The Hindu : Top Hizb commander shot dead near Srinagar

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jan 17, 2004

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Top Hizb commander shot dead near Srinagar

By Praveen Swami

NEW DELHI, JAN. 16. Ghulam Rasool Dar, overall commander of the Hizb-ul Mujahideen's operations in Jammu and Kashmir, was shot dead by the Army this afternoon.

Better known by his aliases, Ghazi Nasiruddin, Riyaz Rasool and Zubair, Dar was second in the Hizb command, reporting only to its amir or supreme commander, Mohammad Yusuf Shah. Dar's elimination is a blow to the outfit's command structure and could have consequences for the imminent dialogue between the Centre and the secessionist politicians in the State.

Dar was killed in a brief encounter with the 2 Rashtriya Rifles battalion at Zainakot, near Srinagar. Fayyaz Ahmad, a Hizb deputy divisional commander in-charge of south Kashmir, was shot dead along with him. A resident of Tral, Ahmad also handled the outfit's finance and publicity work. Sources told The Hindu that the battalion, acting on the basis of information provided by a local source, cordoned off the house in which Dar and Ahmad were hiding.

Dar's elimination marks the climax of a long-running hunt that began soon after he took charge in November 2003. The breakthrough came when the intelligence agencies began intercepting calls made by him on his Thuraya hand-held satellite phone.

India is among the few countries in Asia with a significant satellite signal interception capability, which is enabled by a string of listening stations run by the Research and Analysis Wing's National Technical Intelligence Communication Centre.

Sources say the security forces finally succeeded in shutting the jaws of the trap around Dar last night — at 5.30 p.m., Border Security Force personnel eliminated the Hizb deputy commander, Mohammad Abbas Malik, at a safe house in Srinagar. They found Dar's satellite phone in the safe house, along with Rs. 12 lakhs and a Maruti car.

A series of raids began after Malik's elimination, targeting the locations of all local telephone numbers dialled from the satellite phone. Anticipating that the security forces would soon locate him as his safe houses were now known, Dar fled Srinagar along with Ahmad. The local intelligence available to the Rashtriya Rifles enabled them to win the race. "If the Rashtriya Rifles hadn't found him," a senior officer told The Hindu, "someone else would have. Half the security forces around Srinagar were looking for Dar last night, and we had a pretty good idea of the places he could be in".

Dar's elimination will have considerable consequences for the Hizb's operations. The organisation has lost a string of top-level commanders over the last year — a sign, some believe, of a blood feud within the organisation sparked off by the 2002 assassination of the pro-dialogue commander, Abdul Majid Dar. In April, the security forces succeeded in eliminating Dar's predecessor, Ghulam Rasool Khan, who operated under the code names, Saif-ul-Islam and Engineer Zamaan. Dar's deputy, Saif-ul-Rahman Bajwa, a Pakistani, was subsequently killed by the BSF in November.

As things stand, the Hizb will be hard-pressed to find a credible successor to Dar, a Jamaat-e-Islami veteran, who enjoyed the personal confidence of the Hizb amir. Dar himself had been reluctant to serve in the Valley, and delayed filling the post for several months after Khan was killed. Now, Shah needs to nominate someone from among his diminishing circle of confidants on the Hizb's central command council, since the organisation is fighting against time to stall the imminent dialogue between the All Parties Hurriyat Conference moderates and New Delhi.

In recent days, the Hizb and its sister organisations such as the Jamait-ul-Mujahideen have held out threats to the life of APHC moderates. Dar is also believed to have met the Jamaat-e-Islami chief, Syed Nazir Ahmad Kashani, to demand that the organisation throw its weight behind the Islamist leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Mr. Geelani has opposed the talks soon scheduled to take place between the APHC and New Delhi, although he has backed the parallel India-Pakistan detente. Dar's efforts to swing support for Mr. Geelani had, however, met with little success.

Interestingly, both Dar and the Hizb central division commander, Abdul Rashid Pir, had in recent weeks met senior political leaders from the ruling People's Democratic Party and the Opposition National Conference. One meeting, with a top PDP leader, is believed to have taken place only four days ago. Little is known about the possible content of this dialogue track.

While the PDP has enthusiastically backed the New Delhi-APHC dialogue, it has also been calling for the Hizb's participation in the negotiations. Some analysts believe that the PDP has a long-term interest in seeing the APHC dialogue fail since the moderates and the party compete for essentially the same mass constituency.

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