Pakistanisation of Al Qaeda’
Al Qaeda first fled to South Waziristan. It was later deployed to other areas in Azad Kashmir and Karachi. In June 2002, Pakistan announced that the militants who had killed 10 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitaries in South Waziristan belonged to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and were of Uzbek origin
Khaled Ahmed’s A n al y s i s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel Pearl was kidnapped on 12 January 2002, followed by the assassination of Shiite doctors of Karachi, and in March by an attack on the church in the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad killing five; in April an attack on the Shiites of Bhakkar targeting particularly women and children. Then came the attack on May 8th on the 11 French engineers in Karachi which also killed three Pakistanis, followed by an attack on the US consulate that killed 12 in June; attack on a missionary school in Murree in August which killed six, followed by an attack on a missionary hospital in Taxila the same month which killed four. Islamabad was forced to pay more attention to what the militants were doing. Even then they did nothing to hinder the regrouping of Pakistani and Arab jihadists within Pakistan
Harkat al Mujahideen al Alami suddenly made its appearance in Karachi but was previously unknown in Pakistan. It was founded by Asif Zaheer who had trained as an explosives and chemical expert at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. He had belonged to the Banuri Masjid and was in Karachi making bombs for half a dozen Deobandi-based groups. Asif Zaheer was sentenced to death for masterminding the killing of French engineers but his organisation merged with others to form World United Army which blew up 21 petrol stations owned by Shell in Karachi in May 2003. Over 450 terrorists, about 200 of them Yemenis and Saudis, were captured by Pakistan after 125 raids. Already two-thirds of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are from Pakistan after they were captured inside Afghanistan
Although few in Pakistan believe the official version of the Wana Operation, external observers merely see in it the confirmation of what they had known earlier. The adoption of Al Qaeda by a vast number of people in Pakistan, including the MMA government of the NWFP whose ministers at times swear by the Taliban brand of Islam, cannot be ignored. Senators and MNAs from the Tribal Areas pretend to be on the side of the government and pose as mediators but are clearly loyal to the worldview of Al Qaeda; and some of them have benefited financially from this loyalty. One MNA Shah Abdul Aziz has appeared on a private channel and has admitted to having nursed Abdullah Mehsud - the Guantanamo Bay ex-inmate who abducted the Chinese engineers from the Gomalzam Dam in South Waziristan – when the two were in the tutelage of Mufti Shamzai of Banuri Masjid in Karachi. It was very clear that the loyalty of MNA Shah Abdul Aziz was more to the cause of Al Qaeda than to Pakistan.
Karachi killings in 2002:
The great French analyst of the anti-Soviet Afghan war, Olivier Roy has collaborated with Mariam Abou Zahab to produce Islamist Network: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (Hurst & Company, 2004, from an original publication of 2002; distributed by Vanguard Books Lahore) which tells us about the penetration of Islamist influences into Pakistan and helps us unravel the terrorist conundrum in our society. Mariam Abou Zahab is a well known French scholar who has studied the sectarian scene in Pakistan and written about it, including one path-breaking study of the city of Jhang where Deobandi Islam gave birth to Sipah Sahaba. Her latest book with Olivier Roy has one chapter titled The Pakistanisation of Al Qaeda which tells us that after the fall of the Taliban in 2002 militants regrouped in Karachi with the help of a still un-purged ISI. The militants were bitter with their leaders for not preventing Pakistan from allying itself with the United States and proceeded to express their anger with acts of terrorism
Early Al Qaeda gathering in South Waziristan:
The Pakistan establishment tended to blame all the terrorist action on Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to avoid putting the focus on Harkatul Jihad al Islami and Harkatul Mujahideen al Alami, the two organisation not known commonly in Pakistan but whose activists had come in large numbers from Afghanistan after absorbing a lot of Arab and Al Qaeda influence. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was possibly infiltrated successfully by the government after which it was able to arrest in June 2002 the Lashkar leader Akram Lahori - erstwhile bodyguard of Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, the founder of Sipah Sahaba. Also caught were Shabbir Fauji and Qari Assadullah/Abdul Hay, of a breakaway faction of the Lashkar, who had been a trainer at Sarobi terrorist camps and, after his return to Pakistan, had a lot support in Karachi. He was later revealed as the mastermind behind the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. Riaz Basra held sway in Punjab till he was killed in 2003. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was funded by Arab donors.
Al Qaeda first fled to South Waziristan. It was later deployed to other areas in Azad Kashmir and Karachi. The authors are of the view that this deployment could not have been possible without collaboration from the ISI. In June 2002 Pakistan announced that the militants who had killed 10 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitaries in South Waziristan belonged to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and were of Uzbek origin. One organisation that facilitated the movement of the Al Qaeda militants from South Waziristan was Lashkar-e-Tayba. The authors quote Pakistan intelligence as saying that in 2003 there were around 300 Al Qaeda activists in Pakistan. The Arabs in Al Qaeda learned gradually to trust the Pushtuns less than the Islamic parties in Pakistan on the basis of the networks established during the Afghan war. These political parties have facilitated the deployment of the Arabs in Karachi and in Punjab. In Karachi the networks earlier established by the ISI had gradually gone out of control.
Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Tayba:
The book looks at the arrest in Faisalabad in March 2002 of Abu Zubayda, the organiser of Al Qaeda warriors in Pakistan. From Faisalabad the Americans were able to bag 50 Al Qaeda members, out of which 20 were Arabs and were sent to Guantanamo Bay. The arrest of Abu Zubayda pointed to the link Al Qaeda had with Lashkar-e-Tayba set up in 1987 by Hafiz Saeed and others educated at the Madina University, Saudi Arabia. They were able to set up the Dawat wal Irshad establishment in Muridke on a 190-acre plot donated by the government of General Zia ul Haq, but the rest of the building complex was completed with money from an Arab called Sheikh Abul Aziz who was a frontman for Osama bin Laden. The strength of Lashkar-e-Tayba came from 140 establishments run by Dawat wal Irshad with 20,000 devoted pupils. It had 2000 local offices all over Pakistan functioning under a different name since the Lashkar was banned. At the annual gathering of Dawat wal Irshad at Muridke, the voice recording of Osama bin Laden was played to the gathered audience. Yusuf Ramzi, the terrorist behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre and Aimal Kansi who killed CIA agents near Washington - both took refuge at Muridke’s sanctuary where the writ of the Pakistani state did not run.
More evidence of the links between Lashkar-e-Tayba and Al Qaeda came later. Two other top Al Qaeda leaders were arrested from Karachi, Yemeni Ramzi Binalshibh in September 2002 and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad from Rawalpindi in March 2003. The arrest of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad had followed the arrest in Quetta of Muhammad Abdul Rehman, son of Omar Abdul Rehman, the Egyptian Gamaa Islamiyya blind leader now in prison in the US for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre. In April 2003 a nephew of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, Ali Abdul Aziz was arrested in Karachi, and Waleed Muhammad Attash, a Yemeni accused of attack on USS Cole at Aden in October 2000. Attash confessed to recruiting candidates for suicide bombings against Americans and admitted to having already recruited a dozen of them from Lashkar-e-Tayba. From the Deobandi hinterland, only Jaish-e-Muhammad was to attain a status similar to Lashkar-e-Tayba by reason of its patronage by Mufti Shamzai.
Origin of Harkatul Mujahideen Al Alami:
The book reveals the true identity of Harkat al Mujahideen al Alami which suddenly made its appearance in Karachi but was previously unknown in Pakistan. The man who founded it was Asif Zaheer who had trained as an explosives and chemical expert at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. He had belonged to the Banuri Masjid, inspired by Harkat Jihad al Islami of Qari Saifullah Akhtar, and was in Karachi making bombs for half a dozen Deobandi-based groups. Asif Zaheer was sentenced to death for masterminding the killing of French engineers but his organisation merged with others to form World United Army taken seriously by the Karachi police only after it blew up 21 petrol stations owned by Shell in Karachi in May 2003. Over 450 terrorists, about 200 of them Yemenis and Saudis, were captured by Pakistan after 125 raids at the writing of the book. Already two-thirds of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are from Pakistan after they were captured inside Afghanistan.
The book gives us more information about Hizb al Tahrir which came to Pakistan together with Al Muhajirun in 1999, the latter being allowed by Punjab in 2000 to hold its gathering in a state-owned theatre in Lahore to hear it condemn President Musharraf. Hizb al Tahrir first came to Uzbekistan in 1996 and began its activities in parallel to the Adolat Party of Tahir Yuldashev and Juma Namangani in the Ferghana Valley. It came from London where it was being run since the 1980s on behalf of a Palestinian movement of 1953. It used very strong language against the nation-state and advocated khilafah but stopped short of jihad. Hizb denounced Jinnah for having established Pakistan and declared it a secular state in its London-based journal. In Central Asia it is suspected of having accepted activists from Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) of Tahir Yuldashev and thus of being connected to South Waziristan. Its Pakistani chief Navid Butt is a graduate from the University of Chicago.
Al Muhajirun and Hizb al Tahrir:
In Akbar S. Ahmad’s book Islam under Siege (reviewed in TFT 26 September 2003) the author touched upon the hostility he had faced from one khilafat-supporting organisation called Hizb al-Tahrir in London while making his film on Jinnah: ‘In Britain, Sheikh Umar Bakri’s Khilafah (December 1996), the journal of Hizb al-Tahrir, attacked Jinnah as a kafir and an insult for a Muslim. Moreover it accused Jinnah of being an enemy of God and the holy Prophet because Jinnah supported women, Christians and Hindus, and advocated democracy. Why I asked myself did they pick on Jinnah? Because I concluded Bakri saw him as a major ideological opponent. Significantly after the American strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, Bakri emerged in the media to claim that he represented bin Laden in Europe’ (p113). It was later disclosed that Bakri was not the head of Hizb al Tahrir and that Khilafah was indeed the journal of Hizb al Tahir. Author Akbar S. Ahmed insisted that Al Muhajirun and Hizb al Tahrir were one and the same and that Bakri headed both the organisations.
Olivier Roy and Mariam Abou Zahab express the same suspicion: ‘A further puzzle relates to the relationship between Hizb al Tahrir and the Muhajirun organisation of Sheik Omar Bakri, a Syrian resident in London who maintains a high profile in the English language media. Although Sheikh Omar Bakri does not refer specially to Hizb al Tahir his pronouncements and websites are identical. Thus it seems that the Muhajirun movement may be regarded as a front for Hizb al Tahrir which essentially developed in ‘80s and ‘90s in Western Europe (Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden) and to a lesser extent in the United States’
*********************************
A friend of mine from Pakistan with whom I interact in a regular basis, sent me this. It is from the Friday Times.
I thought it worth posting since a lot of informed and incisive discussion on Taliban, Osama, AQ etc has gone on this board.
Al Qaeda first fled to South Waziristan. It was later deployed to other areas in Azad Kashmir and Karachi. In June 2002, Pakistan announced that the militants who had killed 10 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitaries in South Waziristan belonged to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and were of Uzbek origin
Khaled Ahmed’s A n al y s i s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel Pearl was kidnapped on 12 January 2002, followed by the assassination of Shiite doctors of Karachi, and in March by an attack on the church in the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad killing five; in April an attack on the Shiites of Bhakkar targeting particularly women and children. Then came the attack on May 8th on the 11 French engineers in Karachi which also killed three Pakistanis, followed by an attack on the US consulate that killed 12 in June; attack on a missionary school in Murree in August which killed six, followed by an attack on a missionary hospital in Taxila the same month which killed four. Islamabad was forced to pay more attention to what the militants were doing. Even then they did nothing to hinder the regrouping of Pakistani and Arab jihadists within Pakistan
Harkat al Mujahideen al Alami suddenly made its appearance in Karachi but was previously unknown in Pakistan. It was founded by Asif Zaheer who had trained as an explosives and chemical expert at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. He had belonged to the Banuri Masjid and was in Karachi making bombs for half a dozen Deobandi-based groups. Asif Zaheer was sentenced to death for masterminding the killing of French engineers but his organisation merged with others to form World United Army which blew up 21 petrol stations owned by Shell in Karachi in May 2003. Over 450 terrorists, about 200 of them Yemenis and Saudis, were captured by Pakistan after 125 raids. Already two-thirds of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are from Pakistan after they were captured inside Afghanistan
Although few in Pakistan believe the official version of the Wana Operation, external observers merely see in it the confirmation of what they had known earlier. The adoption of Al Qaeda by a vast number of people in Pakistan, including the MMA government of the NWFP whose ministers at times swear by the Taliban brand of Islam, cannot be ignored. Senators and MNAs from the Tribal Areas pretend to be on the side of the government and pose as mediators but are clearly loyal to the worldview of Al Qaeda; and some of them have benefited financially from this loyalty. One MNA Shah Abdul Aziz has appeared on a private channel and has admitted to having nursed Abdullah Mehsud - the Guantanamo Bay ex-inmate who abducted the Chinese engineers from the Gomalzam Dam in South Waziristan – when the two were in the tutelage of Mufti Shamzai of Banuri Masjid in Karachi. It was very clear that the loyalty of MNA Shah Abdul Aziz was more to the cause of Al Qaeda than to Pakistan.
Karachi killings in 2002:
The great French analyst of the anti-Soviet Afghan war, Olivier Roy has collaborated with Mariam Abou Zahab to produce Islamist Network: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (Hurst & Company, 2004, from an original publication of 2002; distributed by Vanguard Books Lahore) which tells us about the penetration of Islamist influences into Pakistan and helps us unravel the terrorist conundrum in our society. Mariam Abou Zahab is a well known French scholar who has studied the sectarian scene in Pakistan and written about it, including one path-breaking study of the city of Jhang where Deobandi Islam gave birth to Sipah Sahaba. Her latest book with Olivier Roy has one chapter titled The Pakistanisation of Al Qaeda which tells us that after the fall of the Taliban in 2002 militants regrouped in Karachi with the help of a still un-purged ISI. The militants were bitter with their leaders for not preventing Pakistan from allying itself with the United States and proceeded to express their anger with acts of terrorism
Early Al Qaeda gathering in South Waziristan:
The Pakistan establishment tended to blame all the terrorist action on Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to avoid putting the focus on Harkatul Jihad al Islami and Harkatul Mujahideen al Alami, the two organisation not known commonly in Pakistan but whose activists had come in large numbers from Afghanistan after absorbing a lot of Arab and Al Qaeda influence. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was possibly infiltrated successfully by the government after which it was able to arrest in June 2002 the Lashkar leader Akram Lahori - erstwhile bodyguard of Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, the founder of Sipah Sahaba. Also caught were Shabbir Fauji and Qari Assadullah/Abdul Hay, of a breakaway faction of the Lashkar, who had been a trainer at Sarobi terrorist camps and, after his return to Pakistan, had a lot support in Karachi. He was later revealed as the mastermind behind the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. Riaz Basra held sway in Punjab till he was killed in 2003. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was funded by Arab donors.
Al Qaeda first fled to South Waziristan. It was later deployed to other areas in Azad Kashmir and Karachi. The authors are of the view that this deployment could not have been possible without collaboration from the ISI. In June 2002 Pakistan announced that the militants who had killed 10 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitaries in South Waziristan belonged to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and were of Uzbek origin. One organisation that facilitated the movement of the Al Qaeda militants from South Waziristan was Lashkar-e-Tayba. The authors quote Pakistan intelligence as saying that in 2003 there were around 300 Al Qaeda activists in Pakistan. The Arabs in Al Qaeda learned gradually to trust the Pushtuns less than the Islamic parties in Pakistan on the basis of the networks established during the Afghan war. These political parties have facilitated the deployment of the Arabs in Karachi and in Punjab. In Karachi the networks earlier established by the ISI had gradually gone out of control.
Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Tayba:
The book looks at the arrest in Faisalabad in March 2002 of Abu Zubayda, the organiser of Al Qaeda warriors in Pakistan. From Faisalabad the Americans were able to bag 50 Al Qaeda members, out of which 20 were Arabs and were sent to Guantanamo Bay. The arrest of Abu Zubayda pointed to the link Al Qaeda had with Lashkar-e-Tayba set up in 1987 by Hafiz Saeed and others educated at the Madina University, Saudi Arabia. They were able to set up the Dawat wal Irshad establishment in Muridke on a 190-acre plot donated by the government of General Zia ul Haq, but the rest of the building complex was completed with money from an Arab called Sheikh Abul Aziz who was a frontman for Osama bin Laden. The strength of Lashkar-e-Tayba came from 140 establishments run by Dawat wal Irshad with 20,000 devoted pupils. It had 2000 local offices all over Pakistan functioning under a different name since the Lashkar was banned. At the annual gathering of Dawat wal Irshad at Muridke, the voice recording of Osama bin Laden was played to the gathered audience. Yusuf Ramzi, the terrorist behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre and Aimal Kansi who killed CIA agents near Washington - both took refuge at Muridke’s sanctuary where the writ of the Pakistani state did not run.
More evidence of the links between Lashkar-e-Tayba and Al Qaeda came later. Two other top Al Qaeda leaders were arrested from Karachi, Yemeni Ramzi Binalshibh in September 2002 and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad from Rawalpindi in March 2003. The arrest of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad had followed the arrest in Quetta of Muhammad Abdul Rehman, son of Omar Abdul Rehman, the Egyptian Gamaa Islamiyya blind leader now in prison in the US for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre. In April 2003 a nephew of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, Ali Abdul Aziz was arrested in Karachi, and Waleed Muhammad Attash, a Yemeni accused of attack on USS Cole at Aden in October 2000. Attash confessed to recruiting candidates for suicide bombings against Americans and admitted to having already recruited a dozen of them from Lashkar-e-Tayba. From the Deobandi hinterland, only Jaish-e-Muhammad was to attain a status similar to Lashkar-e-Tayba by reason of its patronage by Mufti Shamzai.
Origin of Harkatul Mujahideen Al Alami:
The book reveals the true identity of Harkat al Mujahideen al Alami which suddenly made its appearance in Karachi but was previously unknown in Pakistan. The man who founded it was Asif Zaheer who had trained as an explosives and chemical expert at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. He had belonged to the Banuri Masjid, inspired by Harkat Jihad al Islami of Qari Saifullah Akhtar, and was in Karachi making bombs for half a dozen Deobandi-based groups. Asif Zaheer was sentenced to death for masterminding the killing of French engineers but his organisation merged with others to form World United Army taken seriously by the Karachi police only after it blew up 21 petrol stations owned by Shell in Karachi in May 2003. Over 450 terrorists, about 200 of them Yemenis and Saudis, were captured by Pakistan after 125 raids at the writing of the book. Already two-thirds of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are from Pakistan after they were captured inside Afghanistan.
The book gives us more information about Hizb al Tahrir which came to Pakistan together with Al Muhajirun in 1999, the latter being allowed by Punjab in 2000 to hold its gathering in a state-owned theatre in Lahore to hear it condemn President Musharraf. Hizb al Tahrir first came to Uzbekistan in 1996 and began its activities in parallel to the Adolat Party of Tahir Yuldashev and Juma Namangani in the Ferghana Valley. It came from London where it was being run since the 1980s on behalf of a Palestinian movement of 1953. It used very strong language against the nation-state and advocated khilafah but stopped short of jihad. Hizb denounced Jinnah for having established Pakistan and declared it a secular state in its London-based journal. In Central Asia it is suspected of having accepted activists from Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) of Tahir Yuldashev and thus of being connected to South Waziristan. Its Pakistani chief Navid Butt is a graduate from the University of Chicago.
Al Muhajirun and Hizb al Tahrir:
In Akbar S. Ahmad’s book Islam under Siege (reviewed in TFT 26 September 2003) the author touched upon the hostility he had faced from one khilafat-supporting organisation called Hizb al-Tahrir in London while making his film on Jinnah: ‘In Britain, Sheikh Umar Bakri’s Khilafah (December 1996), the journal of Hizb al-Tahrir, attacked Jinnah as a kafir and an insult for a Muslim. Moreover it accused Jinnah of being an enemy of God and the holy Prophet because Jinnah supported women, Christians and Hindus, and advocated democracy. Why I asked myself did they pick on Jinnah? Because I concluded Bakri saw him as a major ideological opponent. Significantly after the American strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, Bakri emerged in the media to claim that he represented bin Laden in Europe’ (p113). It was later disclosed that Bakri was not the head of Hizb al Tahrir and that Khilafah was indeed the journal of Hizb al Tahir. Author Akbar S. Ahmed insisted that Al Muhajirun and Hizb al Tahrir were one and the same and that Bakri headed both the organisations.
Olivier Roy and Mariam Abou Zahab express the same suspicion: ‘A further puzzle relates to the relationship between Hizb al Tahrir and the Muhajirun organisation of Sheik Omar Bakri, a Syrian resident in London who maintains a high profile in the English language media. Although Sheikh Omar Bakri does not refer specially to Hizb al Tahir his pronouncements and websites are identical. Thus it seems that the Muhajirun movement may be regarded as a front for Hizb al Tahrir which essentially developed in ‘80s and ‘90s in Western Europe (Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden) and to a lesser extent in the United States’
*********************************
A friend of mine from Pakistan with whom I interact in a regular basis, sent me this. It is from the Friday Times.
I thought it worth posting since a lot of informed and incisive discussion on Taliban, Osama, AQ etc has gone on this board.
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