INDIA-SRILANKA-MALDIVES

New Face of Jihadist Consolidation- Part I

Terrorist groups like the LeT are willing to play a supporting role to the IM, as long as the latter continues to inflame the Muslim-Hindu divide in India and batter the country with its hate and bombing campaigns. The year 2014 and beyond could prove to be important for the IM's future, especially if instability in Afghanistan continues to fuel the capacities of Pak-based terrorist groups as well as the IM, say the authors.

On 29 February 2000, a one-page note, scribbled on a piece of paper, arrived at a newspaper office in Hyderabad, in India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The "Indian Muslim Mohammadi Mujahideen (IMMM) has been formed," it announced. According to the note, the organization was "committed to eradicate the western culture from India" and, as a first part of this campaign, had bombed cinemas that ran pornographic films.

The note ended law enforcement agencies’ search for the perpetrators of a number of incidents that had taken place a month earlier. These included a bomb blast at a sweets shop owned by a sympathizer of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu right-wing organization with a pan-Indian presence; two unexploded devices recovered from a movie theater and a location near the high-security Defence Research and Development Organisation laboratory; and explosions at two movie theaters, one in Andhra Pradesh and the other in the neighboring state of Maharashtra. All of the recovered and exploded bombs had been devised from the same substances: potassium nitrate, potassium permanganate, aluminum powder, and sugar.

Less than two months after the note’s appearance, the IMMM’s chief, Azam Ghauri—who was also a top leader of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)—was killed in an encounter with police, and the threat from the IMMM was thought to be over. The IMMM, however, was only one of many offshoots of a larger organization, the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), that set about implementing SIMI president Shahid Badr Falahi’s 1992 pledge: "Muslims organise themselves and stand up to defend the community." Security agencies were able to swiftly neutralize organizations like the IMMM and the Mujahideen Islam e-Hind (MIH), another SIMI offshoot, mostly because the groups sought instant publicity for their actions, which exposed them to the security establishment. Law enforcement agencies’ experience with the Indian Mujahideen (IM) has proved to be different, however.

In the following three sections, we analyze the unique operational dynamics of the IM, which, we argue, are responsible for its cohesion as well as its success as a terrorist organization. On the basis of some recent findings, we examine the IM’s cadre recruitment, explosives manufacturing, external and internal linkages, attack patterns, and attempts to transform itself from a guardian of wronged Muslims in India to an avenger of ill-treated Muslims worldwide. We argue that the IM’s future and its success in carrying out attacks are critically linked to India’s internal efforts to target the IM’s unique strengths and neutralize the support that the IM receives from external sources.

The IM’s Developing Ideology: Three Distinct Phases

On 17 July 2013, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the organization that New Delhi set up after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks as the primary agency to investigate all terrorist incidents in India, stated in its charge sheet that the IM "was formed in 2003 after ultra-radicalised Muslim youth segregated from the Students Islamic Movement of India." Similar to the IMMM and the MIH, the IM has its roots in the avowed need to radicalize the SIMI’s plan of action even further. In 2001 and 2002, a rebellion of sorts was brewing within the SIMI. A faction broke away from the less-radical parent organization and sought new cadres who were already sufficiently radicalized; their extremism was further boosted by contact with external militants such as the LeT. This new faction became the IM. The IM, in a way, was also a result of the LeT’s "Karachi Project," which had sought to raise a new network of jihadists.  In its 17 July 2013 charge sheet, the NIA added that the IM cadres "do not believe in India’s Constitution and IM’s members nurse communal hatred against the Hindu community."

Since the IM had been formed on an agenda of waging a violent war against Hindu India, no spell of moderate militancy separated the IM’s birth from its first act of violence. Within a relatively short time period, however, the IM underwent three distinct phases of ideological expansion: traversing from a narrow India-centric ideology to revenge-seeking and eventually embracing the concerns of Muslims in other countries. This is not to suggest that the IM abandoned or progressed beyond any of the causes that it initially championed. Rather, it acquired new additional causes to fight for. In effect, the IM’s successes in the Indian theater and its constant ideological oscillation demonstrated the IM’s widening profile and proclivity for becoming an integral part of the global jihad. Such a broadening of ideology was important, for it fit in well with the amplification of jihadist terrorism in South Asia, especially boosted by the prospects of instability in post-2014 Afghanistan.

According to an estimate by an intelligence agency, by 2005, the IM had firmly established a complete terror outfit, with different sections in charge of providing manpower and sourcing explosives and bomb components. A specialist computer-services cell was already in place. Different leaders were already travelling countrywide, liaising between cells.

The IM’s war on Hindu India began in 2005 with a string of urban attacks, which included serial explosions in the national capital, Delhi—two bombs exploded at busy marketplaces and a third exploded inside a Delhi Transport Corporation bus, killing 62 people. There was some question about who had carried out the attacks. The LeT was initially suspected. A Delhi Police special cell team also claimed to have killed the mastermind of the blasts in an operation in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir in 2007.

In 2006, the IM carried out serial bombings in the Hindu pilgrimage town of Varanasi, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Three explosions, one in a crowded temple and two in a railway station, killed 21 people and injured 62 others. In 2013, an arrested IM cadre who had participated in the 2006 bombings told his interrogators that the timers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) used in the Varanasi blasts were similar to the ones used in the 2005 Delhi blasts. Since the formation of the IM had remained unannounced, these attacks were thought to have been perpetrated by Pakistan-based outfits, like the LeT, and the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul Jihad-al-Islami. The fact that the LeT was still perpetrating large-scale attacks, like the July 2006 explosions that targeted the train systems in Mumbai and killed 200 people, made the task of looking for another perpetrator seem unnecessary. Indian security personnel felt comfortable in the assumption that because the LeT was still active within India, the LeT must be behind the Varanasi attacks.

The IM’s first-ever ideological affirmation came in the form of its first manifesto, which the group released in 2007 after it had bombed court complexes in Lucknow, Varanasi, and Faizabad. The manifesto claimed that the blasts were intended to "punish local lawyers" who had physically attacked some suspects who were being held for an abortive kidnap plot against politician Rahul Gandhi by the terrorist group Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM). The manifesto, however, spoke broadly of "wounds given by the idol worshippers to the Indian Muslims" and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, a disputed mosque in the state of Uttar Pradesh that Hindu radicals had demolished in 1992 following violent countrywide communal riots. Emphasizing the miserable condition of the Muslims in the country, the manifesto concluded, "If you want to be a successful person in India, then you should be an idol worshipper and kill Muslims."

The IM released two other manifestos in 2008 and 2010, following more bombings in Delhi and Varanasi, respectively. Both documents pointed at the role of "the Supreme Court, the high courts, the lower courts and all the commissions" for failing the Muslims in India. The 2008 manifesto, running nearly 14 pages and titled The Rise of Jihad, indicated that the bombings were carried out to avenge the 2002 anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat. "In the light of the injustice and wrongs on the Muslims of Gujarat, we advance our jihad and call all our brethren under it to unite and answer these irresolute kafireen [infidels] of India," it said. The 2010 manifesto, titled Let’s Feel the Pain Together, said that the attack in 2010 served as a reminder to Hindus that the IM had "resolved that none of your mandirs [temples] will remain safe until and unless all our occupied Masjids [mosques] throughout India are returned back to the Muslims."

When the IM targeted the Indian judiciary in explosions outside the Delhi high court in 2011, its attacks had already spanned the entire country and were being carried out in almost all of the major urban centers, including New Delhi and the country’s financial capital, Mumbai. Attacks in Ahmedabad and Pune in the west, Hyderabad and Bangalore in the south, Patna and Bodh Gaya in the east, and Delhi in the north made the IM look like a pan-Indian outfit capable of taking its activities to almost any corner of the country. Among these attacks was a 2010 incident in which two bikers fired on tourists gathered at the gate of the Jama Masjid in the Old Delhi area. The drive-by shooting, the only attack of this nature carried out by the IM so far, was to be followed by an explosion, but the explosive, which was fitted into a car parked in the area, did not go off due to faulty circuitry. This attack was carried out on 19 September 2010, days before the opening of the Commonwealth Games in the national capital. Two Taiwanese nationals sustained bullet wounds.

By the time of the Jama Masjid attack in 2010, the IM had stopped mailing its usual manifestos claiming responsibility for its attacks, so investigative agencies had to rely on interrogations of arrested IM cadres to unravel the intentions behind the explosions. The IM had also diversified its target selection, demonstrating that it was indeed willing to go after almost any target, with the sole intention of maximizing fatalities. Revenge against Hindus and the institutions facilitating the dominance of Hinduism over the Muslims remained the proclaimed raison d’être of the IM—at least for awhile.

Over a period of time, the IM began perpetrating terror attacks even to avenge the deaths of its cadres, representing a drastic climb down from its larger goal of fighting on behalf of the Muslim community. According to interrogation reports, the explosions in Pune, Maharashtra, on 1 August 2012 were intended to avenge the killing of imprisoned IM cadre Qateel Siddique by his cell mates in a Pune prison a couple of months earlier. The attack included five coordinated low-intensity explosions on a busy road in the heart of Pune, injuring one person. Another live IED was later recovered from the area.

Within a year of the Pune attack, the IM had expanded its worldview, aiming to take up the causes of persecuted Muslims outside of India. Blasts that targeted the Buddhist shrine in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, in July 2013 were said to have been in response to violence against the Rohingyas, a Muslim population in Myanmar, by members of the ethnic Buddhist majority. Arrested IM cadre Umair Siddiqui told his interrogators that he had been approached by another IM cadre, Haider Ali, about the Rohingyas’ situation, and both had finalized the plan to carry out the attack at the Buddhist shrine. Earlier, arrested LeT cadre Abdul Karim Tunda revealed that the LeT had also been part of the Bodh Gaya attack; during his interrogation, Tunda detailed the LeT’s plan, in collaboration with the IM, to recruit Rohingyas and carry out the attack.

On 27 October 2013, explosions in Patna, Bihar, were reportedly carried out to protest communal riots in Muzaffarnagar, in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh. The recovery of a large amount of explosives at Ranchi, Jharkhand, on 4 November 2013 demonstrated the IM’s plan to maintain the momentum in its violent campaign. Similarly, the recovery of documents from an IM safe house in Ranchi, including handwritten notes from IM members detailing future action plans, pointed to the possibility that the IM would carry out future attacks on Buddhist shrines, foreign tourists, and public installations in the state of Chhattisgarh.

The IM’s wide array of unconnected objectives underscores the fact that, instead of remaining a purely ideology-based organization with both local and global aspirations, the IM could be willing to carry out attacks for almost any cause that suits its convenience. Believed to be controlled by external forces (including the JeM, the LeT, and the Pakistani external intelligence agency known as Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI]), and to nurture the aspiration of making common cause with al Qaeda, IM leaders could be looking well beyond the traditional outfit that was triggering explosions only on behalf of wronged Indian Muslims. Although the IM is largely defined as an indigenous or homegrown terror organization within India, its leadership does not appear to be averse to eventually transforming the outfit into a pan-Islamist terrorist operation.

By Dr. Bibhu Prasad Routray and Dr. Shanthie Mariet D’Souza

    Courtesy:  www.globalecco.org

 

 

 

 

 

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