Ilyas Kashmiri, the fugitive chief of the Harkatul Jehadul Islami
(HUJI), the first Pakistani jehadi leader to have been tagged by the
United Nations and the United States as a Specially Designated Global
Terrorist for his al-Qaeda connections, has now been described as a
“terror successor to Osama bin Laden” by none other the CNN.
The CNN labeling makes Kashmiri the world’s most wanted militant after
Osama bin Laden because he is probably the only fugitive jehadi who is
not only wanted by India and Pakistan but also by the United States,
United Kingdom, Germany and France. It was on August 6, 2010, that the
United States Treasury Department, in conjunction with the United
Nations, named the 46-year Ilyas Kashmiri as a “specially designated
global terrorist,” putting him in the same league with Osama and his
second-in-command Dr Ayman Zawahiri, men to whom he has pledged
allegiance. Stuart Levey, US Under Secretary for Terrorism and
Financial Intelligence, said in his official statement that Ilyas
Kashmiri has supported terrorist attacks against Pakistan government
personnel and facilities, besides planning the assassination of [Army
Chief] General Ashfaq Kiyani, which was eventually abandoned due to
al-Qaeda’s strategic considerations.
Now the CNN has reported in its November 10 investigative story that
going by the estimates of the counter-terrorism officials in three
continents, ‘Kashmiri is one of the most dangerous men in the world
today’. “If Osama bin Laden is al-Qaeda’s spiritual leader and
Egyptian cleric Dr Ayman al Zawahiri its philosopher, Kashmiri is the
organization’s military brain. As one US official put it recently,
Kashmiri is “the key ingredient in the bad stew of senior terrorists
who are planning operations in the region and beyond”, the CNN report
stated.
While a cloud of mystery surrounds Kashmiri, he is on the record as
swearing allegiance to the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar as far
back as 1999 when he told a Pakistani journalist Amir Khakwani in an
interview: “We folks have taken oath from Mullah Omar and we consider
him as Ameerul Momineen. We have absolute permission from him to go to
any place and engage ourselves in jehadi activities”. Kashmiri
disclosed: “I have learned the art of war from the Arabs. The Arabs
fighting in Afghanistan, including Egyptians and Palestinians, have
adopted a separate style combining the war strategies of the Russians
and Americans. I am an expert in that style. We have trained our boys
also in that mode so that they can fight better than the Indian
regular army commandos”.
Currently operating from Pakistan’s largely lawless North Waziristan
area bordering Afghanistan, Ilyas Kashmiri is the ameer of the Azad
Kashmir chapter of the HUJI, whose Pakistan chapter is led by another
al-Qaeda-linked jehadi, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, who was named by
Benazir Bhutto in her posthumous book as a principal suspect in the
October 18, 2007 attempt to kill her in Karachi in a suicide bomb
attack, shortly after her homecoming from self-exile. The HUJI chief
has emerged as a new international jehadi plotter who is being
described as the most important guy linking al-Qaeda with Western
recruits. American and European security agencies believe Kashmiri is
trying to infiltrate highly trained terrorists into Europe and the
United States to launch Mumbai style terrorist attacks.
As things stand, Pakistani intelligence sleuths on the ground and the
American drones in the air are out to hunt Ilyas Kashmiri in the
trouble-stricken tribal areas, amidst fears in Islamabad that if yet
another major terrorist strike in conducted either in India or in the
West, Pakistan could suffer massive retaliation this time. On February
25, 2010, during the Indo-Pak foreign secretary talks, Indian Foreign
Secretary Nirupama Rao handed over three files to her Pakistani
counterpart Salman Bashir, containing dossiers of Pakistani nationals
allegedly involved in the Mumbai terrorist attacks. And Kashmiri was
one of them. The dossier detailed Kashmiri’s activities and links to
the Mumbai terrorist attacks, claiming that his Brigade 313 was
mentioned in conversations between the 26/11 attackers and their
Pakistan-based handlers.
According to the findings of the usually well-informed journal ‘The
Long War Journal’, besides heading al-Qaeda, Kashmiri is now also
serving as the acting chief of al-Qaeda’s military committee as Saif
al Adel has moved up the ranks. Since his promotion in al-Qaeda
hierarchy, Kashmiri attends all the meetings of the Arab terrorist top
brass which are usually held at the terrorist republic in North
Waziristan. Going by the journal’s findings, Brigade 313 is al-Qaeda’s
military organisation in Pakistan which is made up of the Taliban and
allied jehadi groups. Members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Harkatul
Jehadul Islami (HUJI), Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM),
Jandullah, and several other Pakistani militant groups are known to
have merged with al-Qaeda in Pakistan, and the group operates under
the name of Brigade 313.
The Brigade 313 has been found to be behind many high-profile attacks
and bombings inside Pakistan, including the October 2009 audacious
commando assault and siege of the General Headquarters (GHQ) of the
Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi. Interestingly, the Brigade 313 also has a
website whose landing page has the words “Al-Qaeda Brigade 313” in the
center, besides inscribing the names of Harkatul Jehadul Islami,
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jundallah, and the Movement of Taliban in Pakistan
in the four corners of the page. Further surfing of the website would
show images of slain al-Qaeda leader Mustafa Abu Yazid and ideologue
Abu Yahya al Libi on the left side of the page, and an image of
Commander Ilyas Kashmiri on the far right.
The extent of the danger being posed by Kashmiri can be gauged from
the nature of the charges brought against him by the US Justice
Department in January 2009 when a federal grand jury in the Northern
District of Illinois indicted him for terrorism-related offenses in
connection with a terror attack against the Jyllands-Posten newspaper
in Denmark which had published odious cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad
(PBUH). Going by the charge sheet, one of the Kashmiri’s jehadi
operative, David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American [originally
named Dawood Gillani and now serving a life sentence in US for
terror-related offenses] cased the main targets for the Mumbai attacks
by the Lashkar-e-Toiba. The US Justice Department had concluded in its
charge sheet that Kashmiri that he was working with David Headley in
late 2008, immediately after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, to plot new
terrorist attacks by infiltrating highly trained terrorists into
America and Europe.
While being questioned by India’s National Intelligence Agency, which
was given access to him in the UN in June 2010, Headley revealed that
he had been taken to Pakistan’s tribal belt on the Afghan border in
2009 to meet Kashmiri. As per his confessional statement, Kashmiri
subsequently sent Headley on another trip to survey possible targets
in India. One of the places he had video-taped was the German Bakery
in Pune [which was quite popular with foreigner]and was subsequently
targeted with a bomb that killed nine people, including two
foreigners.
Some recent findings by Western intelligence agencies say Kashmiri is
a key facilitator in al-Qaeda’s plan to carry out Mumbai-style
commando attacks in Europe, particularly in Germany, France, and
England. According to these reports, Ahmed Siddiqi, a German national
of the Afghan descent, told his American interrogators in Afghanistan
that he and some other ‘white jehadis’ were part of a conspiracy to
launch a commando attack in Europe. Siddiqi, who was trained under
Kashmiri’s command before being arrested in Afghanistan in June 2010,
further told interrogators that at a campfire chat in North Waziristan
earlier this year, Ilyas Kashmiri told him that he had already
dispatched advance teams to Britain and Germany. These revelations led
to a spate of unprecedented number of drone strikes in the Pakistani
tribal area, which are still continuing, with an aim to target the
‘white jehadis’ who are being trained to take part in the possible
European attacks.
Ilyas Kashmiri has also been named in a charge sheet filed by the
Pakistani police in connection with the November 2008 murder of Major
General (retd) Amir Faisal Alvi, the former commanding officer of the
Special Services Group (SSG) of the Army who was killed because of his
role in fighting Taliban militants in the country’s tribal areas.
Kashmiri, who is clearly more than just another jehadi commander, was
born in Bhimbur in the Samhani Valley of the Pakistan-administered
Azad Kashmir on February 10, 1964. He passed the first year of a mass
communication degree at Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad. But
he could not continue his studies due to his heavy involvement in
jehadi activities. The freedom movement in Kashmir was his first
exposure in the field of militancy, then the HUJI and ultimately his
313 Brigade. Kashmiri lost an index finger and one eye while fighting
against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan as a junior commander in the
1980s. Therefore, in his various pictures, he is seen wearing aviator
sunglasses of different colours.
After the war ended with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from
Afghanistan in 1989, Kashmiri turned his attention towards the ‘jehad’
in the Indian administered part of Kashmir as a commander of the HUJI,
, led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. But sharp disagreements with Qari
eventually led Kashmiri in the mid 90s’ to launch his own faction of
the HUJI. He is reported to have conducted several major guerilla
actions in India, including the 1994 Al-Hadid operation in Delhi to
get some of his jehadi comrades released. His second-in-command at
that time was none other than Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed, who has already
been convicted for the 2001 beheading of an American journalist Daniel
Pearl in Karachi.
While waging ‘jehad’ in Jammu Kashmir, Kashmiri was captured by the
Indian Army near Poonch [in the mid-1990s]and sent to prison, where
he had to spend the next two years before managing a jail breaking and
returning to Pakistan. Kashmiri was once again made to resume his
cross border ambushes against the Indian security forces. As Indian
troops carried out a raid into Pakistani part of Kashmir on February
25, 2000, killing two dozen civilians including several women and
children, Kashmiri is reported to have led a retaliatory raid in the
Nakyal sector of Jammu Kashmir the next day and kidnapped and beheaded
an Indian army officer whose head was then paraded in the streets of
Azad Kashmir. However, soon afterwards, he fell out of favour with his
powerful spy masters, when he refused to serve under the command of a
junior jehadi — Maulana Masood Azhar, who had just founded
Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) after being released from an Indian jail in the
wake of an Indian plane hijacking.
As Kashmiri resisted his khaki bosses, he was arrested in 2003 in the
connection with the investigations of a failed attempt by two suicide
bombers to kill General Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi in December
2003. But he was released a few months later in March 2004. He was
once again picked up in 2005 after he refused to close down his cross
border jehadi operations in Jammu Kashmir, only to be released a few
months later. Kashmiri apparently did little until Musharraf decided
to carry out the bloody Operation Silence in the heart of Islamabad
against the fanatic Lal Masjid clerics and their followers in July
2007. But afterwards, he rebuilt his jehadi network and reactivated
his 313 Brigade in the HUJI, while collaborating with the fanatic
Pakistani and Afghan Taliban cadres in the Waziristan region. It was
in the aftermath of the Lal Masjid operation that he moved his
operational base from his home town Kotli to the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
Temporarily switching from the freedom struggle in Jammu Kashmir to
the Taliban-led resistance against NATO forces in Afghanistan, Ilyas
Kashmiri established a training camp in the Razmak area of North
Waziristan and shifted most of his warriors from HUJI’s Kotli military
training camp in Azad Kashmir. He soon became a target of the American
drones and was reportedly killed in a predator attack in North
Waziristan on September 14, 2009 along with Nazimuddin Zalalov, a top
al-Qaeda leader. Yet, hardly a month after his reported death,
Kashmiri re-surfaced and promised retribution against the United
States and its proxies [in an October 13, 2009 interview], saying the
Americans were right to pursue him. “They know their enemy quite well.
They know what I am really up to”, Kashmiri added.
Since then, he seems to have established himself as the chief of
al-Qaeda’s shadow army – Lashkar-e-Zil (LeZ), which is a loose
alliance of al-Qaeda-and Taliban-linked anti-US militia which has
distinguished itself by conducting unusual guerilla operations, like
the one that targeted the CIA’s Forward Operating Base in Khost on
December 31, 2009, killing seven CIA officials. The CIA base was at
the heart of a covert program overseeing drone strikes by
remote-controlled aircraft along the Pak-Afghan border. While the LeZ
is mainly active in Pakistani tribal areas of North and South
Waziristan, Bajaur, Peshawar, Khyber, and Swat in the NWFP, it has
already carried out several deadly bombings against the US-led Allied
Forces in the Afghan provinces of Khost, Kabul, Kandahar, Nuristan,
Nangahar, Wardak, Paktika, Ghazni and Kunar, killing dozens. Keeping
in view Ilyas Kashmiri’s guerilla skill and his wide relations with
Pakistani and foreign militants, terrorism experts describe him as the
most dangerous man for India, Europe, and the United States. Even
Pakistani agencies suspect his involvement in a series of suicide
bombings in Azad Kashmir, targeting the Pakistani security forces.
Usually described as the ‘commando commander’ amongst his cadres,
Kashmiri has proved himself to be a survivor so far who has a knack
for staying alive against all odds. And he is set to become a
legendary jehadi figure the more he is targeted by the American drones
and the longer he survives.
amir.mir1969@gmail.com
* Lahore