JAMAAT-E-ISLAMI, HIZBUL MUJAHIDEEN & AL QAEDA
by B. Raman
US intelligence officers posted in Pakistan have
reportedly been making detailed enquiries into the likely links of the
Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of Pakistan headed by Qazi Hussain Ahmed with Al
Qaeda of Osama bin Laden. These enquiries are reported to have been
started following the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, supposedly No. 3
in Al Qaeda, in March from the house of a women's wing leader of the JEI
at Rawalpindi in an area where many serving and retired officers of the
Pakistan Army live.
2. Earlier this year, two other suspected cadres of Al
Qaeda were arrested from the house of another JEI member in Karachi.
These arrests have given rise to a suspicion that JEI office-bearers and
cadres not only in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan,
but also in other parts of Pakistan have been helping the surviving
members of Al Qaeda who crossed over into Pakistan from Afghanistan in the
beginning of last year.
3. After the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his
handing over to the USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had organised separate
briefings for foreign and Pakistani journalists at the ISI
headquarters. At those briefings, in response to questions about any
links between the JEI and Al Qaeda, Maj. Gen.Rashid Quereshi, who was then
the media spokesman of President Pervez Musharraf, had claimed that the
fact that some Al Qaeda members were arrested from the houses of
individual JEI members did not mean that the JEI as an organisation was
having links with Al Qaeda.
4. However, the US intelligence officers, who have been
interrogating Khalid Sheikh Mohammad at a place outside Pakistan, do not
appear to be convinced that this was just the rogue actions of some
individual members of the JEI, of which the JEI leaders were not
aware. Their concerns over possible links between the JEI and Al
Qaeda have been heightened by the newly-established links of the Hizbe
Islami (HI) of Gulbuddin Heckmatyar with Al Qaeda and the Taliban to
harass the American troops in Afghanistan.
5. Of all the Islamic fundamentalist parties of
Pakistan, the JEI had been the closest to the HI and had maintained
contacts with Gulbuddin even when he and his associates were living in
Iran with the knowledge of the Iranian Government. After 9/11,
Teheran, under pressure from the US, expelled them from Iranian territory.
They were welcomed in Pakistani territory by the JEI and sympathetic
serving and retired officers of the ISI and given shelter in the border
areas.
6. The "Khabrain", an Urdu journal published
from Lahore, has reported as follows: "If during the interrogation of
Khalid by the FBI it is proved that the jihadi wing of the JEI has been
co-operating with Al Qaeda and providing finance to them, then the US
Government's special department "Office of the Co-Ordinator For
Counter-Terrorism" may recommend to the Department of Justice as well
as the US State Department to include the JEI in the list of
terrorist organisations of the world. Reliable sources have revealed
that the Co-ordinator For Counter-Terrorism Department has already started
collecting information regarding the JEI's activities after Khalid's
arrest."
7. It is learnt that, simultaneously, US intelligence
officers in Pakistan have also been making enquiries about the links of
the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) of Jammu & Kashmir with the JEI of Pakistan
as well as with the HI of Gulbuddin and Al Qaeda. The HM was formed
in 1990 at the initiative of the ISI and the JEI by merging nearly a dozen
small terrorist organisations of J&K and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK).
Its leader Syed Salahuddin lives partly in Rawalpindi and partly in the
POK. Its offices in Pakistan, including the POK, are generally
located in the offices of the JEI, which looks after the financial needs
of the HM.
8. Before the Taliban captured power in Kabul in
September, 1996, the recruits of the HM used to be trained in training
camps in Afghan territory by instructors of Gulbuddin. The Taliban,
which was then opposed to the HI, ordered the HM to close down its
training camps and expelled all HM office-bearers based in Afghan
territory. Since then, the HM recruits are trained in the POK by the
ex-servicemen in the JEI and armed by the ISI.
9. Concerned over the links of the HM with the JEI and
the HI, the Counter-Terrorism Division of the US State Department in its
report on the Patterns of Global Terrorism during 2002 released last month
has placed not only the HM, but also the Al Badr and the
Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, both associated with the JEI and the HI, in the list
of "other terrorist organisations". This list includes the
names of those organisations which, in the US judgement, have also been
indulging in terrorist activities, but the evidence against them regarding
their likely involvement in terrorism directed against the US is not
strong enough to warrant their being declared as Foreign Terrorist
Organisations under a 1996 law, which entails some punitive consequences
such as freezing of funds etc.
10. The US action to categorise the HM, the Al Badr and
the Jamiat-ul-Mujashideen as terrorist organisations was triggered off not
so much by their activities in J&K, as by their links with the JEI,
the HI and possibly Al Qaeda too. The US State Department report
states as follows on the HM: "The group is the militant wing of
Pakistan’s largest Islamic political party, the Jamaat-i-Islami. It
currently is focused on Indian security forces and politicians in Kashmir
and has conducted operations jointly with other Kashmiri militants.
It reportedly operated in Afghanistan through the mid-1990s and trained
alongside the Afghan Hizb-I-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) in Afghanistan until
the Taliban takeover. The group, led by Syed Salahuddin, is made up
primarily of ethnic Kashmiris. Currently, there are visible splits
between Pakistan-based commanders and several commanders in
Indian-occupied Kashmir."
11. The recently-announced curbs by the Pakistan
Government on fund collection and other similar activities by the HM in
Pakistani territory would seem to be more in response to US concerns over
its activities and its links with the JEI and the HI than in
response to Indian demands for action against it. It remains to be
seen how far the Musharraf regime vigorously enforces these curbs, of
which there is little evidence so far.
12. Qazi Hussain Ahmed has, in the meanwhile, denounced
attempts to link the JEI with Al Qaeda as a conspiracy and denied any such
links. At the same time, the JEI has reportedly asked the HM offices
located in its buildings to shift elsewhere. It has disputed the US
State Department's description of the HM as its militant wing.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director,
Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Convenor, Advisory Committee,
Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com).
