Author: Alex Perry / Chittagong
Publication: www.time.com
Date: October 15, 2002
URL: http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501021021-364423,00.html
Signs abound that Bangladesh has
become a safe haven for Islamic jihadis-including Taliban and al- Qaeda
fighters fresh off the boat from Afghanistan
As it headed for port through the
midwinter dusk, there was little about the M.V. Mecca that stood out from
the other boats plying the waters off southern Bangladesh. Portworkers
and fishermen noted the same squat deckhouse and plump hold that for centuries
have sheltered fishermen from the cyclones of the Bay of Bengal. The Mecca
had the usual rusted rigging and smoke-blackened stern. And the crew too
was like most others working off Chittagong: pure Rohingyas-stocky Muslim
refugees from western Burma. Only the thick salt marks high on the Mecca's
bow hinted that it was ending a voyage longer than most fishing trips.
But this was Chittagong, South Asia's premier hub for pirates, gunrunners
and smugglers. When the dockworkers saw the Mecca anchoring on a sandbank
three kilometers out to sea on the night of Dec. 21, it was a signal to
all not to ask questions.
For nine months the exact nature
of the Mecca's cargo or the shipment's eventual destination remained unknown.
But there were clues. Portworkers that night said they saw five motor launches
ferry in large groups of men from the boat wearing black turbans, long
beards and traditional Islamic salwar kameez. Their towering height suggested
these travelers were foreigners, and the boxes of ammunition and the AK-47s
slung across their shoulders helped sketch a sinister picture. Then in
July, a senior member of Bangladesh's largest terrorist group, the 2,000-strong
al-Qaeda-allied Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), told TIME the 150 men
who entered Bangladesh that night were Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from
Afghanistan. Three senior Bangladeshi military sources also confirmed this
was the case. And on Oct. 7, Indian police arrested Burmese-born HUJI fighter
and weapons courier Fazle Karim (alias Abu Fuzi) as he arrived in Calcutta
by train from Kashmir. A veteran of al-Qaeda's camps in eastern Afghanistan
who told his interrogators he had twice met Osama bin Laden, Karim said
he recognized two people he had trained with in Afghanistan while visiting
HUJI hideouts in Bangladesh in August. The pair told him they were part
of a group of "more than 100 Arabs and Afghans belonging to al-Qaeda and
the Taliban who had arrived by ship at Chittagong in winter," Karim said,
according to transcripts of his interview with Indian police.
The arrival of a large al-Qaeda
group in the capital Dhaka that night raises pressing concerns that Bangladesh
may have become a dangerous new front in America's war on terror. Indeed,
one Bangladeshi newspaper last month even quoted an unnamed foreign embassy
in Dhaka as saying Osama bin Laden's No. 2, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri,
had been hiding out in the country for months after arriving in Chittagong.
(Last week, in an audio message that authorities have tentatively authenticated,
al-Zawahiri warned of further attacks against the U.S., vowing that it
will not go "unpunished for its crimes.") According to a source inside
a Bangladeshi Islamic group with close ties to al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri arrived
in Dhaka in early March and stayed briefly in the compound of a local fundamentalist
leader. It's unclear how al-Zawahiri came to be in Bangladesh, or whether
he's still there. However, a source in the Directorate General of Forces
Intelligence (dgfi), a Bangladeshi military intelligence agency, told TIME
that al-Zawahiri is believed to have left Bangladesh this summer, crossing
over the eastern border into Burma with Rohingya rebels. U.S. intelligence,
however, has no evidence this report is true.
As for the Mecca, its passengers'
plans remained a mystery. One military source says most of the men stayed
in Bangladesh rather than merely transiting, although he adds it was not
clear whether the group sought only refuge or planned to establish a new
base of operations. On Sept. 24, a fuller picture finally began to emerge
when Bangladesh's domestic intelligence agency arrested four Yemenis, an
Algerian, a Libyan and a Sudanese at three houses in the upper-crust district
of Uttara in Dhaka. Bangladeshi intelligence sources said they received
information from "several" foreign agencies that the men-Abu Nujaid of
Libya, Sadek Al Nassami, Abu Sallam, Abu Umaiya and Abul Abbas of Yemen,
Abul Ashem of Algeria and Hassan Adam of Sudan-were involved in militant
arms training at a madrasah in the capital run by a Saudi-backed charity,
al-Haramain. In September, Indonesia's al-Qaeda supersnitch Omar al- Faruq
told the CIA that al-Haramain was the foundation used to channel bin Laden's
money to him from the Middle East. An American expert in the region concurs
that branches of the ultraconservative foundation have funded terrorism
around the world-a fact that earned two al-Haramain foreign offices a blacklisting
by Washington in March-although probably without the knowledge of al-Haramain's
headquarters in Riyadh. "Disreputable folks have penetrated al-Haramain
and used its offices, funds and personnel for nefarious purposes," he says.
The seven al-Haramain members were
questioned by interrogators from domestic intelligence, police and the
DGFI. Bangladeshi agents also fanned out across the country to investigate
al-Haramain's 37 other branches, which promptly ceased operations. Although
Bangladeshi intelligence sources confirmed the suspects were being questioned
about links to al-Qaeda, they cautioned that no relationship with bin Laden's
terror network had been discovered, nor any evidence of training. They
added that the men had been in Bangladesh for three years and were also
being interrogated over allegations of child trafficking. Sources within
Bangladesh's intelligence community, however, told TIME the authorities
had been embarrassed not to find any evidence at al-Haramain's five-story
offices in Dhaka and were trying to play down the raid. They said the passports
and entry stamps indicating that the seven arrested men entered Bangladesh
in 1999 were most likely fakes. Whatever the case, after being held for
five days at a secret location, the men were driven to court and released
on Sept. 29. No charges or proceedings were brought. After they were freed
from custody, the seven were driven to Dhaka's Sheraton hotel where they
spent the night, and then disappeared. TIME's HUJI source claimed the trafficking
story was merely an official smoke screen. "These are the same guys from
the Mecca," he said. "These are bin Laden's people. They've been hiding
here for several months."
Bangladesh, it is true, is no Afghanistan,
or even Pakistan. For centuries, Bengalis have been united by a culture
of tolerance that defies the familiar South Asian divide between Hindu
and Muslim. After Sept. 11, the CIA did set up a new five-man base in Dhaka,
but merely as part of a global policy of establishing a presence in all
Muslim countries. The American intelligence community's view is summed
up by one U.S. source who told TIME that Bangladesh is "not a real hot
account." But Bangladesh also has its fundamentalists. And its southern
coastal hills and northern borders with India are lawless and bristling
with Islamic militants armed by gunrunners en route from Cambodia and southern
Thailand to Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Central Asia and the Middle East.
Today, southern Bangladesh has become
a haven for hundreds of jihadis on the lam. They find natural allies in
Muslim guerrillas from India hiding out across the border, and in Muslim
Rohingyas, tens of thousands of whom fled the ethnic and religious suppression
of the Burmese military junta in the late 1970s and 1980s. Many Rohingyas
are long-term refugees, but some are trained to cause trouble back home
in camps tolerated by a succession of Bangladeshi governments. The original
facilities date back to 1975, making them Asia's oldest jihadi training
camps. And one former Burmese guerrilla who visits the camps regularly
describes three near Ukhia, south of the town of Cox's Bazar, as able to
accommodate a force of 2,500 between them. The biggest, he claims, has
26 interconnected bunkers complete with kitchens, lecture halls, telephones
and televisions concealed beneath a three-meter-high false forest floor
that stretches between two hills. Weapons available for training there
include AK-47s, heavy machine guns, rifles, pistols, rocket-propelled grenades
and mortars. Mantraps and mines, which can be triggered by spotters hiding
in tree houses, protect approaches to the camp.
Over the years, the former guerrilla
says, Ukhia has hosted militant visitors from the southern Philippines,
Indonesia, southern Thailand, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, even Uzbekistan
and Chechnya. Videotapes showing al-Qaeda in training that were unearthed
by CNN in August include footage from 1990 that feature Rohingya rebels.
And one of the five signatories to bin Laden's Feb. 23, 1998 call for a
jihad against America was Fazjul Rahman, who signed in the name of "the
Jihad movement of Bangladesh." Fighters trained and given new identities
in Bangladesh also regularly find their way to conflicts in Afghanistan
and Kashmir. Indian intelligence says the Islamic hijackers of an Indian
Airlines plane with 189 passengers and crew on board, which they forced
to fly from Kathmandu to Kandahar in December 1999, had traveled to Nepal
from Bangladesh.
"With the right amount of money,
whoever you are, you can do anything," says one Western diplomat based
in Dhaka. "If 150 militants want to come in here and buy themselves new
passports and new identities, stock up on any weapons they might want and
maybe do a little refresher training before heading off again, there's
nothing to stop them." Indeed, December was a repeat visit for the Mecca,
according to the HUJI source. In June 2001, he says the boat sailed from
Karachi to Chittagong with 50 other militants who had completed their training
in bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.
The Bangladeshi government typically
reacts with fury to reports of jihadi camps or fundamentalism within its
borders. The reason isn't hard to fathom. In October 2001 two Islamic fundamentalist
parties with a history of links to terror groups were elected as part of
a four-way electoral alliance led by Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia's
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The accession of Jamaat-e-Islami and
Islamic Oikya Jote to power in Bangladesh rang alarm bells. Islamic Oikya
Jote is open about its sympathies: it is well known for its support of
Islamic fundamentalism, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The party's membership
largely duplicates that of the HUJI, which was founded in 1992 by Bangladeshi
mujahedin returning from Afghanistan with orders from bin Laden to turn
the moderate Islamic state into a nation of true believers. The HUJI has
been involved in scores of bombings, including two attempted assassinations
of then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in July 2000. And while Jamaat now
projects a moderate face, its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir has been
behind a string of bomb attacks and killings. At gatherings during the
campaign, Jamaat leaders spoke of breathing the "Islamic spirit of jihad"
into the armed forces while supporters rallied around posters of bin Laden
and the HUJI slogan: AMRA SOBAI HOBO TALIBAN, BANGLA HOBE AFGHANISTAN.
("We will all be Taliban and Bangladesh will be Afghanistan.")
Jamaat is also the main force behind
the phenomenal growth of unlicensed madrasahs, known as qaumi madrasahs,
in the past decade. There are now an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 in Bangladesh,
of which 30 to 40, run by mujahedin veterans, are known to shelter militants
and recruit fresh fighters. Such militants sometimes receive explicit encouragement
from Bangladesh's spiritual leaders. Mullah Obaidul Haque, head of the
national mosque in Dhaka and a Jamaat associate, told a gathering of thousands
in the capital last December: "America and Bush must be destroyed. The
Americans will be washed away if Bangladesh's 120 million Muslims spit
on them." So controversial were the BNP's partners in government and so
infuriating did they find reports of rising fundamentalism that earlier
this year Zia twice denied that there were any "Taliban" in her government,
or even in Bangladesh. But a Bangladeshi government official tells TIME
that while Zia's administration is aware of the fundamentalist threat inside
the country, tackling it head-on might trigger a violent backlash. Foreign
Minister Morshed Khan took the same line, telling TIME that it was better
to have such groups inside the government, looking out.
Al-Qaeda's links to the leadership
of Jamaat or Islamic Oikya Jote may be largely rhetorical. But the DGFI,
Bangladesh's military intelligence service, may have more to hide. Its
agents maintain contact with their counterparts in Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence and have a long history of supporting rebels fighting Indian
rule across the border, including providing safe houses in Dhaka for the
leaders of the United Liberation Front for Assam (ULFA). The HUJI source
and the portworkers who saw the Mecca arrive claim that the man who greeted
the new arrivals was a major in the DGFI. The major checked the visitors
in by name and led them to a fleet of suvs lined up on the docks, add the
portworkers. A spokesman for the DGFI denied knowing that members of al-Qaeda
had ever set foot in Bangladesh. He even denied that the major existed,
although diplomatic registration records show the officer is a long- standing
member of the service and was stationed in Calcutta in the mid-1990s. The
HUJI source and a Bangladeshi military source maintain the major was the
last link in an operation that began in Afghanistan. After leaving the
Taliban's headquarters in Kandahar as the city fell in early December and
crossing into Pakistan, the fugitives traveled to Karachi, hired the Mecca
and made the sail around India.
The emergence of al-Qaeda in Dhaka
is merely the latest sign that Bangladesh's more radical Islamic groups
are coming out from the forests. The former Burmese rebel says three of
the camps near Cox's Bazar have closed since October-not because of the
kind of governmental pressure being applied in Pakistan, but because the
militants feel safe enough to transfer their operations to like-minded
madrasahs, some of them in the capital. On May 9 and 10, 63 representatives
of nine Islamic groups- including Rohingya forces, the Islamic Oikya Jote
and the ULFA-met in Ukhia to form the Bangladesh Islamic Manch, a united
council under HUJI's leadership. So far, the Manch has restricted itself
to circulating speeches by bin Laden and Mullah Masood Azhar, a Pakistani
militant leader. But it has big plans, says the HUJI source: "The dream
is to create a larger Islamic land than the territorial limits of Bangladesh
to include Muslim areas of Assam, north Bengal and Burma's Arakan province."
That dream, if Islamic terrorists are allowed to continue their operations
in Bangladesh, could be a nightmare for the rest of the region.
(With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington,
Simon Elegant/Jakarta and Scott Macleod/Cairo)
