“They are justified in their pursuit,” Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri told a journalist in October last, just weeks after a United States airstrike almost claimed his life, “they know their enemy well.”
Recently, acting in concert with the United Nations, the U.S. Treasury Department announced a slew of sanctions against Kashmiri and the organisation he commands, the Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami. The sanctions, which freeze assets Kashmiri may have in the U.S. and forbid financial transactions with him, are largely symbolic. Key figures from the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad have long been subject to similar sanctions — but to little effect.
Nestled in North Waziristan, a mountainous region along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan that is under the effective control of Islamist guerrillas, Kashmiri's forces will be little impacted by the sanctions. The Pakistan army has been reluctant to move against them, saying it is too stretched by counter-insurgency campaigns elsewhere to open a new front.
If there is one thing the complex story of the HuJI illustrates, it is this: unless the U.S. finds a way of compelling Pakistan to act against the jihadist groups it has nurtured for so long, its cities and citizens will continue to be at risk.
Like so many jihadist groups of global reach and ambition, the HuJI was a product of the U.S.-authored, Saudi Arabia-funded and Pakistan-backed Islamist insurgency against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
In February 1980, three religious scholars at the Jamia Uloom al-Islamia seminary in Karachi's Binori Town set up the first Pakistani jihadist group to fight in that war. Maulana Irshad Ahmad, Maulana Muhammad Akhtar and Maulana Abdul Samad Sial called their organisation the Jamiat Ansar-ul-Afghaneen, or the organisation of the companions of the Afghan people.
The Harkat-e-Inqiab-e-Islami, led by Peshawar-based cleric Nasrullah Mansoor, paid for the young clerics' first weapons. Akhtar was elected to head the Jamiat Ansar-ul-Afghaneen in 1985, after Irshad was killed in combat. He took on the pseudonym “Saifullah” or the sword of God.
For the first eight years of its existence, the organisation — which came to call itself HuJI towards the end of its campaign there — focussed on Afghanistan. From the outset, though, it had global ambitions. Its objectives, Pakistani newspaper The News reported in 2001, were “to fight against the oppression of the Muslims by the infidels all over the world through the revival of the traditions of jihad. It wants to recapture for the Muslims their glorious past.”
In 1991, the HuJI initiated operations against India. It also, analyst Muhammad Amir Rana has recorded in his book A-Z of Jihadi Organisations in Pakistan , set up sister networks in Bangladesh, Chechnya and Uzbekistan. Figures published in the Pakistani media make clear that the HuJI's Jammu and Kashmir operations were, by far, its most ambitious: its leaders claimed to have lost 650 men in combat there till 2004, against just 43 in Afghanistan between 1980 and 1989.
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate pumped in cash to pay for this expansion: at its peak, the HuJI was reported to be running eight training facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, which processed over 4,000 jihadists. But the battle over resources precipitated a split. In 1991, a faction led by Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman Khalil set up the rival Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.
For the next two years, clerics at the Jamia Uloom al-Islamia worked hard to heal the rift. Finally, in 1993, the two organisations merged into the Harkat-ul-Ansar. In 1994, the Harkat ul-Ansar dramatically announced its presence by taking control of the Chrar-e-Sharif mosque in central Kashmir. From later that year, though, problems began to develop. Key leaders, notably Maulana Masood Azhar and Nasrullah Langriyal, were held by Indian forces. Then, as evidence emerged of the organisation's role in the kidnapping and murder of western tourists in Jammu and Kashmir, the Harkat-ul-Ansar came under intense U.S. pressure that eventually led to its proscription by that country in 1997.
Not long after, the Harkat-ul-Ansar split again into its constituent formations. The Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami went into decline after the autumn of 1995, when Akhtar was held on charges of attempting a coup against Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. The Harkat ul-Mujahideen did better — for a time. But in January 2000, Azhar was released from jail in return for the passengers of an Indian Airlines flight hijacked to Kandahar. He returned to Pakistan, and with the ISI's patronage, founded the Jaish-e-Mohammad. Following a bitter power struggle, he took over much of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen.
Kashmiri had been a bit-actor as much of this story unfolded: he claimed in interviews that he was jailed in India, and that he participated in a major terrorist strike in New Delhi but there is no evidence to back either claim. Born in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 1964, Kashmiri joined the HuJI soon after dropping out of a mass communications degree course in Islamabad. He was among a small group of ideological radicals who resisted the ISI's pressure to join Azhar's JeM and, following the India-Pakistan crisis of 2001-2002, scale back operations in Jammu and Kashmir. Pushed out of Jammu and Kashmir in 2005, Kashmiri was increasingly drawn to the jihadists fighting in Afghanistan. He was even briefly detained on suspicion of having participated in an attempt to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf.
In theory, Azhar supported the global jihadist project. “The fundamental argument of each one of Azhar's books and many published speeches,” Pakistani scholar and diplomat Husain Haqqani wrote in a 2005 paper, “appears to be that puritanical Islam faces extinction at the hands of an ascendant secular culture, just as the fledgling religion was challenged by unbelievers in its earliest days.” Indeed, “Azhar's argument for fighting India in Kashmir is rooted in the same theological arguments that Osama bin-Laden has cited in his declarations of war against the United States.” But where bin-Laden was willing to fight against the U.S. in Afghanistan, the ISI-linked Azhar wasn't.
Kashmiri began working closely with the jihadists opposed to the Pakistani state — and, by 2009, drifted into the ranks of the al-Qaeda. “The defeat of the American global hegemony,” he explained in a 2009 interview to Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, “is a must if I want the liberation of my homeland Kashmir.”
The HuJI cadre have been responsible for training hundreds of insurgents operating against the western forces in Afghanistan, as well as a string of bombings in both that country and Pakistan. That, however, is not the extent of their ambitions — and reach.
Less than a month after the failed bomb strike on Kashmiri, the Federal Bureau of Investigations held Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley — and found evidence that the new-form of HuJI he commands holds out a credible transnational threat. Long a key Lashkar operative, Headley had, among other things, helped collect a video footage that guided a 10-man assault team to its targets in Mumbai in November 2008. But he became increasingly frustrated with the organisation's reluctance to support operations against the West.
Headley railed against the Lashkar's leadership, saying it had “rotten guts.” “I am just telling you,” he hectored a Lashkar-linked friend in a September 17, 2009 phone conversation, “that the companies in your competition have started handling themselves in a far better way.”
Kashmiri received Headley at a camp in North Waziristan last year. “The bazaar,” Headley wrote in an internet post, “is bustling with Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Bosnians, some from European Union countries and, of course, our Arab brothers. According to my survey, the foreign population is a little less than a third of the total. Any Waziri or Mehsud I spoke to seemed grateful to God for the privilege of being able to host the foreign Mujahideen.”
In the months before his arrest, Headley made contact with Kashmiri and began tapping his associates for assistance to bomb the offices of Jyllands Posten , a Copenhagen newspaper which incensed many Muslims by publishing cartoons they believed were blasphemous.
Earlier this year, an audiotape released to mark the death of al-Qaeda operative Said al-Masri claimed Kashmiri even had a role in attacks against India. “I bring you the good tidings,” he said, “that last February's India operation was against a Jewish locale in the west of the Indian capital [sic., throughout], in the area of the German bakeries — a fact that the enemy tried to hide — and close to 20 Jews were killed in the operation, a majority of them from their so-called statelet, Israel. The person who carried out this operation was a heroic soldier from the ‘Soldiers of the Sacrifice Brigade' which is one of the brigades of Qaedat al-Jihad [the al-Qaeda's formal name] in Kashmir, under the command of Commander Illyas Kashmiri, may Allah preserve him.”
For years, the U.S. ignored groups like the HuJI, trusting the ISI to ensure that their India-focussed energies never turned to the West. That strategy, Illyas Kashmiri's story makes clear, has comprehensively failed.
