Author: Wilson John
Publication: EastIndiawatch.blogspot.com
Date: August 7, 2008
URL: http://eastindiawatch.blogspot.com/2008/08/bangladeshs-muslim-migrants-no-longer.html
Sleeper cells of the ISI are thriving all
over India using Bangladeshi infiltrators as local contact points. Result:
The signature of HuJi on most bomb blasts in recent times
The two unstable Islamic countries flanking
India have emerged as the Al Qaeda's staging posts. While Pakistan has been
the epicentre of terrorism since the early 1980s, the emergence of Bangladesh
as an extension of a global terror network pose serious challenges to the
world, particularly India.
Though the terrorist groups targeting India
(there is a hardly any difference between such groups and others with a global
agenda) continue to be inspired by terrorist leaders based in Pakistan and
Afghanistan, Bangladesh is where they meet, learn techniques of bomb making
and collaborate for terrorist actions in India.
While the world is focussed on Pakistan's
tribal areas and North-West Frontier Province as an Al Qaeda-Taliban Emirate,
the Bangladesh terror network's emergence and growing power remains largely
unnoticed.
This impression needs to be corrected without
delay. Before September 11, 2001, no one really took seriously India's struggles
to cope with an externally-aided and abetted terrorism. Pakistan, despite
a huge evidence of its complicity in promoting terrorism, remained on the
blind side of the Western nations, particularly the US, which, till recently,
considered it as a 'strategic ally' in the war on terrorism.
Today, it is widely acknowledged that Pakistan
has become global headquarters of terrorism. Similarly, Bangladesh is fast
becoming a major centre of outsource for this grand coalition of terror groups
which are facing intense heat in West Asia and Afghanistan.
Bangladesh has become host to various terrorist
groups anxious to recruit and train young students coming out of these madarsas.
One of the more prominent ones is Harkat-ul-jihad al-Islami (HuJI), widely
regarded as the Al Qaeda's operating arm in South Asia. HuJI has been consolidating
its position in Bangladesh where it boasts a membership of more than 15,000
activists, of whom at least 2,000 are "hardcore".
Led by Shawkat Osman (alias Sheikh Farid)
in Chittagong, the group has at least six training camps in Bangladesh. According
to one report, about 3,500 Bangladeshis had gone to Pakistan and Afghanistan
to take part in jihad. Barring 34 who died, a large number of them returned
home; of these, about 500 form the backbone of HuJI.
What should be of immediate concern to regional
nations and the West (in particular the US) is, irrespective of the absence
of sustained links between Islamic groups like HT, JeI and terrorist organisations,
they essentially share the same ideology and anti-Western agenda. In Pakistan,
the Al-Qaeda has been quite successful in co-opting various religious and
sectarian groups to work for the larger "cause" of global terror.
In Bangladesh such networking could be easier, making this small, impoverished
country a potential sanctuary for Al Qaeda clones like HuJI.
For India, HuJI presents a clear and immediate
danger. But even Indian authorities ignored the emerging evidence of HuJI's
footprints. The group's activities in India were first noticed in August 1999
when four HuJI activists were detained in Guwahati -- two of them were from
Pakistan, one from Kashmir and another from Muzzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh.
Their interrogations revealed a cache of explosives -- 34 Kg of RDX -- hidden
in a Bangladesh mosque and the recruitment of young immigrant Muslims in Assam.
But it was the attack on the American Centre in Kolkata on January 22, 2002
that uncovered the growing linkages of HuJI-B within India.
Investigators found HuJI-B's links with a
local group called Asif Reza Commando Force (ARCF) formed by illegal Bangladeshi
migrants living in Assam and West Bengal with the help of HuJI-B and Students
Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) activists.
Another clear evidence of HuJI's strength
and alliances was revealed when a suicide bomber walked into Hyderabad's Special
Task Force office on October 12, 2005, and detonated a pressure-activated
bomb carried in a backpack. Investigations pointed to a joint operation by
cadres of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, HuJI and LeT. Two months later, Delhi Police
detained three HuJI-B militants involved in the Hyderabad attack who said
they were trained at ISI-run camp in Balochistan and were sent to India to
target Bangalore and Hyderabad.
The series of terrorist attacks, beginning
with Varanasi (March 7, 2006), besides numerous arrests of terrorists, their
supporters and seizure of weapons and explosives, exposed the contours of
a grand merger of various extremist and terrorist groups and organisations
within India. Of the two terrorists shot down within hours of the Varanasi
explosions, one was a LeT commander in Lucknow, while the second a HuJI activist
from Bangladesh living in Delhi.
This alliance could not have operated across
the country without extensive local support provided often by SIMI and other
small, less-known outfits. The terrorist coalition utilises the support base
to plan and execute terrorist operations, besides planning a safe exit. This
support base in many areas like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar rely on modules set
up by ISI for gathering intelligence on Indian strategic assets.
Madarsas have also been used in providing
the logistics in the past and continue to do so but more covertly than in
the past. The groups seek out rooms to rent out in outlying colonies or in
crowded areas where they could remain anonymous; in many cases they have set
up small businesses to merge into the crowd. The objective of this coalition
of terror is to create political upheaval in India.
The fast emerging linkages between LeT, SIMI
and HuJI (and Jamaitul Mujahideen Bangladesh) depict the contours of a pan-Islamist
network in Asia, linking groups operating in Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan,
India, Bangladesh and several south Asian countries like Indonesia.
