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Terror in the hands of a
teenager
By Rahul Bedi
JAMMU,
India - With his close-cut prison hairstyle and a
physique lean from weeks of training as a jihadi in
Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Mohammad Abdullah seems
even younger than the 17 years he claims to be.
But to the 28 people he helped massacre in
India's Jammu and Kashmir state in July, including 10
women and eight children, the slight youngster with
barely a hint of a moustache was considerably more
fearsome.
"I was not happy about it [killing
innocent people], but my controllers in Pakistan said it
was necessary to establish terror," Abdullah, captured
by Indian security forces in August, said in an
interview with Inter Press Service in Jammu.
The
city is the winter capital of the Himalayan state of
Kashmir, over which Pakistan and India have been locked
in dispute for more than half a century, and have fought
three wars. Violence has been a part of life in
Muslim-majority Kashmir, including in the months leading
up to the state election in Indian Kashmir, that began
on Monday.
"I had my orders [for the attack] and
had to follow them. It was not a question of liking the
job but of simply executing it," declared Abdullah, who
hails from Pakistan's Punjab province and operated under
the code name "Abu Talah".
He says he was in
eighth class when he was recruited into the
Lashkar-e-Toiba (Army of the Pure) militant group based
at Mudrike, near the border city of Lahore in Pakistan.
The Lashkar-e-Toiba is the militant wing of the Markaz
Dawa-ul-Irshad, a center for religious learning set up
in 1987 by Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, a professor at Lahore's
University of Engineering and Technology, who believes
that jihad has always been needed and that democracy is
a Western menace.
In January, Pakistan President
General Pervez Musharraf said that his country would
stop logistical support for militants operating from its
territory, a key issue in the Kashmir dispute. In June,
he told US officials that there would be a permanent
stop to infiltration into Kashmir, according to US State
Department briefings.
US
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, to whom Musharraf
had spoken, relayed this commitment to Indian officials
that month, at the height of the India-Pakistan standoff
that saw the deployment of 1 million troops on the border.
At the UN General Assembly last week, Musharraf
said that India had a large number of troops in Kashmir,
and could stop infiltration if there were any. Reacting
to the speech Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee said, "There is a limit to telling
lies."
Reported to be supported by Pakistan's
shadowy Inter Services Intelligence (ISI),
Laskhar-e-Toiba cadres began operating in Kashmir's
13-year old civil war in 1993, with the aim of achieving
Muslim unity through religious motivation.
Its
members are all non-Kashmiris, mostly Pakistanis and
Afghans, and several have been involved in Afghanistan's
civil wars. Lashkar-e-Toiba cadres were also killed in
the US-led battle for the northern Afghan city of
Mazar-e-Sharif in October last year.
Abdullah
says that he underwent advanced courses in guerrilla
warfare, including weapon and explosives training,
alongside 50 other youths at Aska near Muzaffarabad,
capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, for around 10
weeks. He also attended classes where he was influenced
to wage jihad in Kashmir to "liberate" fellow Muslims,
in an insurgency that has claimed over 35,000 lives.
"Our most senior instructor, in charge of all
our training camps, was Nasser Javed, a Pakistani who
had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. He also
fought with the Taliban, but had come back to Pakistan
to help with the jihad in Kashmir," Addullah said.
Abdullah, whose story and that of others
arrested like him were also shown on Indian television
ahead of the state polls, recalls that the trainees were
told that thousands of Muslims were being butchered in
Kashmir, their homes destroyed and their women raped.
"It made me very angry. On top of it all, it was very
hot in Multan, and the thought of doing something
adventurous in the mountains was very attractive," he
said.
The young militant, trained as a
fidayeen (suicide militant), later crossed the
Line of Control (LoC) that divides Kashmir between its
rival claimants, from Kotli in Pakistan. With the help of
mountain guides and Lashkar-e-Toiba "sleepers", he
arrived near Poonch, 250 kilometers north of Jammu, two
days before the July 13 attack, according to Indian army
officials in whose custody those like Abdullah are.
Along with Mohammad Adnan, another
teenage Lashkar-e-Toiba militant, he was ferried to
Jammu. Within hours, he had emptied four AK-47 assault
rifle magazines of 32 rounds each and lobbed five
grenades inside a crowded laborer colony in Jammu's Rajiv
Nagar. The two then fled into the nearby jungle. Adnan was
shot dead by police on August 2 and Abdullah was
arrested a day later.
Insurgents frequently make
the midnight run into Kashmir from a Pakistani army
border post to join their tanzems or militant
groups, officials say. On a signal from their guide,
they slither toward one of the Pakistan army's machine
gun nests along the 774 kilometer LoC.
The
tanzimi or administrator hands a promissory note
to the guide that is to be signed by his counterpart
across the frontier to indicate that the crossing has
been made safely. On return, the guide receives around
10,000 rupees (US$210) per crossing, officials say.
This, officials explain, is how infiltration has taken
place across Kashmir ever since the insurgency erupted
in 1989.
As the heavy caliber guns open up,
following a wireless transmission by militants from
Indian territory, the nervous insurgent group, led by
their sure-footed scout, dash across no man's land into
the thickly wooded hills. Within seconds they are
squirreling their way across a maze of rock-strewn
gullies that offer excellent cover, preventing
meaningful pursuit by India's army. Ghostlike, another
guide, often a gujjar or local herder familiar
with the minefields, army patrols and ambush parties,
emerges from the forest and escorts the militants to
their particular group's area of operation.
Indian security officials say that once the
tanzimi receives a "requisition" for fresh cadres
over the wireless, he shortlists the militants, the
guide and the route they are to traverse and determines
where and when the crossing will take place. This
information is then relayed back across the border and
the crossing is effected a few days later, sometimes under
the cover of artillery fire.
India's
counter-insurgency grid in Kashmir comprises around
40,000 soldiers from the Rashtriya or National Rifles,
the army's counter-insurgency force. If necessary, as is
often the case, the National Rifles units are reinforced
by troops from the two large army corps stationed in
Kashmir. In addition, there are 60,000 paramilitary
personnel and the 50,000-strong local police, all of
whom operate under the army's Unified Command.
All this does not count the 700,000 Indian
troops strung out along the LoC and the international
border with Pakistan since December, when a four-man
squad that India has reported as being from the
Lashkar-e-Toiba tried to blow up the Indian parliament
building.
Yet it remains a relatively simple
matter for young men such as Mohammad Abdullah to sneak
across the border at will to do their business. And as
long as this continues, peace in the troubled region
will remain an elusive goal.
(Inter Press
Service)
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