Terror factory back in business

Wilson John

While the entire world is preoccupied and concerned with a headstrong US President George W Bush pushing the world towards a needless and disastrous war, his friend in Pakistan, the General, is quietly reopening terror factories that were shut down, temporarily, following the WTC attack.

In December last, General Pervez Musharraf let off Hafiz Sayeed and Masood Azhar on a legal loophole that he had deliberately created when the two terrorist leaders were locked up after Washington told the General to comply. Sayeed is the founding father and leader of Markaz Dawa-Wal-Irshad (since renamed Jama'at ud-Da'awa), a religious extremist organisation the avowed mission of which is to liberate Kashmir, Hyderabad and Gujarat from India.

To achieve this objective, it raised and trained a terrorist force called the Lashkar-e-Toiba that has been operating from its headquarters in Muridke, a small town near Lahore in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Azhar is the leader of another equally committed terrorist group, Jaish-e-Mohammad.

Disconcertingly enough, both Sayeed and Azhar, otherwise quite vocal, have remained quiet after their release. Their movements and activities have been camouflaged under the garb of religious meetings. Both Lashkar and Jaish remain banned and most of their office continued to be padlocked after General Musharraf banned them last January. Barring a few incidents in India, their terrorist activities too have been unusually tame. It could mean only one thing: Lashkar and Jaish are regrouping, realigning and could be expected to re-emerge in the summer months, either targeting India or US interests, depending on whether there is a war in Iraq.

The smoke from the terror factories is becoming visible. Lashkar-e-Toiba is at present busy expanding and consolidating its network within Pakistan and outside, including India. Within Pakistan, it is planning to expand its base to Sindh, a potentially explosive region that has been afflicted with bloody ethnic and sectarian clashes since 1947. Sindh also happens to be closer to the Indian States of Rajasthan and Gujarat, two areas where Lashkar and its proxy Indian organisations have been busy setting up a network in the past several years.

Part of Lashkar's expansion plan is to buy properties in "every district'' of Pakistan. The group is now concentrating on Sindh. The objective is to set up madrasas and training camps in interior Sindh. At present, Lashkar runs about 20 madrasas and 30 schools in Sindh. A sum of $ 300 million has been kept aside for this purpose. Properties have been acquired in Gumbat, Khasmore, Larkana, Mahrabpur, Shahdadkot and Sukkur, with plans to buy land in interior Sindh in the months to come. Vacant properties for setting up new training camps were also being acquired. One such camp, Markaz Mohammad bin Qasim, has come up near Shehdadopur. The group is planning to set up at least four other centres in Sindh.

Four plots have already been bought in Hyderabad division and six in other parts of Sindh for about Rs 200 million. A 20,000 square feet plot of land has been brought on Khoasi Road, Badin, for five million rupees. Another 43,000 sq ft have been acquired in Mitali for Rs 100 million. A new madrasa is being built on Hala Road, Hyderabad city. Similarly another plot has been bought in Tando Allan Yar.

This real estate buying spree by a terrorist organisation banned by the US State Department (and now the Russian Supreme Court) should be viewed in two contexts-Indian and global.

Unlike Harkat or Hizb-ul Mujahideen or Jaish, Lashkar is not a Deobandi organisation nor limited to a particular geographical zone. While the former three groups are local in character, Lashkar has a wider network of associations and affiliations. Lashkar, for instance, has benefactors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The sprawling Lashkar campus at Muridke where terrorists were recruited and trained, was constructed with the help of Saudi money. A United Nations study last year found that Lashkar bought its weapons from Cambodian arms traffickers, a pointer to its links with transnational criminal syndicates and terror groups of south east Asia.

Lashkar's Indian connections are no secret but are not known in depth. Ahle Hadis is a Muslim charitable and religious organisation headquartered in Moradabad. It is one of Lashkar's front organisations in India. Another known affiliate is the newly emerging Muslim Defence Force in South India. Hadis had been involved in a series of bomb blasts in and around Delhi after the demolition of Babri Masjid. One of the most wanted Ahle Hadis man in India is Abdul Karim alias Tunda who fled to Muzaffarabad after engineering bomb blasts in Delhi and Haryana, and took over as Deputy Commander of Lashkar's India operations.

The Muslim Defence Force was founded in Saudi Arabia by Abu Hamsa (35) of Hyderabad and has branches in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, apart from Andhra Pradesh. It has a branch in Pakistan also. Abu Hamsa's real name is Abdul Bari. Hamsa had earlier teamed up with another Muslim extremist, Azam Ghori, to set up the Indian Muslim Mohammedi Mujahideen (IMMM). The IMMM was responsible for the bomb blasts in Hyderabad, Karim Nagar and Nizamabad.

Ghori hailed from Hanmajjpet in Warangal district and was a member of the outlawed People's War Group almost a decade ago after one of his hands was injured in a grenade attack. He shifted to Mumbai, from where he crossed over to Saudi Arabia and was recruited by Hamid Bahajib, a Saudi moneybag who has been financing Lashkar's activities for long. Ghori received training in explosives at the terrorist training camps run by the Taliban in Afghanistan and landed in Hyderabad to head the IMMM.

Ghori was a close associate of Tunda. Both were members of Ahle Hadis and involved in planning and executing several terrorist attacks after the Babri Masjid demolition.

The Lashkar connection could be further corroborated by two incidents that were hardly noticed by the general media. On February 29, 2000, several newspapers in Andhra Pradesh received a small note announcing the creation of the IMMM. The note was circulated a few days after the three-day annual conference of Markaz Dawa-wal-Irshad, the parent organisation of Lashkar, decided to set up a new unit in Hyderabad.

Far more significant is the least known import of the reemergence of Lashkar on the global context. With the disruption of the Al Qaeda and other similar terror networks following the 9/11 attack, it is Lashkar that will, and is, spearheading the Islamic jihad. It is a Wahabi organisation, unlike other terror groups that follow Deobandi tradition. Wahabis are more orthodox than Deobandis. The Saudi rulers are Wahabis and have been the most generous contributors for the Wahabi cause in the past several years. A conservative estimate put Saudi Arabia's annual contribution to the Islamic cause (camouflaged as religious, educational and charitable) at over $ 10 billion.

Lashkar has, like the Al Qaeda, a wide network of associations and affiliations across the globe. In all probability, it is being resurrected as an alternative to the Al Qaeda headed by Osama bin Laden, the Saudi billionaire whose antipathy to the royal family is no secret. A resurgent Lashkar could effectively checkmate bin Laden without disrupting the radical Islamic cause.

The new Lashkar and its affiliates could-learning from the Al Qaeda's operational strategy-avoid spectacular attacks and instead concentrate on expanding its network across the globe. This deep and silent infiltration could take years, but produce far more spectacular results than the WTC attack.