2005 to recruit a suicide bomber.
Leveraging his HuJI-B contacts, Sahed enlisted a Bangladeshi national, who blew himself up outside the Andhra Pradesh police’s counterterrorism Special Task Force headquarters in October 2005.The Indian Mujahideen launched its first attack in early 2005, but had begun coalescing several years earlier. In December 2001, the men who ultimately came together to form the IM constituted only another small call with ties to militant groups in Pakistan and Bangladesh. After the Gujarat police gunned down Asif Khan that month, Amir Raza Khan established the Asif Raza Commando Force (ARCF) in his honor and set out to avenge his brother. He enlisted several Indians, including Sadique Sheikh, as well as two Pakistani militants to execute an attack targeting the police. With Asif Khan’s death, Aftab Ansari had become the senior member of this cohort.
With his blessing, militants operating under the ARCF banner opened fire on police officers guarding the American Centre in Kolkata, killing six of them and injuring fourteen other people. The two Pakistanis were killed in Bihar, where they planned to escape across the border into Nepal. Aftab Ansari, Amir Raza Khan, and Sadique Sheikh all fled to Dubai, where Ansari’s luck ran out. He was arrested and became the first militant extradited to India from a Persian Gulf country. The remaining two men connected with Riyaz Shahbandri in Dubai. With Ansari in custody and Asif Khan dead, Amir Raza Khan assumed the leadership reins. In early 2002, he successfully relocated to Pakistan, where he became the key interface between LeT and the indigenous networks that evolved into the Indian Mujahideen.
On Amir Raza Khan’s instructions, Sadique Sheikh returned to India in late 2002 to launch another recruitment drive, this time focused on his native Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. During the next year, he transited between India, Dubai, and Pakistan, enlisting recruits who would form the sinews of the Indian Mujahideen. At the same time, the Shahbandri brothers were recruiting in the Pune–Maharashtra region and also leveraging Jihadist Violence: The Indian Threat 35 their connections to Amir Raza Khan to enable recruits’ travel to and from Pakistan.
In his new role as a Pakistan-based LeT interface for Indian jihadist networks, Amir Raza Khan facilitated training and travel for recruits via the provision of fake passports and financing. He also played a prominent role in procuring explosives, once again leveraging his late brother’s recruits. Operatives from HuJI-B had introduced Asif Khan to Jalaluddin Mullah, an Indian from West Bengal better known by his alias Babu Bhai, in 1994 when Babu Bhai was still a student at a Bangladesh madrassa. Six years later, Asif Khan hired Babu Bhai to work for him at a shoe shop, and used the opportunity to radicalize his employee. In April 2001, Babu Bhai agreed to go for training in Pakistan, travelling there via Bangladesh and meeting AftabAnsari in advance of his departure. He reportedly trained at a HuJI camp in Kotli, returning the following month. The short duration of his stay suggests Babu Bhai was not given extensive weapons or explosives training, and his ultimate role as a smuggler supports this contention.
After his involvement in Asif Khan’s kidnapping of Partho Roy Burman, vice chairman of Khadim Shoe Company, in which Aftab Ansari and Sadique Sheikh were also involved, Babu Bhai went underground. He resurfaced in 2003 and, on the instructions of a HuJI-B operative, traveled to Bangladesh. Amir Raza Khan, having travelled from Pakistan, met him there and instructed him to begin recruiting Indians for training in Pakistan and to help HuJI-B transit operatives and RDX into India. Prosecutors allege that in 2004 Riyaz Shahbandri brought various operators from the burgeoning jihadist movement together for a retreat in Bhatkal, their hometown in the state of Karnataka. His brother Iqbal, Sadique Sheikh, and others, some of who also trained with LeT, were present.
Together, these men formed the core of the Indian Mujahideen network. The same year, Babu Bhai helped to smuggle twenty packets (each weighing around 500 grams) of RDX to Varanasi. Located on the banks of the Ganges River in Uttar Pradesh, Hindus consider it to be one of the holiest seven 36 Stephen Tankel sacred cities. He delivered the RDX to a man investigators believe was Sadique Sheikh.142 On February 23, 2005, a pressure cooker containing RDX exploded in Varanasi at the Dasashwadmedha Ghat, the holiest bathing place for Hindus on the banks of the Ganges. It killed nine people. The Indian Mujahideen network had activated.
Source: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/jihadist-violence-the-indian-threat
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/jihadist-violence-indian-threat-3/d/35209