| India-Pakistan |
| Rahul Gandhi is right on Indian jihadists |
| 2013-11-09 |
[The Hindu] ... From placed in durance vileDon't shoot, coppers! I'm comin' out! Mumbai resident Sadiq Israr Sheikh's testimony to police, we know some on SIMI's radical fringes were craving for direct action. Born in 1978 to working class parents from the north Indian town of Azamgarh, Sheikh had grown up in Mumbai's Cheetah Camp housing project. In 1996, he began attending SIMI gatherings -- polite tea-and-biscuits affairs that he would eventually storm out of, frustrated by endless discussion. Late in 2001, he ran into a distant relative, Salim Islahi, the son of a Jamaat-e-Islami ... The Islamic Society, founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka The Great Apostosizer. The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an independentbranch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores... -linked holy man who was himself expelled from the organization for his extremism. Islahi, later controversially killed by police, allegedly arranged for Sheikh to travel to Pakistain for training in September 2001. His story wasn't uncommon: other SIMI friends like computer engineer Abdul Subhan Qureshi made the journey to the Lashkar-e-Taiba ...the Army of the Pure,an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI... 's camps at about the same time. From 2002, when this core leadership returned to India, it found fertile ground: Gujarat ...where rioting seems to be a traditional passtime... persuaded younger recruits that India's claims to secularism and democracy were a sham. SIMI's wellsprings gave birth to small jihadist cells across India. Peedical Abdul Shibly and Yahya Kamakutty, highly successful computer professionals, are alleged to have prepared to carry out attacks in Bangalore. Feroze Ghaswala, another alleged Indian Mujahideen A locally recruited auxilliary of Pakistain's Lashkar-e-Taiba, designed to give a domestic patina to Pakistain's terror war against its bigger neighbor... recruit, told police he volunteered for joining jihad training after witnessing the mass burial of 40 Gujarat riot victims. Kerala men trained in the mountains of Jammu and Kashmire with the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Zabiuddin Ansari, from Maharashtra's Aurangabad, famously ended up in the 26/11 control room. From the investigations of the Patna and Bodh Gaya bombings, we know the recruitment continues, often carried out by old SIMI cadre, drawing on an anger which every new communal confrontation fuels. "You have provoked the Mujahideen to massacre you and your five-and-a-half crore multitude of pathetic infidels," read the bitter Indian Mujahideen manifesto released after the 2008 serial bombings in New Delhi, "who tortured us in the post-Godhra riots asking 'where is your Allah'?" "Here He Is" 'Purely Indian' It is interesting that the Indian Mujahideen never dropped its national identification from the name. In the 2007 manifesto, it said this: "We are not any foreign mujahideen nor we have any attachment with neighbouring countries. We are purely Indian." In a later manifesto, the group called itself "the home-grown jihadi militia of Islam." Recently tossed in the slammer Drop the rosco, Muggsy, or you're one with the ages! Indian Mujahideen operative Ahmed Siddibapa, also known as Yasin Bhatkal, is reported to have told the National Investigations Agency that he refused to train in Pakistain for these reasons. The India of an Indian jihad shouldn't surprise us. From the work of chronicler Zain al-Din Maabari, we know self-described jihadis waged war against Portugese colonial forces more than 200 years ago. The eminent historian, Ayesha Jalal, has shown the notion of jihad was an important ideological theme through the 18th and 19th centuries. Following the 2008 bombings in Delhi, the Indian Mujahideen actually invoked this heritage: "We have carried out this attack in the memory of two most eminent Mujahids of India: Sayyed Ahmed Shaheed and Shah Ismail Shaheed, who had raised the glorious banner of Jihad against the disbelievers in this very city of Delhi." Like all other modern ideologies, Islamism offers believers a road map for action. It has been a fringe tendency, drawing far fewer supporters among Indian Musselmens than the Congress, the Left and perhaps even the BJP -- but its durability points to deep tears in our social fabric. Investigations of the Patna and Bodh Gaya blasts have shown the obvious: even as police and intelligence services have registered important successes in the battle against jihadist terrorism, the fractures in our society have enabled recruits to be drawn from a new generation. Pakistain's intelligence services and their jihadist proxies will exploit the dysfunctions in our polity, until India's political life addresses them. For years now, it has suited a wide spectrum of Indian political opinion to simply deny this problem exists. The forces behind the silence are remarkably wide -- among them, Hindu nationalists, unwilling to acknowledge their role in giving birth to jihadist terror; opportunists trying to cash in on Musselmen fears; ideologues sympathetic to Islamists. Mr. Gandhi's intervention, inchoate and fumbling, won't solve the problem. It does, though, open the door to the truth-telling that is a precondition for healing. For that, India ought to be grateful. |
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| India-Pakistan |
| Kerala computer engineers story casts light on jihad in India |
| 2009-05-08 |
| Late last year, four Keralites training with a Lashkar-e-Taiba unit in the Kupwara mountains, along the Line of Control in northern Kashmir, were shot dead by security forces. And since the September shootout, the police in Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala have been scrambling to unravel the threads that tied Indian Mujahideen groups in the south to each other and to the Lashkar. But the investigations also show that the Indian Mujahideen was fed and watered by transnational financial networks: networks linked both to diasporic Islamists living in west Asia and Pakistan-based organisations like the Lashkar. From the story of Ernakulam-born computer engineer Sarfaraz Nawaz, who was expelled by the Oman authorities earlier this year, investigators have been able to understand the relationship between domestic terror and diaspora cash. Like so many Indian Mujahideen-linked figures, Nawazs journey into jihad began in the Students Islamic Movement of Indias study groups. Nawaz began attending SIMI meetings in 1995, soon after he graduated from high school. He became an Ikhwan or full-time SIMI member within a year and by March 2000 was made a member of the now-proscribed Islamist organisations central committee. While in New Delhi, where he also served as the SIMIs office secretary, Nawaz developed a close relationship with several key members of what would later become the organisations jihad faction, including Safdar Nagori, Yahya Kamakutty and Peedical Abdul Shibly. When the SIMI was proscribed in 2001, Nawaz decided to move abroad. He first found work in a computer firm operating out of Ibra, in Oman, and later joined the Ajman-based Ibn Sina Medical Centre, which was owned by the former Kerala SIMI president Abdul Ghafoor. Later, other SIMI contacts helped him to find a job in Dubai. Finally, in July 2006 Nawaz moved back to Muscat and began working at the al-Noor Education Trust, which offered computer courses. Newly married and prosperous, Nawaz appeared to live the kind of quiet life most in the Indian diaspora aspire to. But the Oman authorities now believe the appearance was intended to deceive. Soon after returning to Muscat, the investigators say, Nawaz made contact with Abdul Aziz al-Hooti, a Muscat-based businessman with substantial interests in the automobile business and the Lashkar. Hooti, in turn, introduced Nawaz to a ranking Pakistani Lashkar operative, who is so far known only by the aliases Rehan and Wali. Early in 2008, the police in Hyderabad and Bangalore believe, Nawaz and Rehan met in Dubai to finalise funding for two important projects. In Hyderabad, fugitive Indian Mujahideen commander Tadiyantavide Nasir was preparing several Keralites to journey across the Line of Control to Lashkar training camps in Pakistan. Nasir used his position as an instructor at the citys Jamia Arifiya Nooriya seminary to recruit volunteers. He set up a safe house in Madikere, near Coorg, for their basic indoctrination. In August, 2008, Rehan allegedly provided the funds and contacts that led the first group of volunteers travel to Jammu and Kashmir. The Indian Mujahideen units also needed funding, Nawaz was told, to execute a series of bombings in Bangalore. Rehan and Hooti, the Bangalore police say, asked Nawaz to travel to India for an on-site briefing about these plans. Both men were evidently impressed by what he found, for an estimated 2,500 Oman Rials was despatched to the Indian Mujahideen through a Kannur-based hawala dealer. Later, the investigators say, Dhaka-based Lashkar operative Mubashir Shahid provided more money to secure Nasirs escape into Bangladesh and to compensate the families of the men killed in Jammu and Kashmir. Police officers involved in the Nawaz investigation believe that several similar funding networks fed different elements of the Indian Mujahideen. Indian Mujahideen co-founder Sadiq Sheikh, for example, lived in Dubai for several months with the help of ganglord Aftab Ansari and his lieutenant Amir Reza Khan. During his stay, Sheikh said in a statement to the Hyderabad Police, he discovered that key Indian Mujahideen commander Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri also visited the city to raise funds. Sheikh never met with Shahbandris contacts, but it seems likely that Nawaz himself was in touch with several SIMI-linked figures who were engaged in fundraising for jihadist groups. Important among them was CAM Basheer, a fugitive SIMI leader, who is thought to be living in Sharjah using fake identification. Basheer, police sources say, visited Nawaz in Muscat at least once and carried funds intended to facilitate Nasirs efforts to recruit jihadists in Kerala. Maulana Abdul Bari, a Hyderabad cleric last sighted in Saudi Arabia, is also thought to have raised funds in the diaspora for the training of jihadist cadre recruited in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. |
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| India-Pakistan |
| New leads emerge on SIMI terror plans |
| 2008-04-02 |
| Students Islamic Movement of India leaders conducted at least three secret combat camps last year, police investigating a group of top SIMI leaders held in Indore believe. New recruits were taught basic jungle-craft, elementary marksmanship with air-rifles and the principles of bomb-making, police sources told The Hindu. SIMIs leading bomb-maker, Mumbai-based Mohammad Subhan alleged to have been linked to the perpetrators of the 2003 Gateway of India terror strike was the principal instructor at the camps. Investigators believe the first of these camps was held in the third week of April, 2007, near Hubli in Karnataka. The camp was organised by SIMIs south India chief, Hafiz Husain, and Shibli Peedical Abdul, an Idukki-born computer engineer who is alleged to have links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror cell which carried out the 2006 serial bombings in Mumbai. Operating under the code-name Adnan, Husain had overseen the large-scale expansion of SIMIs operations in Karnataka. A resident of Bijapurs Jamia Road area, Husain ran a network of religious front organisations through which SIMI drew much of its cadre. Abdul, who worked as a computer engineer with a multinational company in Bangalore, was among his key lieutenants. Several of their recruits are thought to have worked with Andhra Pradesh-based Lashkar operative Raziuddin Nasir in an abortive plot to stage bombings targeting western tourists in Goa. Among them was Yahya Kamakutty, a computer engineer drawn to SIMI through SARANI, a front organisation headed by Abdul. Nasir, Kamakutty and several other members of the cell were held in Bangalore last month. Police sources say similar training camps were held by SIMI at Mhow, Madhya Pradesh, in late October, 2007, and then near Kottayam, Kerala, in December, 2007. In each case, front organisations controlled by SIMI made arrangements for the camps, while cadre told their families they were travelling to retreats to further their religious education. Preparations Documents sized at SIMIs Indore safe-house suggest the training camps could have been preparatory exercises for a programme of continued selective violence agreed on at closed-door discussions between top SIMI leaders after the Hubli camp. SIMI planned to contact fraternal organisations, including the Taliban, to seek further resources for its campaign. SIMIs jihadist leadership also decided to resume publication of three jihadist magazines, Jihad: Fitr-e-Jamhooriyat [Jihad: The Commencement of Democracy] and Aaiye, Jannat ki Sair Karaein [Welcome to the Journey Into Paradise]. Publication of the magazines had been terminated by SIMIs last president, Shahid Badr Falahi, in an effort to distance the organisations leadership from jihadists. At Hubli, SIMIs leadership sought to outflank anti-jihad Islamists led by Falahi, by abolishing the central committee he controls. The leadership also forbade the organisation from participating in politics and, most important, abolished the age limit for membership allowing pro-jihad leader Safdar Nagori to remain in the organisation. Nagori, secretary-general of the organisation at the time of its proscription in 2001, was among the 13 SIMI leaders held in Indore last week. Wanted by police in half a dozen States, including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi, Nagori believed to be the principal architect of SIMIs turning to the jihad had evaded arrest since 2001. |
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