Human bombs used to be mere puzzling headlines for the people of
Pakistan till the 9/11 terror attacks, a part of stories of death and
destruction emanating out of troubled West Asia. Then US-led Allied
Forces invaded Afghanistan, making Pakistan personally experience the
devastation a person strapped with lethal explosives could unleash.
With the avowed aim of physically eliminating all those who are siding
with the forces of the infidel, the new breed of well trained and
highly motivated suicide bombers strike not only Western targets, but
Pakistani security and intelligence agencies also, especially the
army, the police and the ISI, which spearhead the US war against
terror in the country.
The security situation in Pakistan has been in utter turmoil for the
past two years, and it went from bad to worse after the Operation
Silence carried out against the fanatic Lal Masjid clerics in July
2007. Since then, it appears the extremist forces had not only gained
strength in the tribal areas but also got a foothold in the country’s
settled areas. Therefore, as things stand, hotels, police stations,
police training centres, headquarters of intelligence agencies, army
check posts, military training centres, government buildings, mosques,
processions and markets have become vulnerable targets of the suicide
bombers.
Investigations by Pakistani agencies show the involvement of several
kinds of jehadi groups in the ongoing spate of suicide strikes
including the Lal Masjid Brigade, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP),
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Harkatul Jehadul Islami (HUJI),
Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM),
Jamaatul Furqaan (JuF), Jaishul-Islami (JuI), Fidayeen-e-Islam (FeI),
Abdullah Azzam Shaheed Brigade (ASB) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).
The human bombs coming from the Lal Masjid Brigade are those who have
either been linked with Lal Masjid or Jamia Fareedia or had sympathies
with the fanatic Ghazi brothers due to their ideological affinity.
While some of the human bombs had been the students of the Ghazi duo,
some were the relatives of those killed during the Operation Silence
in July 2007. Authorities probing the ongoing spate of suicide
bombings that took place after the Operation Silence believe that most
of these attacks were carried out by young men in their 20s coming
from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of South
Waziristan and North Waziristan.
As soon as the Operation Silence came to an end, the agencies had
warned that the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad could suffer
from suicide attacks, as over 500 potential suicide bombers who had
been studying at the Lal Masjid-run Jamia Hafsa and Jamia Fareedia had
not returned to their homes after the ending of the Operation Silence.
They had warned that the potential bombers were hiding in several
madrassas and mosques in and around the twin cities, and were
determined to blow themselves up any time, anywhere to avenge the
killing of kin and friends. Hardly a few weeks after the operation
ended, an 18 year old suicide bomber killed 22 highly trained
commandos of the Special Services Group of the Army by targeting their
Tarbela Ghazi mess, 100 km south of Islamabad on 13 September 2007.
The bomber eventually turned out to be the brother of a Jamia Hafsa
girl student killed during the operation, carried out by the Karar
Company of the SSG.
The second kind of extremists involved in suicide attacks are those
linked to the al-Qaeda and Taliban network based in the Waziristan
region on the Pakistan-Afghan tribal belt. In the rocky and far-flung
region of Waziristan, Islamic rebels allied to the Afghan Taliban and
al-Qaeda have literally taken control of virtually all of the entire
North Waziristan tribal area on the Pak-Afghan border, thereby gaining
a significant base from which to wage their resistance against the
US-led forces in Afghanistan as well as the Pakistani security forces,
especially through their highly motivated and lethal suicide bombers.
Intelligence sources say the Pakistani security forces have mostly
been targeted by the bombers trained and dispatched by the
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) led by Commander Baitullah Mehsud, the
chief of the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan.
According to a senior official of the elite Special Investigation
Group (SIG), from the 26 suicide attacks carried out in 2007, from
where the heads of the bombers were also recovered, it transpired that
the vast majority of the human bombs came from just one tribe – the
Mehsuds of central Waziristan, all boys aged 16 to 20. In fact, most
of the recent suicide attacks carried out after the launching of the
Operation Rah-e-Haq by the Pakistan Army in Swat have already been
claimed by Baitullah – be it the Peshawar Pearl Continental blast,
twin attacks on the Lahore headquarters of the Inter Services
Intelligence and the Rescue 15, the murder of Mufti Sarfraz Naeemi or
the fidayeen assault on the Manawan police academy in Lahore.
The man tasked with indoctrinating youngsters and converting them into
lethal suicide bombers is Qari Hussain, also known as Ustad-e-Fidayeen
or the teacher of suicide bombers. Believed to be the main ideologue
of Pushtun Taliban working under Baitullah’s command, Hussain had been
running his suicide training camp in Spinkai Ragzai, a small town in
South Waziristan. As one such training centre was discovered by the
military authorities last year at a Government-run school in the
Kotkai area of South Waziristan, General Officer Commanding of the 14
Division Major General Tariq Khan told reporters in Dera Ismail Khan
on May 18, 2008 that it was like a factory, recruiting nine to
12-year-old boys, and turning them into suicide bombers.
Qari Hussain is known in the TTP ranks for his strong anti-Shia views
and close ties with the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). The Pakistani
agencies are trying to hunt him down given his status as the one who
may have recruited and indoctrinated the largest number of people from
Waziristan to carry out suicide hits in the country. On January 17,
2009, Qari Hussain released an unusual video of statements from
purported human bombs and footage of deadly attacks they claimed to
have perpetrated in Pakistan.
The tape, released by none other than Hussain himself, showed youth,
some in their teens, addressing the camera about their intention to
carry out suicide attacks to background music of Urdu militant
anthems. The two major suicide attacks claimed on the TTP video were
the March 11, 2008 suicide attack on the Federal Investigation Agency
building in Lahore and the November 24, 2007 twin suicide attacks in
Faizabad area of Rawalpindi right in front of the ISI headquarters
when a bomber rammed his explosive-laden car into a bus carrying 35
ISI officers, killing 15 of them on the spot.
Another important sectarian-cum-jehadi group involved in suicide
attacks across Pakistan is Lashkar-e-Jhangvi – a Sunni Deobandi
organization which was launched in 1996. The Lashkar today is the most
violent al-Qaeda terrorist group operating in Pakistan with the help
of its lethal suicide squad, supervised by Qari Zafar who has become a
trusted member of al-Qaeda’s hardline inner circle due to his
acquaintance with Baitullah Mehsud. South Waziristan-based Qari Zafar,
who in fact belongs to Karachi, is not only the suspected mastermind
of the September 20, 2008 Marriot Hotel suicide attack in Islamabad,
but the most sought after al-Qaeda linked terrorist is reportedly
trying to target key strategic installations belonging to the ISI and
the Army.
Then next in line is the Swat chapter of the
Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi which is accused of carrying out
several suicide attacks targeting the Pakistani security forces. The
first such attack was carried out on November 8, 2006 when 45 Pakistan
army recruits undergoing training at the Punjab Regimental Centre in
Dargai, 100 kilometers north of Peshawar. Another major suicide attack
was carried out on October 25, 2007 in Mingora, as two suicide bombers
rammed their explosive-laden vehicles into a truck carrying the
Frontier Constabulary personnel, killing 33 of them. The attack came
following a warning by Fazlullah against the deployment of the
security forces.
Then there are a few relatively unknown jehadi organisations like
Jaishul-Islami, Fidayeen-e-Islam and Abdulllah Azam Shaheed Brigade
which had claimed several major suicide hits. The Jaish had claimed
the October 9, 2008 car suicide attack on the Anti Terrorist Squad
headquarters in Islamabad. The Fidayeen had claimed the September 20,
2008 Marriott Hotel suicide hit in Islamabad while the Azzam Brigade
had co-claimed along with the Tehrik-e-Taliban the June 9, 2009 attack
on the Marriot Hotel in Peshawar. These three groups are supposed to
be based in the Waziristan region. There are three other jehadi groups
which have not yet claimed any suicide attack in Pakistan but have
been found involved in several such attacks in the past.
The first one is Jaish-e-Mohammad led by India’s Most Wanted Maulana
Masood Azhar while the second is Harkatul Jehadul Islami led by Qari
Saifullah Akhtar, already named by Benazir Bhutto as her would be
assassin in her posthumous book. To recall, the two human bombs who
had tried to kill General Musharraf on December 25, 2003 by ramming
their explosive-laden cars into his presidential convoy in Rawalpindi,
were later identified as Qari Mohammad Jameel Sudhan, an activist of
the Jaish-e-Mohammad and Khalique alias Hazrat sultan, an activist of
the Harkatul Jehadul Islami.
The third such jehadi group, Jamaatul Furqaan, is led by Maulana Abdul
Jabbar alias Umar Farooq, once the chief operational commander of
Jaish-e-Mohammad and a close associate of Masood Azhar. The Jamaat is
accused of masterminding the March 17, 2002 suicide hit inside an
Islamabad church during Sunday service in diplomatic enclave, killing
five people, including an American diplomat’s wife and his daughter.
And last but not the least, there is another jehadi organization,
Lashkar-e-Toiba, which is accused of carrying out fidayeen attacks in
Jammu & Kashmir, targeting the Indian security forces. Fidayeen or
life daring attacks are its hallmark. The LeT prefer the term fidayeen
to the more common ‘suicide attack’ because its Wahabi leadership
strictly prohibits suicide. The fidayeen attackers seldom return from
their penetrate-and-kill missions as their aim is not to save their
own lives but to maximize the frightening psychological impact on the
enemy by inflicting death and destruction on their targets.
The Pakistani investigators say all these groups follow their own
techniques to achieve their objectives and use different mechanisms to
attack their targets. The jehadi group comprising the toughest
motivation category is to hit the military installations with the help
of its suicide bombers. They include trained, skillful and equally
motivated terrorists. The second category of human bombs attack
personnel of law-enforcement agencies and government personalities
while the third one is deputed to kill the enemy through a car bombing
or blast through remote-controlled device.
The Pakistani authorities say the production of suicide belts in
Waziristan has become a cottage industry as one household makes the
detonator, another sews the belt, a third molds ball bearings, and so
on. These are then collected and paid for by the Taliban, who claim in
their propaganda that they have hundreds of willing youngsters lined
up to carry out suicide bombings. Then there are some definite
patterns of the suicide attacks being carried out in Pakistan. They
say the suicide bomber generally never comes alone; he is charged up,
brainwashed to the last moment, highly indoctrinated and fanatically
intoxicated up till the last moment by his handler who makes sure that
the tempo and temper of the suicide bomber reaches to the climax and
to the extreme just as he approaches his target.
As far as the motivation of a human bomb to sacrifice himself is
concerned, a careful study of the life history of 25 human bombs that
exploded themselves between 2002 and 2005 across Pakistan showed that
American atrocities against Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq had been
the foremost motivation for a majority of them. The study, carried out
by an elite intelligence agency, showed that none of the 25 human
bombs came from the elite class: 16 of them belonged to the lower
middle class while the other nine belonged to the middle class
families. Another thing they had in common was illiteracy.
For years, the Pakistani intelligence agencies used to indoctrinate,
motivate and train the jehadi cadres for export in the neighbourhood –
to Jammu Kashmir and Afghanistan. The human bombs had, however,
excluded their home ground from the scope of their holy war. But as
things stand, there is a sharp decline in deadly suicide attacks in
Jammu Kashmir, with Pakistan emerging as a favoured target of these
attacks. Therefore, the human bombs originally designed by the
Pakistani establishment to rip apart the so-called enemies of Islam
and Pakistan, are now exploding themselves inside their own country
and killing their fellow Muslims. Pakistan’s chickens have come home
to roost.
amir.mir1969@gmail.com