LAHORE: The
dreaded Maulana Masood Azhar of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) is back in
business and has restarted recruitment and fund-raising activities in
Pakistan, a move timed precisely with the recent progress in the peace
talks between India and Pakistan.
In December 2008, almost a
week after the 26/11 terror attacks in the Indian commercial capital of
Mumbai, the Pakistani authorities had placed restrictions on Masood
Azhar’s movement by confining him to his multi-storied concrete compound
in the Model Town area of Bahawalpur, housing hundreds of armed men.
The action was taken in the wake of the Indian demand to hand over three
persons to New Delhi - Masood Azhar, Dawood Ibrahim and Hafiz Mohammad
Saeed. The JeM chief was wanted for his alleged involvement in the 2001
attacks on the Indian parliament.
The Indian demand was followed
by Pakistani media reports that Maulana Masood Azhar had abandoned his
Jaish headquarters in the Model Town and temporarily shifted his base to
South Waziristan in the wake of the mounting Indian pressure for his
extradition.
In the second week of April 2009, Masood Azhar was
declared officially missing from Pakistan after the Interior Minister
Rehman Malik claimed that he was not in Pakistan and that Islamabad
would not provide protection and refuge to any criminal.
But the
then Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee had ridiculed
Pakistan for denying the “obvious presence” of the Jaish chief, saying:
“India had several times got different information from Pakistan on
Masood Azhar and it was not unusual to hear such denials from Pakistani
officials.”
However, well-informed militant circles say Maulana
Masood Azhar has already returned to Bahawalpur and resumed his jehadi
activities by reactivating the Jaish headquarters in the Model Town
area. The JeM nerve center openly runs a grand religious seminary -
Usman-o-Ali - where extremist interpretation of Islam is taught to
hundreds of children.
International media recently expressed
fears that the headquarters of the jehadi group could contain
underground bunkers and tunnels, as had been the case with the Lal
Masjid-run Jamia Fareedia and Jamia Hafsa schools in Islamabad, which
were eventually destroyed in a massive military operation carried out by
the Pakistan army in July 2007.
Critics say by allowing the
Jaish Ameer to return to Bahawalpur and resume his jehadi activities,
the Pakistani establishment seems to have forgotten that
British-Pakistani terror suspect Rashid Rauf, who escaped from the
custody of the police in Rawalpindi in 2007 while undergoing a court
trial, was a close relative of Masood Azhar and had planned to blow up
trans-Atlantic planes at Heathrow Airport in London way back in August
2006.
Rashid Rauf was reportedly killed in a US drone strike in
the North Waziristan on November 22, 2008 along with a senior al-Qaeda
leader. Even today, senior security officials concede that JeM activists
are working in tandem with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Haqqani
militant network in NWA in their ongoing battle against what they
describe as “the forces of the infidel” on both sides of the Pak-Afghan
border.
The Jaish was launched by jehadi cleric Azhar in
February 2000 shortly after his release from an Indian jail in exchange
for hostages on board an Indian plane that was hijacked by Kashmiri
militants in December 1999. Although Azhar was arrested in India in
February 1994, his name first hit the headlines following the 1999
hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC 814. After being hijacked the
plane was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan, which was under the control
of the Taliban at that time. The hijackers were led by Azhar’s younger
brother.
Once the Indian authorities handed over Masood Azhar,
Sheikh Omar Saeed and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar to the hijackers, they came
to Pakistan and shortly afterwards Masood Azhar appeared in Karachi to
address an estimated 10,000 people. He announced the launching of the
JeM with the prime objective of fighting Indian security forces in
J&K and proclaimed, “I have come here because this is my duty to
tell you that Muslims should not rest in peace until they destroy India
and the United States.”
Masood Azhar was the ideologue of
another militant organization, the Deobandi Harkatul Ansar (HuA) that
was banned in 1997 by the US State Department due to its alleged
association with al-Qaeda. The HuA renamed itself as the Harkatul
Mujahideen in 1998, a year after being banned.
The formation of
the Jaish was widely supported by Pakistan’s top Islamic Deobandi
scholars, especially Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai of the Jamia Binori in
Karachi, who was known for his pro-Taliban leanings and Maulana Yusuf
Ludhianvi, who was the chief commander of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan at
that time. While Shamzai became the chief ideologue of the Jaish,
Ludhianvi was made its supreme leader and Masood Azhar the chief
commander.
In July 2005, British intelligence agencies
investigating the July 7 suicide bombings in London informed their
Pakistan counterparts that two of the four suicide bombers - Shehzad
Tanweer and Siddique Khan - had met Osama Nazir, a JeM suicide trainer,
in Faisalabad a few months before the attacks. Information provided by
Nazir after his arrest revealed that Tanweer had stayed at another
extremist Sunni religious school, Jamia Manzurul Islami, situated in
cantonment area of Lahore and being run by its principal, Pir Saifullah
Khalid, who is considered close to Masood Azhar.
In 2007, the
slowing down of the India-Pakistan peace process saw renewed activity by
the Jaish which re-launched cross-border offensives in Jammu &
Kashmir. The group was reorganized under the command of Mufti Abdul
Rauf, the younger brother of Azhar who had proved his mettle by carrying
out successful militant operations inside Jammu & Kashmir.
Rauf
was allegedly allowed to establish a transit camp in Rawalpindi for
recruits traveling from southern Punjab to the training camp at Kohat,
40 miles from Peshawar. It was decided that Abdul Rauf would supervise
the JeM training camps as the acting chief of the group while Maulana
Masood Azhar would continue to manage organizational affairs while
remaining underground.
However, the Jaish Ameer had to go
underground in the wake of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks and the
subsequent Indian demand for his extradition.
ISLAMABAD:
After remaining underground for a decade since being banned
in 2001, Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), the second largest jihadi group based
in Punjab, has resumed full-scale public activity including fundraising
while security agencies appear to be overlooking its ‘resurgence’.
Jaish activists and intelligence officials
said
the group is in the process of regaining its traditional physical and
financial strength which had dissipated during the ten-year ban imposed
by former president Pervez Musharraf. The JeM, they added, is working on
a plan to reach out to its activists who had abandoned the organisation
after it came on the radar following an attack on the Indian parliament
blamed on the group.
JeM is trying to consolidate avenues for fundraising, individual
charity from within Pakistan and donations from Gulf states, which were
partially blocked during the ban by the country’s security agencies. As a
first step, an activist said, it had revived its charity, Al-Rehmat
Trust, the group’s humanitarian wing once run by Master Allah Baksh, the
father of Jaish founding chief Maulana Masood Azhar, till his death
last year.
Maulana Ashfaq Ahmed, who is affiliated with the trust as its coordinator
said
from Bahawalpur, the city in southern Punjab where the organisation is
based, that the charity’s fundraising was in full swing in Punjab and
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The trust capitalises on Masood Azhar’s name for
recreating the goodwill it once enjoyed when it had fought in
Afghanistan along with the Taliban before the regime was driven out of
power by international forces. Government agencies have never obstructed
the trust’s fundraising in either Punjab or KP, Maulana Ashfaq added.
When asked why, he remarked: “You can put this question to the
government and its agencies. We operate on the ground. We have a visible
presence.”
Led by Azhar, Jaish is the second largest jihadi outfit in the
Punjab. Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is the biggest both in terms of the number
of activists and infrastructure. Maulana Ashfaq said the trust’s
offices were being re-established all over Punjab and KP including
Jaish’s traditional strongholds in Kohat district and Hazara region. He
added that fund-raising had gained momentum with the advent of Ramazan,
but declined to give an approximation of the amount the charity might
fetch by Eid. A younger brother of Masood, Amar Azhar (possibly his
codename), was in Saudi Arabia to seek donations from rich businessmen
and sympathisers in Gulf states.
Illusion
Officials of law enforcement agencies in Punjab said they had never
received orders for a crackdown on the trust since it was not banned by
the federal interior ministry. “Provincial authorities can only ban
organisations proscribed by the federal government. Otherwise, they can
take us to court,” said Senator Pervez Rasheed, an adviser to the Punjab
government. Additional Inspector General (Investigations) Punjab police
Azam Joya said not a single case against banned organisations for
raising funds was referred to provincial law enforcers in recent months.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik was not available for comment on why
an organisation using the name of Jaish chief and sharing its
headquarters has not been banned. KP Information Minister Mian Iftikhar
Hussain also declined to comment on the trust’s activities in the
province.
