The Jamestown Foundation does fantastic work on worldwide terrorism. I urge you to sign up for their email updates.
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Here is an example of the latest:
BANGLADESHI JIHAD MOVEMENT SENDS THREATS OF A NEW BOMBING CAMPAIGN BY REGISTERED MAIL
The Media Department of the Jamiat-ul-Mojahedin Bangladesh (JMB) has sent a package of threats and propaganda materials to Dhaka newspapers and Bangladeshi politicians by fax and registered mail. Together with threats of a bombing campaign during the December 29 parliamentary elections (the first since the military enforced emergency rule in 2007), the JMB sent CDs containing video footage of JMB leaders, including footage of their arrests and court appearances following the nearly simultaneous explosion of roughly 400 bombs nationwide on August 17, 2005. JMB leaders also urge jihad against the Bangladeshi secular judicial system, condemn the media and describe democracy as “a system of evil.” Bangladesh’s judicial system is a frequent target of the JMB, which regards it as a colonial holdover in need of being replaced by Islamic law. The CDs featured a statement by the movement’s late leader, Shaykh Abdur Rahman, who was executed for his role in the murder of two judges, and a Bengali translation of a statement by Osama bin Laden (Prothom Alo [Dhaka], December 3; New Nation [Dhaka], December 5). The movement is expected to seek revenge for the execution of Shaykh Abdur Rahman and five other top JMB leaders in March 2007. During emergency rule the JMB is believed to have regrouped and actually expanded its membership.
The JMB has the capability of following up on its threats. Recent seizures of JMB arms caches have revealed the group has developed the ability to manufacture sophisticated explosive devices made entirely from locally available materials (Indo-Asian News Service, November 18; Daily Star [Dhaka], November 18). The JMB’s explosives expert, “Boma” Mizan, was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison (bdnews24.com, November 25; Daily Star, November 26).
Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite counterterrorist unit, is currently engaged in operations against the JMB in northern Bangladesh designed to capture the group’s current Amir, Saidur Rahman (New Nation, December 5). Human rights organizations have accused RAB of torture, the death of innocent civilians and arbitrary violence. RAB is drawn from members of the nation’s army, air force, navy and police.
PAKISTAN’S “ANTI-TERRORIST” TALIBAN VOW TO FIGHT INDIA IF NECESSARY
Recent statements from Pakistani Taliban leaders suggest an Indian attack on Pakistan in response to alleged Pakistani responsibility for the Mumbai terrorist assault could do what the Pakistani military and politicians have been unable to do so far – bring the Pashtun militants of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) onside with the Pakistani government in a common cause.
Taliban spokesman Saifullah Akhtar announced the Taliban was ready to “annihilate” the 8,500 Indian troops it claims are operating in Afghanistan. Akhtar pledged the Taliban would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the Pakistani army if India “committed aggression” against Pakistan; “We’ll put all the differences aside at this juncture and unite… We’ll stand by the army against external powers… The Taliban are like lions before whom all the powerful have to bow down.” The Taliban spokesman added that Indians rather than the Taliban were responsible for the Mumbai attacks. According to Akhtar, the Taliban condemn the killing of innocent civilians and are “opposed to terrorism across the world” (Nawa-i-Waqt [Rawalpindi], December 3).
Though India is not part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Pakistan has recently complained about an un-mandated Indian military presence in Afghanistan (ANI, November 25). In 2006, India announced it would send 3,000 members of the paramilitary Indo-Tibetan Border Police to Afghanistan to guard Indians working on a new road between Kandahar and the Iranian port of Chabahar (Daily Times [Karachi], February 8, 2006). Great Britain has asked India in the past to commit troops to the ISAF mission (The Tribune [Chandigarh], May 2, 2006).
Maulvi Omar, another Taliban spokesman, was also quoted as saying the Taliban would defend the Line of Control (the unofficial military border between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir) in the same way they defend the Durand Line (the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan). Since the Taliban basically ignore the Durand Line, the meaning of Omar’s statement is somewhat elusive. Maulvi Omar added, “in the event of an Indian attack, we'll make it clear to the Pakistani people whether we are defenders of this country or militants” (Nawa-i-Waqt [Rawalpindi], December 3).
The Taliban’s newfound nationalism and opposition to terrorist attacks will come as a revelation to many. Pakistan’s regular forces are unlikely to accept Taliban assistance in any but the most extreme circumstances, though the option may be preferable to leaving the NWFP in Taliban hands in order to move Pakistani military assets currently deployed there up to the border with India. A major military withdrawal from the NWFP and tribal agencies would effectively leave Taliban and al-Qaeda elements free to operate in the area just as Pakistani forces have taken the initiative in a large regional offensive. It would also disturb the United States, which is encouraging Pakistan to intensify its campaign against the militants. The Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, was in Pakistan earlier this month to urge Pakistan to take “more concerted action against militant extremists elsewhere in the country,” according to a U.S. embassy statement (Reuters, December 3).
Jihadis React to Mumbai Attacks
Jihadi forum members have been eager to learn anything about the Mumbai terror attacks, hoping for clues that al-Qaeda has perpetrated, in a jihadi perspective, these “great and admirable attacks.” In response to this interest, the jihadi forums have circulated an analytical article about the Mumbai attacks by the Kuwaiti Salafi cleric Hamid al-Ali (h-alali.org, December 1). Al-Ali is on the U.S. list of terrorism supporters and financiers and is best known for his early 2001 fatwa (religious ruling) approving the use of suicide attacks, including flying an aircraft into a building (see Terrorism Monitor, April 26, 2007). Al-Ali’s article received over fifteen hundred hits in on day and was reposted in major jihadi forums and websites (muslm.net, December 2; alboraq.info, December 2; hanein.info, December 2).
In an article entitled, “The Secret Behind India’s Joy over the Mumbai Incident,” Hamid al-Ali alleges that the attacks came right after a training exercise for U.S. officials in which a map of Pakistan was included in the training scenario showing Pakistan dismantled into smaller states. The Mumbai attacks followed this conspiracy by the United States and India, says al-Ali, claiming that the end objective is to dismantle the only Islamic country armed with nuclear weapons.
The map in question was first published to accompany an article by retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters in the June 2006 issue of Armed Forces Journal, but copies are only now being circulated in Pakistan as proof of America’s intention to dismember Pakistan by joining the North-West Frontier Province to Afghanistan and severing Baluchistan as part of a new “Free Baluchistan,” leaving the remainder of “natural” Pakistan as a much reduced nation lying almost entirely east of the Indus River. Al-Ali’s “training exercise for U.S. officials” is just part of the mythology that has grown around this document as it circulates in Pakistan.
An Islamabad daily mocked the importance ascribed to this map by Pakistan’s elites:
The debacle of 1971 taught us that it is dangerous for a country to be cocooned in an artificial sense of immortality. But it is also disempowering and futile for a nation to live with the paranoia of imminent death. Not a day goes by without our prophets of doom (who incidentally are often proponents of non-representative power elites in Pakistan) bellowing that a US-led global plot to divide Pakistan into pieces is close to fruition. Their smoking gun is a redrawn map of Pakistan (now widely redistributed over the Internet) that was published by the Armed Forces Journal in 2006. There are thousands of such journals in the US that publish all kinds of crazy ideas produced by analysts and think tanks. But our conspiracy-mongers are convinced that this lone article is irrefutable proof that "America" wishes Pakistan's dismemberment (The News [Islamabad], November 29).
According to al-Ali, India sides with the Zionists, occupies Pakistani Kashmir against the well of its Muslim majority and commits heinous crimes against Kashmiris. Al-Ali reminds his readers that India also backed Bangladesh against Pakistan in the 1971 war of Bengali secession. India’s Hindus were alarmed when the Taliban began to exert power and influence in nuclear-armed Pakistan and began supporting Kashmiri Muslims’ aspirations for independence. Therefore, the hidden agenda of India aims to penetrate Afghanistan under the U.S. umbrella, with Israeli cooperation, to eliminate jihad and the Islamic movements.
Secondly, India is endeavoring to dismantle Pakistan under the pretext that Pakistan is the springboard for all global jihadi movements. Al-Ali reiterates India’s role in instigating the West against Pakistan. India’s argument, says al-Ali, is that the “Taliban movement sprung from Pakistan, where the most dangerous terrorists reside in Pakistan’s Waziristan. Pakistan is overloaded with religious schools filling Muslims’ minds with Takfiri ideology. Pakistan is the only Islamic nuclear state vehemently interacting with Islamic issues.” Al-Ali goes on to elucidate the many services and favors India rendered to Israel to win the support of the West against Pakistan. Finally, al-Ali predicts Indian escalation and possible all out war, backed by the United States, against the mujahideen in Kashmir with the collusion of the corrupt president of Pakistan, Asif Zardari.
Al-Ali’s analysis received many comments from jihadi forum members. Although corroborating al-Ali’s conspiracy theory in general, some jihadi forum chatters raised three main arguments on the Mumbai attacks. One forum member disagreed with al-Ali’s insinuation that the Indian intelligence services were behind the attacks with the intent of undermining Pakistan, saying “It’s insane to think that such young men would pay with their lives for India’s possible political conspiracy against Pakistan.” Other critics, working on the assumption that the Pakistani Taliban was responsible, rebuffed the premise that the group had made a strategic mistake by attacking India. On the contrary, the Taliban would force Pakistan to redeploy its military from the border with Afghanistan to the border with India, consequently relieving pressure on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Another forum member posted a summary of what he claimed was a Rand Corporation study predicting the partition of Pakistan into small emirates as a result of religious, ethnic and sectarian rivalry. Small political entities would emerge from the dismantling of Pakistan in Baluchistan, Sindh, and Punjab.
Some forum members believe that the Mumbai perpetrators are Muslims from Pakistani- controlled Kashmir. Without consideration to the repercussions on Pakistani-Indian political affairs, the attackers struck Mumbai to seek revenge Hindu violations of Muslim honor. A link to a free file-hosting website was posted in muslm.net showing instances of Hindu aggression against Indian Muslims; thereafter even moderate Islamic forum members were convinced the Mumbai attacks were justified.
The majority of forum members are convinced that al-Qaeda was involved in the attacks one way or another, pointing to a video by al-Qaeda delivered to news agencies in the Indian city of Sringar last year. In the alleged al-Qaeda video a man calling himself Abu Abdulrahman al-Ansari claimed to be a high ranking member of al-Qaeda and threatened to wage holy war against India (abrar.org June 8, 2007). Whether the Pakistani army decides to track down Islamic movements in Kashmir or is forced into a confrontation with the Indian army, it will ease Pakistani pressure on the tribal areas where the Pakistani Taliban operates.
Abdul Hameed Bakier is an intelligence expert on counter-terrorism, crisis management and terrorist-hostage negotiations. He is based in Jordan.
Mumbai Terror Investigation Leads to Pakistan’s “Epicenter of Terrorism”
Two weeks after the deadly Mumbai terrorist incidents which claimed 164 lives, including security forces personnel and foreign nationals, Indian investigating agencies have been struggling to unearth a terror trail that appears to point directly towards neighboring Pakistan.
In one of the most prolonged and deadly terrorist attacks the country has ever seen, at least ten Muslim terrorists entered Mumbai on November 26 using sea routes to perpetrate mindless carnage at several places, including the main railway station, a hospital and two luxury hotels. The terrorists holed up in three South Mumbai buildings – the Taj Mahal hotel, the Oberoi-Trident hotel and the Nariman House (a Jewish center), taking guests and inmates as hostage. After a fierce 60 hour long operation, India’s elite security forces rescued most of the hostages while killing nine terrorists and capturing one. The sole prisoner was identified as Muhammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, a resident of Okara, Pakistan and presently in the custody of the Mumbai Police.
An unknown militant group, the Deccan Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the Mumbai attacks. The same group also issued a threat to blow up major airports across the country a week after the Mumbai events (Financial Express [Mumbai], December 4). However, for some time now this name-game has been a part of an attempt by Pakistan-based terror groups to give a homegrown Indian flavor to the ongoing jihadi terrorism in the region. In the last few years, names like Lashkar-e-Qahar, Indian Mujahideen, Tehriq-e-Qasas and Inquilabi Mahaz have been floated, perhaps to divert attention from the Pakistan-based terror groups.
Interrogations and circumstantial evidence suggest the complicity of a Pakistan-based and Kashmir-centric Islamist group, the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Meanwhile, Mumbai police have released photos of the terrorists and traced their place of origin to Pakistan’s Punjab province, based on the evidence gathered and the confession of Kasab, the sole surviving terrorist (Times of India, December 9). Three of the ten terrorists were from Okara, three were from Multan, two were from Faisalabad, and one each from Sialkot and Dera Ismail Khan.
The probe so far has pointed to four LeT operatives. The “masterminds” are identified as Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, who was seized by Pakistani police after a raid on a LeT camp in Kashmir, and Yusuf Muzammil, whose current whereabouts are unknown. Based on the results of police interrogations, two individuals identified as Abu Hamza and Khafa have been named as trainers who provided maritime lessons and training in the handling of explosives and weapons (Times of India, December 6; Daily Times [Lahore], December 12). According to Rakesh Maria, the Joint Commissioner of Police and a lead investigator in the Mumbai attacks, Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD, a charity and front organization for LeT) chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed was also involved with Lakhvi, Hamza and Kahfa in the Mumbai plot, from planning to execution (Press Trust of India, December 10). Earlier, government sources claimed that the investigators had “incontrovertible proof” of the names of the ISI handlers and trainers and the locations in Pakistan where the terrorist training was carried out. Police also claimed to have recovered some of terrorists’ communications through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) (The Hindu, December 5). With the help of foreign investigating agencies, especially the FBI, Mumbai police tracked the VoIP number brought from Orlando, Florida, which was used by the terrorists to talk to Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, who is currently under detention in Pakistan along with 20 other LeT and Jaysh-e-Mohammed operatives (Indian Express, December 10).
The fishing trawler in which the terrorists reached the Mumbai coast, the MV Kuber, had an inventory of items that established a Pakistani hand in the attacks, including wheat flour, dental gel and shaving cream all bearing “Made in Pakistan” tags. The Thuraya satellite phone recovered from the abandoned trawler contained records of a conversation between LeT chief Yusuf Muzammil, based in the Kashmiri city of Muzafarabad, and an individual known as Yahya, believed to be a point man for the LeT and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) in Bangladesh. Yahya reportedly arranged SIM (subscriber identity module) cards and fake ID cards, primarily from countries like Mauritius, the UK, the United States and Australia. The satellite phone also has records of calls traced to Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi in Jalalabad in Afghanistan (Times of India, November 30).
Interrogation of the lone surviving terrorist has revealed details of LeT training camps in Danna, Abdul-Bin-Masud, Mangla Dam, Akas, Um-Al-Qura, Badli and Muzafarabad in Pakistan-Administered Kashmir. Mumbai’s Crime Branch denied the involvement of more than ten terrorists in these multiple attacks, adding that the terrorists behind the Mumbai attacks were trained at four places inside Pakistan: Manshera, Muridke, Muzafarabad and Karachi (Daily News and Analysis [Mumbai], December 7).
Tausif Rehman and Mukhtar Ahmed (the latter a constable and former police informant) were two suspects apprehended in Kolkata and New Delhi, respectively, for their alleged role in supplying mobile SIM cards to the terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks (The Hindu, December 6). Investigating agencies have also tied two Indian men, Fahim Ansari and his close associate Sabahuddin Ahmed, to the Mumbai attacks. Ansari allegedly carried out reconnaissance missions in Mumbai and was arrested last February with a number of maps highlighting Mumbai landmarks in his possession. Both Ansari and Sabahuddin Ahmed have been in detention in Uttar Pradesh since their arrest in February in connection with a LeT attack on a police post in the Rampur district (Times of India, December 12).
There was certainly a massive intelligence failure that allowed terrorists to hit Mumbai while evading all security points. Officials at India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), claim to have sent relevant intelligence inputs to other security agencies, including the Mumbai Police, the Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Coast Guard prior to the attack. In return, Indian Coast Guard sources pointed fingers at the spy agency while describing how terrorists spread false information and managed to divert Coast Guard and Naval ships in the wrong direction to enter Indian territory by sea. Mumbai police and the IB also have refuted RAW’s claims of prior warning (CNN-IBN, December 3; Press Trust of India, December 3; for the Indian intelligence agencies, see Terrorism Monitor, March 24).
However, the ensuing blame game among security and intelligence agencies over “actionable inputs” notwithstanding, the newly appointed Home Minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, has admitted that there were intelligence and security lapses and has vowed to bring in a stringent anti-terror law, establish a federal investigating agency, and provide modernization packages for police and intelligence agencies to prevent future attacks by terrorists. He also vowed to introduce bills to strengthen the legal provisions relating to the prevention, investigation, prosecution and punishment of terrorist acts (Sify.com. December 11).
Meanwhile the United Nations Security Council’s Al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee imposed sanctions on Jamaat-ud-Dawa as well as Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and three others individuals, including Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, Haji Muhammad Ashraf (the Jamaat’s chief of finance) and Mahmoud Ahmed Bahaziq (Times of India, December 11). Under international pressure, Pakistan has initiated a crackdown against JuD’s establishments in Punjab province and its central office in Lahore (Geo TV News, December 12).
With the wealth of evidence available, the federal government and the investigating agencies, including the Anti-Terrorist Squad and the Crime Branch of the Mumbai Police, are confident in making a strong case against the Pakistan-based terrorist groups and their patrons in order to expose to the international community what Indian politicians have taken to describing as Pakistan’s “epicenter of terror.”
Animesh Roul is the Executive Director of Research at the New Delhi-based Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict (SSPC).
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