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Sunday, Apr 13, 2008
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Inside the mind of the jihad

Praveen Swami

Sabahuddin’s story casts light on motives of Indian jihadists

Ahmad crossed LoC to reach Lashkar camps in Pakistan
Evidence shows that SIMI cadre continue to train in Jammu and Kashmir

LUCKNOW: Ever since the Uttar Pradesh police arrested the top Lashkar-e-Taiba operative Sabahuddin Ahmad in February, investigators have gained new insights into the terrorist group’s tactics.

But the story of the 26-year-old commander — the architect of the 2005 attack on the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, among others — also casts light on the motives that have driven hundreds of young men to join the Students Islamic Movement of India’s little-understood war against the very country its cadre call their home.

Like a growing number of recruits to SIMI’s jihad, Ahmad belongs to a successful middle-class family, secular in its aspirations. His Bihar-based father Shabbir Ahmad is a lawyer, his sister Farida Iram works at a hotel on New Delhi’s suburbs. Cousins Nadeem Jilani and Latif Jilani are United Kingdom-trained doctors, and others, engineers and businessmen.

But the Gujarat communal pogrom of 2002 led Ahmad to break with the path his family had chosen. At Aligarh, where his family hoped that the environment would be conducive to his high school studies, Ahmad began attending a SIMI study group, which met in secret. He was deeply influenced by Mohammad Amjad, an older student, who argued that jihad alone could ensure the survival of Indian Muslims.

Life in the Lashkar

Late in 2002, Ahmad finally decided to join the Lashkar. With the aid of Basharat Jaffrey, a Poonch-based Unani practitioner with old SIMI links in Aligarh, he travelled to Surankote in Jammu and Kashmir. Above the town were the mountains of Hil Kaka, an important logistics hub for the Lashkar until it was cleared during a major Army offensive in 2003.

By Ahmad’s account, over a hundred men were being trained on Hil Kaka when he arrived there. Among them were three men from Beed, Maharashtra, linked to a cell led by Zabiuddin Ansari, a SIMI leader planning attacks in Gujarat. So, too, were six Gujarat men sent by the cleric Sufiyan Patangia, a central figure in the assassination of Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya.

ISI training

Like most of these men, Ahmad crossed the Line of Control to reach Lashkar training camps in Pakistan. Later, police investigators say, he received advanced training in covert war techniques from officers of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. In mid-2005, he returned to India with orders to execute a major terror attack.

Basing himself in Bangalore, Ahmad enrolled at Presidency College for a Bachelors degree in Business Administration — the closest he perhaps came to fulfilling his family’s dreams. He rented an apartment at the Coffee Board Colony, waiting for a Lashkar fidayeen attacker, who was to carry out the Indian Institute of Science strike, to be sent from Jammu and Kashmir.

Ahmad’s interrogation resolved the question just why the attack caused so little damage — the fidayeen attacker’s automatic rifle malfunctioned, while a grenade he threw failed to explode.

But Ahmad’s own planning of the operation’s logistics was picture-perfect. He returned to Pakistan, where he worked at the Lashkar headquarters in Muzaffarabad and Lahore.

In the summer of 2007, Ahmad returned to India through Nepal, to plan strikes, which the Lashkar’s command hoped would have an even larger impact than the IISc attack. He initially had little success. A planned attack on an Indian Space Research Organisation facility in southern India, for example, was called off after a Maldives national code-named ‘Ehsham’ backed out of the plot.

Eventually, Ahmad succeeded in executing the 2008 New Year Eve’s attack on the Central Reserve Police Force training camp, using fidayeen sent from Jammu and Kashmir — a repetition of the tactics used in Bangalore. At the time of his arrest, the police believe, Ahmed had completed arrangements for yet another strike, this time on the Mumbai Stock Exchange.

Continued threat

Ahmad’s arrest is unlikely to mark the end of SIMI’s jihad. Last month, when the police arrested 13 SIMI leaders in Indore, they learned that dozens of cadre had received rudimentary combat and bomb-making training at camps conducted by the organisation.

Students who demonstrated combat aptitude were sent for training at Lashkar facilities in Pakistan.

Evidence that SIMI cadre continue to train in Jammu and Kashmir also exists. In May 2006, for example, security forces shot dead a Hizb ul-Mujahideen operative code-named ‘Janbaaz Hizbi’ in an operation near Tral town. Investigators later found that he was in fact Mohammad Irfan, a SIMI activist from Mattaharam village in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district.

Even as police officials are working to prevent the next bombing, Ahmad’s story demonstrates, politicians need to start thinking about what can be done to still the hate unleashed six years ago by the massacres in Gujarat.

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