Yet another enemy of India, Ilyas Kashmiri, suspected to be involved in the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai and Pakistan Navy’s shore base, PNS Mehran at Karachi, reportedly being killed in a drone attack by US forces in the restive South Waziristan tribal region, reveals and confirms wide and complex connections between Pakistan’s various jihadi outfits and of course, its infamous Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
An interesting surprise a day later, however, is the US expressing doubts on Kashmiri being killed in the drone attack because of his body not being recovered. “All ground intelligence shows that he is dead. What I can say is there is a 98 per cent chance he is dead,” Pakistan’s interior minister Rehman Malik told the media. “Since we do not have the body, we do not have DNA. We need to confirm. This is the substantive evidence we are looking for,” is what is reported to have been stated from Washington.
Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami’s (HuJI) 313 Brigade confirmed the “martyrdom of our leader Ilyas Kashmiri in a US drone strike on June 3, 2011 at 11.15 pm”. “We will take revenge (for the killing of) our leader from the US,” its spokesman Abu Hanzala said in a handwritten fax message sent to Pakistani media groups. He was reportedly killed along with Taliban commander Amir Hamza and seven or eight others — all belonging to the Pakistani Punjabi Taliban. “I confirm the commander Ilyas Kashmiri was martyred. We have buried his body in Lamand,” Sidiqullah, a Taliban commander in South Waziristan, told the media.
Kashmiri being involved with Lashkar-e-Tayyaba’s (LeT) 26/11 attack on India and the Al Qaeda’s recent attack on PNS Mehran is ironic.
Hailing from the Kotli/Mirpur district in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, a former member of the elite Pakistani Special Service Group (which he denied), his link with the Al Qaeda was strong enough for him to be considered as a possible successor to Osama bin Laden. During the 1980’s Soviet-Afghan War, on behalf of Pakistan, he trained Afghan Mujahideen in mine warfare at Miranshah. Having lost an eye and an index finger while fighting in Afghanistan, he continued his official terrorist work in Kashmir after the war as a member of HuJI, though disagreements with leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar several years after initially joining in 1991 led Kashmiri to establish his own new unit within the HuJI, known as the 313 Brigade.
During the mid-1990s, Kashmiri and Nasrullah Mansoor Langrial were near Poonch when they were seized by the Indian Army and sent to prison, where he spent the next two years before escaping and returning to Pakistan.
Upon his return, Kashmiri continued to conduct operations against India, once reportedly being rewarded personally with cash by then Army Chief General Pervez Musharraf for presenting the head of an Indian Army soldier to him.
Kashmiri, Mullah Omar and Ayman al-Zawahiri are part of a list of five most wanted terrorists drawn up by the US. If Kashmiri has been killed, barely over a month after Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces in Abbottabad cantonment, and also without the participation or involvement of the Pakistan Army, then it underscores the widening rift between the two and indicates better progress in intelligence-gathering and accuracy in striking by US forces. If Kashmiri was a contender for replacing Laden, then his elimination is also a telling blow to the Al Qaeda.
An earlier development related to the Pakistan Army’s/ISI’s terrorist tieups is the assassination of Syed Saleem Shahzad, one of Pakistan’s best investigative journalists and bureau chief of Asia Times Online, who went missing on May 29 from Islamabad while on his way to a local television channel to participate in a talk show. His body — with his face severely beaten — was found two days later in a canal in Mandi Bahauddin area of Punjab province.
Shahzad’s book, Inside Al Qaeda & Taliban — Beyond Bin Laden & 9/11, published in the UK and about to reach India shortly is a damning account of the ISI’s nefarious connections with terrorist groups as well as many other facts about and cross-connections between them.
Shazad said 26/11 was scripted by the ISI, approved by Al Qaeda commanders and executed by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT). From Al Qaeda, the main player was Ilyas Kashmiri and from LeT, Haroon Ashik. The common link between Ashik and Kashmiri is that they were both from the Pakistan Army, which “has been embedding terror outfits with its own men, especially in the operations and planning department so that there is close coordination with what the Pakistan Army and ISI demands and its seamless execution by these terror outfits.”
The book and Shahzad’s last article, in all likelihood, proved to be his nemesis. An excerpt from this article reads: “Al Qaeda carried out the brazen attack on PNS Mehran naval air station in Karachi on May 22 after talks failed between the Pakistan Navy and Al Qaeda over the release of naval officials arrested on suspicion of Al Qaeda links.”
Interior minister Malik, who visited Shahzad’s residence to condole and condemned his murder, later told the media that Shahzad might have been murdered over personal enmity. Mr Malik also reportedly admitted that journalists in Pakistan are also battling against negative forces like the Army and in order to ensure safety of their lives, new orders have been passed to allow journalists to carry small arms for self-protection.
Nobody is willing to buy Mr Malik’s line of Shahzad being “murdered over personal enmity”.
Journalists and human rights activists in Pakistan have said they believed that Shahzad was not killed by militants, but Pakistan’s “fearsome spy agencies”, the kingpin of which is the ISI.
According to the Pakistani media, suspicion immediately fell on the ISI, bringing it more negative publicity, more than what it got after the killing of Bin Laden by US special forces. The raid, which Pakistan failed to detect or stop, shattered the myth that the agency (ISI) is omnipotent. A former ISI officer is quoted: “The ISI’s image had already been tarnished and it is under much pressure. It’s never been as bad as this before.”
Shahzad was investigating suspected links between the military and Al Qaeda, a highly sensitive subject at a time when Washington is wondering how Bin Laden was able to live for years in a town near Pakistan’s capital and about a two-hour drive from the ISI headquarters.
Human Rights Watch is reported to have said that Shahzad, a 40-year-old father of three, had voiced concerns about his safety after receiving threatening telephone calls from the ISI and was under surveillance since 2010.
The third major post-Laden-killing attack was on July 1, 2011, when reportedly 300-400 heavily armed terrorists besieged a remote Pakistani post on the Afghan border, killing at least one policeman at Shaltalu checkpoint in the remote part of northwestern district Dir, where the Pakistan Army tried to put down a Taliban takeover two years ago.
Be that as it may, for India, there is more to be worried about and the situation demands much care along its long international boundary with Pakistan and the Line of Control.
Whatever exposures there have been about the Pakistan Army and the ISI, no matter how low their stock is, it has made absolutely no difference to India. While on the ground, even as three LeT terrorists were killed by the Rashtriya Rifles a few days ago in an encounter in Jammu and Kashmir, the Northern Command headquarters of the Indian Army has clearly stated that there are at least 700 terrorists waiting to succeed in crossing over and making the summer in the Kashmir Valley and elsewhere in India really hot.
In post-26/11 discussions and other negotiations, there is nothing at all for India to be elated about.
The recent Siachen talks amounted to a naught. No matter how revealing the disclosures by Dawood Gilani, alias David Coleman Headley, or Tahawwur Hussain Rana may have been during the ongoing trial in Chicago, Pakistan’s latest take simply writes them off, with Rehman Malik stating that Headley cannot be trusted. What else can any civilian leader of Pakistan say on this matter after having given the Pakistan Army and the ISI a clean chit during the mockery of long session in Parliament following the highly successful US Op Geronimo?
As things stand, it seems that the best that India can hope for is consolation from further successful intelligence-gathering and strikes by the US forces.
Anil Bhat, a retired Army officer, is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi