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Behind the Hizb ul-Mujahideen’s ceasefire

In the crumpled photograph found on his bullet-ridden body, Sartaj Ahmad has his arm wrapped around the shoulder of a slender young woman: a woman, his neighbours in the small south Kashmir village of Okay say, he hoped one day to marry. The assault rifle that Ahmad fired from at Indian troops in the minutes before his death is draped over his right shoulder.

Hours after Hizb ul-Mujahideen battalion commander Ahmad and his bodyguard, Ashiq Husain Paddar, were shot dead near Kulgam, the Pakistan-based United Jihad Council announced a unilateral ceasefire on the occasion of Eid-ul-Fitr. In an October 8 statement, UJC chairman and Hizb ul-Mujahideen supreme commander Mohammad Yusuf Shah commanded “the mujahideen leadership and cadres engaged in armed confrontation to strictly comply [with] the directions with regard to the unilateral decision to cease fire.”

If the ceasefire holds — and if terror groups outside the UJC, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, are forced by Pakistan’s military establishment to join in in its implementation — Jammu and Kashmir will see three successive violence-free days, starting from October 12: the first violence-free Eid-ul-Fitr in decades.

More important, though, the ceasefire could lead to the Hizb deciding to join a political dialogue on Jammu and Kashmir’s future: an outcome that until recently seemed inconceivable. Underpinning Shah’s new peace bid is one stark fact: the slow, inexorable demise of what was once Jammu and Kashmir’s most feared terror group.

Ever since Nisar Ahmad Bhat took charge of the Hizb ul-Mujahideen’s Kashmir Valley operations in 2004, his message to his Rawalpindi-based organisation has been simple: the terror group is comatose and its decline possibly terminal.

Operating under the code-name Ghazi Misbahuddin, Bhat was charged with rebuilding the Hizb after it lost a series of top operatives in 2003-2004. He discovered, though, that the organisation no longer had the popular legitimacy or political influence that it needed to remain a credible force. Internecine feuding had plagued the organisation since 2000-2001, when the Hizb first aborted a ceasefire announced by the pro-dialogue commander, Abdul Majid Dar, and then arranged for his assassination. Bhat’s strategy rested on shipping in trusted Hizb operatives from across the Line of Control to revive its dwindling fortunes.

For the most part, the strategy has failed. Hizb central Kashmir division commander Tajamul Islam Abdullah, for example, has been unable to mount a single operation of consequence in over six months. Desperate to demonstrate success, he put in place plans for a series of bombings in and around Srinagar on October 30, when pious Muslims across Kashmir were due to commemorate the historic battle between the forces of Prophet Mohammad and his opponents in the tribe of Quraish at Badr.

However, Indian intelligence soon penetrated the cell tasked to execute the bombings. Shabbir Ahmad Ganai and Mehrajuddin Mir, both long-standing Hizb operatives who had been despatched from Pakistan to help rebuild the organisation’s central Kashmir networks, were arrested. A laboratory built by Mir to fabricate electronic circuits for bombs was detected and shut down. Ganai had last served in Jammu and Kashmir in 1996-1997, while Mir had left for Pakistan in 2001. Neither any longer commanded the kind of loyalty which could have helped the organisation grow.

Abdullah’s failures, similarly, were linked to his lack of local political legitimacy. His family migrated from Srinagar to Karachi during the first India-Pakistan war of 1947-1948, and although it retains ties of kinship and marriage within Srinagar, it has little direct relationship with the Islamist networks within Jammu and Kashmir from which the Hizb draws its sustenance.

What influence Abdullah possesses among the Hizb cadre in Jammu and Kashmir draws on his connections in Rawalpindi, not Srinagar: his father, Malik Abdullah, runs the Pakistan-based Hizb ul-Mujahideen radio station Sada-i-Hurriyat. Conflicts between local commanders and lieutenants of the Hizb’s Rawalpindi command have also been evident in southern Kashmir. In the wake of Mohammad Ashraf Shah’s killing, his lieutenant-turned-rival Javed ‘Seepan’ Sheikh moved to pre-empt the succession decision his Pakistan-based superiors would take.

He ruthlessly eliminated rivals in mafia-style hits, notably the Bijbehara-based Mohammad Jehangir ‘Master-ji,’ whose body was found dumped in an Anantnag alleyway.

Alarmed, the Hizb command responded by drafting in old hands from Pakistan. Farooq Ahmad Dar, who operates under the alias Hanif Khan, was assigned control of the division. With the support of his lieutenant, Pervez Ahmad Dar, who uses the code-name ‘Musharraf,’ Farooq Dar set about rebuilding the Hizb ul-Mujahideen. Several districts were handed over to Hizb commanders drafted in from Pakistan, like Bijbehara district commander Tariq Lone. However, Sheikh’s hostility ensured that the new commanders achieved little. In one time strongholds such as Kulgam and Shopian, the Hizb has been decimated.

Evidence of the Hizb’s diminishing influence is not hard to come by. Earlier this month, People’s Democratic Party dissident Ghulam Hasan Mir made a bid to harvest support among Islamists by offering prayers at the graves of nine Pakistani terrorists killed by the Indian Army along the Line of Control in Tangmarg — not ethnic-Kashmiri Hizb ul-Mujahideen cadre.

Mohammad Ashraf Shah’s own funeral rites were ignored by politicians in Jammu and Kashmir, a marked departure from 2001-2003, when the PDP actively courted the terror group’s support. Nor, it bears mention, did a single south Kashmir politician see it fit to condole with the families of Sartaj Ahmad or Pervez Ahmad Padder.

Just four years ago, when tacit Hizb support helped propel the PDP to power, the terror group seemed to hold the keys to power. Today, its own long-term prospects are in question.

“I believe,” Shah told the Pakistan-based Islamist newspaper Jasarat on September 20, “that Kashmir will only be freed through jihad, not dialogue.”

In practice, though, Hizb insiders have long known that Shah has wearied of the long jihad he helped initiate in 1988. What is unclear is whether he has the stomach for the risks needed to transform the three-day ceasefire into a durable peace process.

An affluent apple farmer who participated in Kashmir’s electoral politics, Shah was from the outset an improbable radical. His family embodies traditional Kashmiri middle-class aspirations — not neoconservative Islamism. Shah’s oldest son, 35-year old Shahid Yusuf, works as a teacher, while 30-year old Javed Yusuf is an agricultural technologist.

Twenty-six-year-old Shakeel Yusuf works as a medical assistant at a government-run hospital. Wahid Yusuf, 24, graduated from the Government Medical College in Srinagar, where the family’s contacts helped him obtain a seat through a quota controlled by the Jammu and Kashmir Governor. Momin Yusuf, at 20 the youngest of Shah’s sons, is an engineering student.

Last year, Shah gave a series of interviews that fuelled speculation that he was in search of a road that could bring him home. Speaking to the Srinagar-based Kashmir News Service in August, for example, he said the organisation was willing to initiate a dialogue with New Delhi. A ceasefire, he said, could also come about if India brought troop levels “in Jammu and Kashmir to the 1989 position” adding that “it should release detainees, it should stop all military operations, it should acknowledge before the world community that there are three parties to the dispute.” New Delhi flatly refused to meet the Hizb’s extravagant terms.

Now, however, there is new reason for hope. Pakistan’s domestic crisis has made President Pervez Musharraf increasingly keen to contain Islamist forces active in Kashmir. Shah was thrown out of Rawalpindi for several weeks after the Lal Masjid crisis — a sign of Islamabad’s diminishing patience with violent Islamists.

Notwithstanding recent media claims that violence has escalated in Jammu and Kashmir, the data makes clear that it continues to fall. Civilian fatalities from January to September 15, 2006, stood at 314. This year, the figure for the same period has been just 136. Where 125 Indian soldiers, police personnel and irregulars were killed from January- September 15 last year, only 86 were lost in combat during the same period this year. Terrorist fatalities have dropped from 429 to 327 but arrests have risen from 275 to 313.

What lies ahead? Judging by the UJC ceasefire declaration, the Hizb ul-Mujahideen does not expect immediate negotiations. Indeed, UJC resolved that “the struggle for freedom will continue on every front until the dawn of freedom,” and condemned bilateral negotiations with New Delhi as “futile.” For its part, New Delhi is unlikely to respond to the Hizb ceasefire until the terror group brings a tangible negotiation offer to the table. More likely than not, months of quiet covert diplomacy will be needed before a workable ceasefire can be hammered out.

Does the Eid ceasefire, then, mean nothing? No. A few hours after the UJC issued its ceasefire declaration, three Lashkar-e-Taiba cadres walked into a home near Kupwara, searching for a suspected police informer. Nargis Maqsood, who had come to celebrate Ramzan with her parents, was critically injured when she unwisely sought to bar their way. Her six-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Aamish Maqsood, was killed in the firing. Even if just a few families survive this coming Eid-ul-Fitr, the prospects of an abiding peace in Jammu and Kashmir will appear that much more real to its residents.

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