How an ex-Army commando became a terrorist

Hamid Mir
September 25th, 2009 The News
ISLAMABAD: Once he was a blue-eyed boy of President General Pervez Musharraf.
He got a cash award from the president for slitting the throat of an Indian Army
officer in the year 2000 but after 9/11, he became a suspected terrorist.
This terrorist was Ilyas Kashmiri, reportedly killed in a US drone attack in North
Waziristan last week. US officials claimed that Ilyas Kashmiri was a senior al-Qaeda
commander and his death was a huge loss for the militants fighting against the
foreign forces in Afghanistan.
Very few people know that Ilyas Kashmiri was a former SSG commando of Pakistan
Army. He was originally from Kotli area of Azad Kashmir. He was deputed by
Pakistan Army to train the Afghan Mujahideen fighting against the Russian Army in
mid-80s. He was an expert of mines supplied to Afghan Mujahideen by the US. He
lost one eye during the Jihad against Russian invaders and later on he joined Harkate-Jihad- e-Islami of Maulvi Nabi Muhammadi.
Ilyas Kashmiri was based in Miramshah area of North Waziristan where he was
working as an instructor at a training camp. After the withdrawal of Russian Army
from Afghanistan, Ilyas Kashmiri was asked by Pakistani establishment to work with
Kashmiri militants. He joined the Kashmir chapter of Harkatul Jihad-i-Islami in 1991.
After a few years, he developed some differences with the head of HuJI Qari
Saifullah Akhtar.
Ilyas Kashmiri created his own 313 Brigade in HuJI. He was once arrested by Indian
Army from Poonch area of Indian held Kashmir along with Nasrullah Mansoor
Langrial. He was imprisoned in different Indian jails for two years and finally he
escaped from there after breaking the jail. His old friend Langrial is still imprisoned
in India.
Ilyas Kashmiri became a legend after escaping from the Indian jail. It was 1998 when
the Indian Army started incursions along the Line of Control and killed Pakistani
civilians many times by crossing the border. Ilyas Kashmiri was given the task to

attack the Indians from their back. He did it many times.

Indian Army killed 14 civilians on February 25, 2000 in Lonjot village of Nakial in
Azad Kashmir. Indian commandos crossed the LoC, spent the whole night in a
Pakistani village and left early morning. They slit the throats of three girls and took
away their heads with them. They also kidnapped two local girls. The next morning,
the heads of the kidnapped girls were thrown towards Pakistani soldiers by the
Indian Army.
The very next day of this massacre, Ilyas Kashmiri conducted a guerilla operation
against the Indian Army in Nakyal sector on the morning of February 26, 2000. He
crossed the LoC with 25 fighters of the 313 Brigade. He surrounded a bunker of
Indian Army and threw grenades inside. After one of his fighters Qudratullah lost
his life, he was able to kidnap an injured officer of the Indian Army. That was not the
end. He slit the throat of the kidnapped officer.
He came back to Pakistan with the head of the dead Indian Army officer in his bag
and presented this head to top Army officials and later on to the then Army Chief
General Pervez Musharraf, who gave him a cash award of rupees one lakh.
The pictures of Ilyas Kashmiri with the head of a dead Indian Army officer in his
hands were published in some Pakistani newspapers and he became very important
among the Kashmiri militants. Maulana Zahoor Ahmad Alvi of Jamia
Muhammadia, Islamabad, issued a fatwa in support of slitting the throats of Indian
Army officers. Those were the days when Corps Commander, Rawalpindi, Lt Gen
Mehmood Ahmad, visited the training camp of Ilyas Kashmiri in Kotli and
appreciated his frequent guerilla actions against the Indian Army.
His honeymoon with the Pakistan Army generals was over after the creation of Jaishe-Muhammad. Gen Mehmood wanted Ilyas Kashmiri to join JeM and accept
Maulana Masood Azhar as his leader but the one eyed militant refused to do so. The
militants of JeM once attacked the training camp of Ilyas Kashmiri in Kotli but he
survived that attack. His outfit was banned by Musharraf after 9/11. He was
arrested after an attack on the life of Pervez Musharraf in December 2003. He was
tortured during the interrogation.
The United Jihad Council led by Syed Salahuddin strongly protested the arrest of
Ilyas Kashmiri and on the pressure of Kashmiri militants, Ilyas Kashmiri was
released in February 2004. He was a shattered man after his release. He disassociated
2

himself from the Kashmiri militants and remained silent for at least three years.
It was the Lal Masjid operation in July 2007, which totally changed Ilyas Kashmiri.
He moved to North Waziristan where he spent many years as a Jihad instructor. This
area was full of his friends and sympathisers. He reorganized his 313 Brigade and
joined hands with the Taliban but he was never close to al-Qaeda leadership. He
attracted many former Pakistan Army officers to join hands with him. The strength
of 313 Brigade in North Waziristan was more than 3,000. Most of his fighters were
hired from the Punjab, Sindh and Azad Kashmir.
It is alleged that he organised many terrorist attacks in different areas of Pakistan,
including the assassination of Major General (retd) Faisal Alvi in Rawalpindi. Alvi
was also from the SSG and he led the first-ever Army operation in North Waziristan
in 2004.
Kashmiri planned attacks on Alvi on the demand of Taliban in North Waziristan.
Sources close to his family have yet not confirmed his death in a US drone attack but
there is no doubt that Ilyas Kashmiri was actually a creation of the Pakistani
establishment like Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi of the banned LeT.
The Pakistani establishment abandoned and arrested most of these militant leaders
without realising that they had followers all over Pakistan and they could create
problems for Pakistan anytime. The establishment is still without any policy about
all those who were once declared "freedom fighters" and were honored by the top
Army officials like Pervez Musharraf
South Asia
Oct 15, 2009
Page 1 of 2
AN ATol EXCLUSIVE
Al-Qaeda's guerrilla chief lays out strategy
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
ANGORADA, South Waziristan, at the crossroads with Afghanistan - A high-level
meeting on October 9 at the presidential palace between Pakistan's civil and military
leaders endorsed a military operation against the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda in
the South Waziristan tribal area - termed by analysts as the mother of all regional
conflicts.
3

At the same time, al-Qaeda is implementing its game plan in the South Asian war
theater as a part of its broader campaign against American global hegemony that
began with the attacks in the United States of September 11, 2001.
Al-Qaeda's target remains the United States and its allies, such as Europe, Israel and
India, and it does not envisage diluting this strategy by embracing Muslim
resistances on narrow parameters. In this context, militant activity in Pakistan is seen
as a complexity rather than as a part of al-Qaeda's strategy.

Militants have been particularly active over the past few days. Last Thursday, a car
loaded with explosives rammed into the compound wall of the Indian Embassy in
Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, killing at least 17 people. Then on Saturday, militants
staged an audacious attack on the the Pakistani military headquarters in Rawalpindi,
the twin city of the capital, Islamabad. On Monday, a suicide bomber detonated
a bomb in market town in the Swat Valley region, killing 41 people and injuring 45
others.
Pakistan is at critical juncture, with the armed forces gathered in their largest-ever
numbers (almost a corps, as many as 60,000 troops) around South Waziristan to flush
out the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Taliban (PTT), al-Qaeda and their allies from the Pakistani
tribal areas.
In these tense times, Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, an al-Qaeda leader who, according

to American intelligence is al-Qaeda's head of military operations and whose death

they wrongly confirmed in a recent US Predator drone attack in North Waziristan,
spoke to Asia Times Online.
He invited this correspondent to a secret hideout in the South WaziristanAfghanistan border area, where drones regularly fly overhead.
This is Ilyas' first-ever media interaction since he joined al-Qaeda in 2005. He is a
veteran commander from the struggle with India over divided Kashmir.
In the past few months, the militants have appeared to be on the back foot. A number
of leading figures have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan, including Osama alKini, a Kenyan national and al-Qaeda's external operations chief; Khalid Habib, the
commander of the Lashkar al-Zil or the Shadow Army, al-Qaeda's fighting force;
Tahir Yuldashev, leader of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; PTT
leader Baitullah Mehsud, and several others.
The Pakistani Taliban have also been given a bloody nose by the military in tribal and
urban areas. Negotiations were also underway to strike peace deals with some
Taliban commanders in various Afghan provinces.
Then last week at least nine US troops along with several dozen AfghanNational
Army (ANA) personnel were killed in a raid on an outpost in Nuristan province,
besides the abduction of over 30 ANA officers and soldiers by the Taliban.
This attack was complemented by a series of other attacks on North AtlanticTreaty
Organization bases across the southeastern provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika,
forcing top US General Stanley McChrystal to pull out all troops from isolated posts
in remote areas in these provinces to relocate them in population centers.
This created immense space for the Taliban to operate freely, meaning that if Pakistan
conducted operations in South Waziristan, the militants could easily move across the
border to find sanctuary.
The attacks over the past few days have also shown that the militants are still capable
of striking important targets almost at will. They also mean a redesign of the war
theater in which Pakistan will have to relocate its troops from the eastern front
(India) to the western front (Afghanistan), as the Taliban are now the number one
enemy.
5

Washington plans to send at least another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan while India
will complement these efforts with its intelligence and military expertise against the
common enemy - Muslim militant groups.
The upcoming battle
Ilyas Kashmiri gave his views on what the upcoming battle will look like, what its
targets will be, and how it will impact the West in relation to the destabilization of a
Muslim state such as Pakistan.
The contact with Asia Times Online began with a call from the militants on October
6, inviting this correspondent to the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan. No reason
was given. The next day, I traveled to Mir Ali, a town that has been heavily attacked
by drones over the past year. After over seven hours of continuous traveling, I was
received by a group of armed men who transferred me to a house belonging to a
local tribesman.
"The commander [Ilyas Kashmiri] is alive. You know that the commander has never
spoken to the media before, but since everybody is sure of his death as a result of a
drone attack [in September], al-Qaeda's shura [council] decided to make a denial of
this news through an interview by him to an independent newspaper, and therefore
the shura agreed on you," a person whom I knew as the key person in Ilyas' famous
313 Brigade told me as soon as I reached the safe house. The brigade, a collection of
jihadi groups, fought for many years against India in India-administered Kashmir.
"You will have to stay in this room until we inform you of the next plan. You can hear
the voices of drones above your head, therefore you will not leave the room. The area
is full of Taliban, but also of informers whose information on the presence of
strangers in a house could lead to a drone attack," the man said.
The next day, I was transferred to another house at an unknown location, about three
hours away. During this time I was accompanied at all times by an armed escort. I
was not allowed to speak to them, and they could not communicate with me. This is
al-Qaeda's internal world. Finally, in the early morning of October 9, a few armed
men arrived in a white car.
"Please leave all your electronic gadgets here. No cell phone, no camera, nothing. We
will provide you pen and paper to write the interview," I was instructed. After
several hours of a very uncomfortable journey, passing down muddy tracks and
6

through mountain passes, we reached a room where Ilyas was supposed to meet us.
After a couple of hours, suddenly the sound of a powerful vehicle broke the silence.
My escort and the men already present in the room rapidly took up positions. They
all wore bullet pouches and carried AK-47s.
Ilyas made his entrance. He cut a striking figure, about six feet tall (1.83 meters),
wearing a cream-colored turban and white qameez shalwar(traditional shirt and
pants), carrying an AK-47 on his shoulder and a wooden stick in one hand, and
flanked by commandos of his famous diehard 313 Brigade.
Ilyas now sports a long white beard dyed with reddish henna. At the age of 45 he
remains strongly built, although he carries the scars of war - he has lost an eye and an
index figure. When we shook hands, his grip was powerful.
The host immediately served lunch, and we sat on the floor to eat.
"So, you have survived a third drone strike ... why is the Central Intelligence Agency
[CIA] sniffing around you so much? I asked.
The question was somewhat rhetorical. He is one of the most high-profile al-Qaeda
commanders, with a Pakistani bounty of 50 million rupees (US$600,000) on his head.
His position is defined differently by various intelligence and media organizations.
Some say he is commander-in-chief of al-Qaeda's global operations, while others say
he is chief of al-Qaeda's military wing.
If today al-Qaeda is divided into three spheres, Osama bin Laden is undoubtedly the
symbol of the movement and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri defines al-Qaeda's
ideology and broader strategic vision. Ilyas, with his unmatched guerrilla expertise,
turns the strategic vision into reality, provides the resources and gets targets
achieved, but he chooses to remain in the background and very low key.
His bases and activities have always remained shrouded in secrecy. However,
the arrest of five of his men in Pakistan earlier this year and their subsequent grilling
helped lift the veil. Their information resulted in CIA drone strikes against him, the
first in May and then again on September 7, when he was pronounced dead by
Pakistani intelligence, and finally on September 14, after which the CIA said he was
dead and called it a great success in the "war on terror".
"They are right in their pursuit. They know their enemy well. They know what I am
7

really up to," Ilyas proudly replied.

Born in Bimbur (old Mirpur) in the Samhani Valley of Pakistan-administered
Kashmir on February 10, 1964, Ilyas passed the first year of a mass communication
degree at Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad. He did not continue due to his
heavy involvement in jihadi activities.
The Kashmir Freedom Movement was his first exposure in the field of militancy, then
the Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami (HUJI) and ultimately his legendary 313 Brigade. This
grew into the most powerful group in South Asia and its network is strongly knitted
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, India, Nepal and Bangladesh. According to some
CIA dispatches, the footprints of 313 Brigade are now in Europe and capable of the
type of attack that saw a handful of militants terrorize the Indian city of Mumbai last
November.
Little is documented of Ilyas' life, and what has been reported is often contradictory.
However, he is invariably described, certainly by world intelligence agencies, as the
most effective, dangerous and successful guerrilla leader in the world.
He left the Kashmir region in 2005 after his second release from detention by
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and headed for North Waziristan. He had
previously been arrested by Indian forces, but he broke out of jail and escaped. He
was then detained by the ISI as the suspected mastermind of an attack on thenpresident Pervez Musharraf, in 2003, but was cleared and released. The ISI then
picked Ilyas up again in 2005 after he refused to close down his operations in
Kashmir.
His relocation to the troubled border areas sent a chill down spines in Washington as
they realized that with his vast experience, he could turn unsophisticated battle
patterns in Afghanistan into audacious modern guerrilla warfare.
Ilyas' track record spoke for itself. In 1994, he launched the al-Hadid operation in the
Indian capital, New Delhi, to get some of his jihadi comrades released. His group of
25 people included Sheikh Omar Saeed (the abductor of US reporter Daniel Pearl in
Karachi in 2002) as his deputy. The group abducted several foreigners, including
American, Israeli and British tourists and took them to Ghaziabad near Delhi. They
then demanded that the Indian authorities release their colleagues, but instead they
attacked the hideout. Sheikh Omar was injured and arrested. (He was later released
in a swap for the passengers of a hijacked Indian aircraft). Ilyas escaped unhurt.
8

Oct 15, 2009

On February 25, 2000, the Indian army killed 14 civilians in Lonjot village in
Pakistan-administered Kashmir after commandos had crossed the Line of Control
(LoC) that separates the two Kashmirs. They returned to the Indian side with
abducted Pakistani girls, and threw the severed heads of three of them at Pakistani
soldiers.
The very next day, Ilyas conducted a guerilla operation against the Indian army in
Nakyal sector after crossing the LoC with 25 fighters of 313 Brigade. They kidnapped
an Indian army officer who was later beheaded - his head was paraded in the bazaars
of Kotli back in Pakistani territory.
However, the most significant operation of Ilyas was in Aknor cantonment in Indianadministered Kashmir against the Indian armed forces following the massacre of
Muslims in the Indian city of Gujarat in 2002. In cleverly planned attacks involving
313 Brigade divided into two groups, Indian generals, brigadiers and other senior
officials were lured to the scene of the first attack. Two generals were injured (the
Pakistan army could not injure a single Indian general in three wars) and several
brigadiers andcolonels were killed. This was one of the most telling setbacks for
India in the long-running Kashmiri insurgency.
Despite what some reports claim, Ilyas was never a part of Pakistan's special forces,
nor even of the army. Nearly 30 years ago when he joined the Afghan jihad against
the Soviets from the platform of the HUJI, he developed expertise in guerrilla
warfare and explosives.
Within just months of arriving in the Afghan war theater in 2005, Kashmiri redefined
the Taliban-led insurgency based on legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen
Giap's three-pronged guerrilla warfare strategy. For the Taliban, the main emphasis
was to be placed on cutting NATO's supply lines from all four sides of Afghanistan,
and carrying out special operations similar to the Mumbai attack in Afghanistan.
Over the years, Ilyas has deliberately adopted a low key presence in the militants'
hierarchy. His attacks are just the opposite, although he never issues statements or
claims responsibility for any operation.
His 313 Brigade is believed to be the main catalyst of high-profile operations such as
the one in Mumbai and others in Afghanistan, as well as al-Qaeda's operations in
9

Somalia and to some extent in Iraq.

"Do you believe that the upcoming South Waziristan operation will be the 'mother of
all operations' in the region, as some analysts say," I asked after we had finished
lunch and I was alone with Ilyas and his trusted confidant.
"I don't know how to play with words during an interview," Ilyas responded. "I have
always been a field commander and I know the language of battlefields. I will try to
answer your questions in the language I am familiar with. (Ilyas spoke mostly in
Urdu, mixed with some Punjabi.)
"Saleem! I will draw your attention to the basics of the present war theater and use
that to explain the whole strategy of the upcoming battles. Those who planned this
battle actually aimed to bring the world's biggest Satan [US] and its allies into this
trap and swamp [Afghanistan]. Afghanistan is a unique place in the world where the
hunter has all sorts of traps to choose from.
"It might be deserts, rivers, mountains and the urban centers as well. This was the
thinking of the planners of this war who were sick and tired of the great Satan's
global intrigues and they aim for its demise to make this world a place of peace and
justice. However, the great Satan was full of arrogance of its superiority and thought
of Afghans as helpless statues who would be hit from all four sides by its war
machines, and they would not have the power and capacity to retaliate.
"This was the illusion on which a great alliance of world powers came to
Afghanistan, but due to their misplaced conceptions they gradually became trapped
in Afghanistan. Today, NATO does not have any significance or relevance. They have
lost the war in Afghanistan. Now, when they realized their defeat, they developed an
emphasis that this entire battle is being fought from outside of Afghanistan, that is,
the two Waziristans. To me, this military thesis is a mirage which has created a
complex situation in the region and created reactions and counter-reactions. I would
not like to go into the details, to me that was nothing but deviation. As a military
commander, the reality is that the trap of Afghanistan is successful and the basic
military targets on the ground have been achieved," Ilyas said.
I responded that the relocation of 313 Brigade from Kashmir was itself proof that
foreign hands were involved in Afghanistan.
"The entire basis of your argument is wrong, that this war is being fought from
10

outside of Afghanistan. This is just an out-of-context understanding of the whole

situation. If you discuss myself and 313 Brigade, I decided to join
the Afghan resistance as an individual and I had quite a reason for that. Everybody
knows that only a decade ago I was fighting a war of liberation for my homeland
Kashmir.
"However, I realized that decades of armed and political struggles could not help to
inch forward a resolution of this issue. Nevertheless, East Timor's issue was resolved
without losing much time. Why? Because the entire game was in the hands of the
great Satan, the USA. Organs like the UN and countries like India and Israel were
simply the extension of its resources and that's why there was a failure to resolve the
Palestinian issue, the Kashmir issue and the plight of Afghanistan.
"So I and many people all across the world realized that analyzing the situation in
any narrow regional political perspective was an incorrect approach. This is a
different ball game altogether for which a unified strategy is compulsory. The defeat
of American global hegemony is a must if I want the liberation of my homeland
Kashmir, and therefore it provided the reasoning for my presence in this war theater.
Ilyas continued, "When I came here I found my step justified; how the world regional
powers operate under the umbrella of the great Satan and how they are supportive of
its great plans. This can be seen here in Afghanistan." He added that al-Qaeda's
regional war strategy, in which they have hit Indian targets, is actually to chop off
American strength.
"The RAW [India's Research and Analysis Wing] has detachmentcommand centers in
the Afghan provinces of Kunar, Jalalabad, Khost, Argun, Helmand and Kandahar.
The cover operations are road construction companies. For instance, the road
construction contract from Khost city to the Tanai tribe area is handled by a
contractor who is actually a current Indian army colonel. In Gardez,
telecommunication companies are the cover for Indian intelligence operations.
Mostly, their men operate with Muslim names, but actually the employees are
Hindus."
"So should the world expect more Mumbai-like attacks?" I asked.
"That was nothing compared to what has already been planned for the future," Ilyas
replied.

11

"Even against Israel and the USA?" I asked.

"Saleem, I am not a traditional jihadi cleric who is involved in sloganeering. As a
military commander, I would say every target has a specific time and reasons, and
the responses will be forthcoming accordingly," Ilyas said.
As I noted Kashmiri's answers, I thought of how several years back he was the
darling of the Pakistani armed forces, their pride. The highest military officers were
proud to meet him at his base in Kashmir, they spent time with him and listened to
the legends of his war games. Today, I had a different person in front of me - a man
condemned as a terrorist by the Pakistani military establishment and their biggest
wish is his death.
"What impressed you to join al-Qaeda?" I asked.
"We were both victims of the same tyrant. Today, the entire Muslim world is sick
of Americans and that's why they are agreeing with Sheikh Osama. If all of the
Muslim world is asked to elect their leader, their choice would be either [Taliban
leader] Mullah Omar or Sheikh Osama," Ilyas said.
"If it is so, why are a section of militants bent on war on Muslim states like Pakistan?
Do you think this is correct?"
"Our battle cannot be against Muslims and believers. As I have mentioned earlier,
what is happening at the moment in the Muslim world is a complexity due to
American power games which have resulted into reactions and counter-reactions.
This is a totally different debate and might deviate me from the real topic. The real
game is the fight against the great Satan and its adherents," Ilyas said.
"What turned you from the most-beloved friend to the most-hated foe in the eyes of
the Pakistani military establishment?" I asked.
"Pakistan is my beloved country and the people who live there are our brothers,
sisters and relatives. I cannot even think of going against its interests. It was never the
Pakistan army that was against me, but certain elements who branded me as an
enemy to cover up their weaknesses and to appease their masters," Ilyas said.
"What is 313 Brigade?" I asked.

12

"I cannot tell you, except war is all tactics and this is all 313 Brigade is about; reading
the enemy's mind and reacting accordingly. The world thought that Prophet
Mohammad only left women behind. They forgot there were real men also who did
not know what defeat was all about. The world is only familiar with those so-called
Muslims who only follow the direction of the air and who don't have their own will.
They do not have their own minds or dimensions of their own. The world has yet to
see real Muslims. They have so far only seen Osama and Mullah Omar, while there
are thousands of others. Wolves only respect a lion's iron slap; lions do not impress
with the logic of a sheep," Ilyas said.
As the shadows of darkness emerged, the conversation ended. The next day, a curfew
was to be imposed in North Waziristan in preparation for the grand operation in the
region, and I had to leave the area. Ilyas also needed to move to a new destination, as
he does on a regular basis to hide from the eyes of Predator drones.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached
at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ15Df04.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ15Df03.html

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http://2.bp.blogspot.com/VzUKbcdfxT8/U1mE9sQhzHI/AAAAAAAAFOY/MoEkRZgKOXo/s1600/Hamid+Mi
r+Friend+of+TTP.jpg
TheISIandTerrorism:BehindtheAccusations
Authors: Jayshree Bajoria, and Eben Kaplan
Updated: May 4, 2011
Introduction
Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has long
faced accusations of meddling in the affairs of its neighbors. A range of officials inside
and outside Pakistan have stepped up suggestions of links between the ISI and terrorist
groups in recent years. In fall 2006, a leaked report by a British Defense Ministry think
tank charged, "Indirectly Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and
extremism--whether in London on 7/7 [the July 2005 attacks on London's transit
system], or in Afghanistan, or Iraq." In June 2008, Afghan officials accused Pakistan's
16

intelligence service of plotting a failed assassination attempt on President Hamid

Karzai; shortly thereafter, they implied the ISI's involvement in a July 2008 attack on the
Indian embassy. Indian officials also blamed the ISI for the bombing of the Indian
embassy. Pakistani officials have denied such a connection.
Numerous U.S. officials have also accused the ISI of supporting terrorist groups, even as
the Pakistani government seeks increased aid from Washington with assurances of
fighting militants. In a May 2009 interview with CBS' 60 Minutes, U.S. Defense
Secretary Robert Gates said "to a certain extent, they play both sides." Gates and others
suggest the ISI maintains links with groups like the Afghan Taliban as a "strategic
hedge" to help Islamabad gain influence in Kabul once U.S. troops exit the region. These
allegations surfaced yet again in July 2010 when WikiLeaks.org made public (NYT) a
trove of U.S. intelligence records on the war in Afghanistan. The documents described
ISI's links to militant groups fighting U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. In
April 2011 during a visit to Pakistan, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral
Mike Mullen pointed toISI's links with one such group, the Haqqani network. The
May 1, 2011, killing of America's most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani
military town not far from Islamabad raised new questions over army and ISI support
for the al-Qaeda leader and the legitimacy of their counterterrorism efforts. Pakistan's
government has repeatedly denied allegations of supporting terrorism, citing as
evidence its cooperation in the U.S.-led battle against extremists in which it has taken
significant losses both politically and on the battlefield.
Supporting Terrorism?
"The ISI probably would not define what they've done in the past as 'terrorism,'"
saysWilliam Milam, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. Nevertheless, experts say the
ISI has supported a number of militant groups in the disputed Kashmir
region between Pakistan and India, some of which are on the U.S. State Department's
Foreign Terrorist Organizations list. While Pakistan has a formidable military presence
near the Indian border, some experts believe the relationship between the military and
some Kashmiri groups has greatly changed with the rise of militancy within
Pakistan. Shuja Nawaz, author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars
Within, says the ISI "has certainly lost control" of Kashmiri militant groups. According to
Nawaz, some of the groups trained by the ISI to fuel insurgency in Kashmir have been
implicated in bombings and attacks within Pakistan, therefore making them army
targets.
17

On Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan, the ISI supported the Taliban up to
September 11, 2001, though Pakistani officials deny any current support for the group.
Pakistan's government was also one of three countries, along with the United Arab
Emirates and Saudi Arabia, that recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan. The
ISI's first major involvement in Afghanistan came after the Soviet invasion in 1979, when
it partnered with the CIA to provide weapons, money, intelligence, and training to the
mujahadeen fighting the Red Army. At the time, some voices within the United States
questioned the degree to which Pakistani intelligence favored extremist and antiAmerican fighters. Following the Soviet withdrawal, the ISI continued its involvement
in Afghanistan, first supporting resistance fighters opposed to Moscow's puppet
government, and later the Taliban.
Pakistan stands accused of allowing that support to continue. Afghan President Hamid
Karzai has repeatedly said Pakistan trains militants and sends them across the border.
In May 2006, the British chief of staff for southern Afghanistan told the Guardian,
"The thinking piece of the Taliban is out of Quetta in Pakistan. It's the major
headquarters." Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in September 2006, thenpresident Pervez Musharraf responded to such accusations, saying, "It is the most
ridiculous thought that the Taliban headquarters can be in Quetta." Nevertheless,
experts generally suspect Pakistan still provides some support to the Taliban, though
probably not to the extent it did in the past. "If they're giving them support, it's access
back and forth [to Afghanistan] and the ability to find safe haven," saysKathy
Gannon, who covered the region for decades for the Associated Press. Gannon adds
that the Afghan Taliban needs Pakistan even less as a safe haven now "because [it has]
gained control of more territory inside Afghanistan."
Many in the Pakistani government, including slain former prime minister Benazir
Bhutto, have called the intelligence agency "a state within a state," working beyond the
government's control and pursuing its own foreign policy. But Nawaz says the
intelligence agency does not function independently. "It aligns itself to the power
center," and does what the government or the army asks it to do, says Nawaz.

18

Control over the ISI

Constitutionally, the agency is accountable to the prime minister, says Hassan Abbas,
research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. But most officers in the ISI
are from the army, so that is where their loyalties and interests lie, he says. Experts say
until the end of 2007, as army chief and president, Musharraf exercised firm control over
the intelligence agency. But experts say it is not clear how much control Pakistan's
civilian government--led by Bhutto's widower, President Asif Ali Zardari--has over the
agency. In July 2008, the Pakistani government announced the ISI will be brought under
the control of the interior ministry, but revoked its decision (BBC) within hours. Bruce
Riedel, an expert on South Asia at the Brookings Institution, says the civilian leadership
has "virtually no control" (PDF) over the army and the ISI. In September 2008, army
chief Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani replaced the ISI chief picked by former president Musharraf
with Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha. Until then, Pasha headed military operations against
militants in the tribal areas. Some experts said the move signaled that Kiyani was
consolidating his control over the intelligence agency by appointing his man at the top.
In November 2008, the government disbanded ISI's political wing, which politicians say
was responsible for interfering in domestic politics. Some experts saw it as a move by
the army, which faced much criticism when Musharraf was at the helm, to distance itself
from politics.
"I do not accept the thesis that the ISI is a rogue organization," Milam says. "It's a
disciplined army unit that does what it's told, though it may push the envelope
sometimes." With a reported staff of ten thousand, ISI is hardly monolithic: "Like in any
secret service, there are rogue elements," says Frederic Grare, a South Asia expert and
visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He points out that
many of the ISI's agents have ethnic and cultural ties to Afghan insurgents, and
naturally sympathize with them.Marvin G. Weinbaum, an expert on Afghanistan and
Pakistan at the Middle East Institute, says Pakistan has sent "retired" ISI agents on
missions the government could not officially endorse.

19

Resistance in FATA
Pakistan's tribal areas along the Afghan border have emerged as safe havens for
terrorists. Experts say because of their links to the Taliban and other militant groups, the
ISI has some influence in the region. But with the mushrooming of armed groups in the
tribal agencies, it is hard to say which ones the agency controls. Also, there appears to
be divisions within the ISI. While some within the intelligence agency continue to
sympathize with the militant groups, Harvard's Abbas says others realize they cannot
follow a policy contradictory to that of the army, which is directly involved in
counterterrorism operations in the area.
Mixed Record on Counterterrorism
Pakistan has arrested scores of al-Qaeda affiliates, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The ISI and the Pakistani military have
worked effectively with the United States to pursue the remnants of al-Qaeda. Following
9/11, Pakistan also stationed eighty thousand troops in the troubled province of
Waziristan near the Afghan border. Hundreds of Pakistani soldiers died there in
resulting clashes with militants, which, as Musharraf told a CFR meeting in September
2006, "broke the al-Qaeda network's back in Pakistan."
But Musharraf did crack down on terrorist groups selectively, as
this Backgrounder points out. Weinbaum in 2006 said the Pakistani military has largely
ignored Taliban fighters on its soil. "There are extremist groups that are beyond the pale
with which the ISI has no influence at all," he says. "Those are the ones they go after." In
2008, Ashley J. Tellis, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, wrote (PDF) in The Washington Quarterly that Musharraf tightened pressure on
groups whose objectives were out of sync with the military's perception of Pakistan's
national interest.
The Taliban as a Strategic Asset
Pakistan does not enjoy good relations with the current leadership of Afghanistan,
partly because of rhetorical clashes with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and partly

20

because Karzai has forged strong ties with India. But there have been increased efforts
by the United States to close this gap. The Obama administration's regional
strategy unveiled in March 2009 focused on creating new diplomatic mechanisms; a
trilateral summit of the leaders of the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan has been
one such step toward helping reduce the level of distrust that runs among all three
countries. But lingering suspicions about ISI's support for the Taliban continue to pose
problems. In an October 2006 interview, Musharraf said some retired ISI operatives
could be abetting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, but he denied any active links.
Zardari, too, denies any ISI links with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. In a May 2009 interview
with CNN, he remarked all intelligence agencies have their sources in militant
organizations but that does not translate to support. "Does that mean CIA has direct
links with al-Qaeda? No, they have their sources. We have our sources. Everybody has
sources."
Some experts say Pakistan wants to see a stable, friendlier government emerge in
Afghanistan. Though the insurgency certainly doesn't serve this goal, increased Taliban
influence, especially in the government, might. Supporting the Taliban also allows
Pakistan to hedge its bets should the NATO coalition pull out of Afghanistan. In a
February 2008 interview with CFR.org, Tellis said the Pakistani intelligence services
continue to support the Taliban because they see the Taliban leadership "as a strategic
asset," a reliable back-up force in case things go sour in Afghanistan.
Not everyone agrees with this analysis. According to Weinbaum, Pakistan has two
policies. One is an official policy of promoting stability in Afghanistan; the other is an
unofficial policy of supporting jihadis in order to appease political forces within
Pakistan. "The second [policy] undermines the first one," he says. Nawaz says there is
ambivalence within the army regarding support for the Taliban. "They'd rather not deal
with the Afghan Taliban as an adversary," he says.
Allegations of Terrorist Attacks
Indian officials implicated the ISI for the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai
that killed nearly two hundred people. India's foreign ministry said the ISI had links
(Reuters)to the planners of the attacks, the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba,

21

which New Delhi blames for the assault. Islamabad denies allegations of any official
involvement, but acknowledged in February 2009 that the attack was launched and
partly planned (AP)from Pakistan. The Pakistani government has also detained several
Islamist leaders, some of them named by India as planners of the Mumbai
assault. Gannon says this is an unusual step by Pakistan, which never got enough credit
in India because the country was in the middle of a national election. "I don't see any
evidence" to believe that the ISI was behind the Mumbai attack, she says. However, she
doubts the agency has severed all its ties with groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba which it
supported to fight in Indian-administered Kashmir. Indian officials also claim to have
evidence that the ISI planned the July 2006 bombing of the Mumbai commuter trains,
but these charges seem unlikely to some observers of the long, difficult India-Pakistan
relationship. The two nations have a history of finger-pointing, and while some of the
allegations hold water, there is a tendency to exaggerate.
Following the release of the British report regarding its July 7, 2005, bombings of
London's mass transit system--which London insists is not a statement of policy-Weinbaum said it makes "too broad a statement." Though Pakistan does offer safe haven
to Kashmiri groups, and perhaps some Taliban fighters, the suggestion that the ISI is
responsible for the 7/7 bombings is "a real stretch," Gannon says.
http://www.cfr.org/pakistan/isi-terrorism-behind-accusations/p11644
killed in a missile strike by the US MQ-9 Reaper (a.k.a Predator B) unmanned aerial
vehicle (UAV).
Read more: http://pakmr.blogspot.com/2011/06/ilyas-kashmiri-killed-in-mq-9reaper.html#ixzz3uqJdZPle
https://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://media1.snbcnews.com/j/ap/mideast%252520replacing%252520bin%252520laden1021709726_v2.grid6x2.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.today.com/id/43084748/ns/today-today_news/t/binladen-dead-who-will-lead-worlds-top-terroristgroup/&h=352&w=474&tbnid=chKb6HZS1u5IRM:&docid=V0pYyOJG1aM5ZM&ei=p
012Vt7TF8OXuATTzqyoCg&tbm=isch&ved=0ahUKEwiew53T6unJAhXDC44KHVMnC

22

6U4ZBAzCBkoFjAW
http://www.today.com/id/43084748/ns/today-today_news/t/bin-laden-dead-whowill-lead-worlds-top-terrorist-group/#.VnZV6Pl97iw
After Lal Masjid massacre. He moved to NWA and his groups became part of what now

is TTP.
https://www.google.co.in/imgres?
imgurl=http://im33.gulfup.com/Lc6ZI.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.siasat.pk/forum/
showthread.php?229053-Hamid-Mir-Is-Friend-Of-Khawarij-ZaidHamid&h=540&w=720&tbnid=UyyTvlPmBNSWoM:&docid=GskxKuOPO8HyrM&ei=0
qdzVtnoLsP8ugTmjpfoCA&tbm=isch&ved=0ahUKEwjZmZ-

23

c5OTJAhVDvo4KHWbHBY0QMwiZASheMF4

24

gspot.in/2011/06/ilyas-kashmiri-killed-in-mq-9-reaper.html

Rediff.com News Ilyas Kashmiri was a genie created by Pakistan

Eminent Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, who interviewed slain terrorist Ilyas
Kashmiri a couple of times, reveals certain undisclosed details about the elusive man
and speaks about his plan to make India and Pakistan go to war.
Pakistani and American authorities are reluctantly claiming the death of militant leader
Ilyas Kashmiri for the third time in the last three years, but they still lack knowledge
about the network, aims and capabilities of his 313 Brigade despite the fact that
Kashmiri was actually a genie created by the Pakistani establishment.
He served American interests in Afghanistan in 1980's and Pakistani interests in
Kashmir in 1990's; but today both American and Pakistani security establishments want
to celebrate his death.
Ilyas Kashmiri was mishandled by the Pakistani establishment after the 9/11 terror
attacks in New York and this mishandling made him one of the most dangerous threats
for security, not only in Pakistan but the whole South Asia.

He trained hundreds of young boys in the last few years with a plan to make India and
Pakistan go to war. He was running one of the most lethal terror networks in the world
with the support of many low-level retired Pakistani army officers.

25

Kashmiri was not the product of the religious schools. He was a man who believed in
modern education and who used modern war tactics against his enemies.
This scribe first met him in mid 1990's when he escaped from an Indian jail and came
back to Pakistan. He was very popular, especially in the Kashmiri militant circles.
He became a darling of the military leadership in Pakistan when he attacked an Indian
check post on the Line of Control in Naushehra sector on February 27, 2000, and killed
seven soldiers of the Indian Army. This attack was organised as a response to Indian
Army's raid on a village in Nakial area of Pakistani Kashmir, in which many civilians
were killed.
Ilyas Kashmiri again killed some senior Indian Army officers in Tanda area of Jammu
sector in 2003, but within few months of this attack he was arrested by Pakistan Army in
connection with assassination attempt on the life of then President General Pervez
Musharraf.

26

He was declared 'innocent' during

the investigations and he was released in February 2004. He was again arrested in 2005,
but was released on the pressure of Kashmiri militant outfits.
Torture and humiliation in a Pakistani jail once forced him to tell a senior leader of
Hizbul Mujahedeen that 'there is no difference between Pakistani and Indian jails; they
don't trust us because we are Kashmiris.'
He moved to North Waziristan after the Lal Masjid operation in Islamabad in 2007, but
interestingly some militant groups always suspected him because of his past
connections with the Pakistan Army.

27

He was trusted more by the Punjabi Taliban rather than the Pashtuns, but with the
passage of time he developed good relations with the Hakimullah Mehsud group (who
heads Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan after the death of Baitullah Mehsud).
On the other side he never had good relations with militant groups having
unannounced peace accords with Pakistani authorities in the tribal areas and who are
fighting only against United States troops in Afghanistan.
It was reported last Friday that Ilyas Kashmiri was killed in an apple orchid close to
Wana area of South Waziristan in a US drone attack.
This area falls under the control of Maulvi Nazir who is considered a "Pakistan friendly
good Talib".
It is not yet clear why Ilyas Kashmiri decided to visit an area where another Taliban
leader Hakimullah Mehsud does not feel safe, and even his fighters were attacked by
Maulvi Nazir group sometime back.
Hakimullah is believed to be hiding somewhere in North Waziristan. Some sources
claim that may be Pakistani authorities helped US to find out his location, but his
presence in a non-friendly area is still a mystery.
Kashmiri was very careful in his relations with all those who have direct or indirect
contacts with Pakistani establishment.
He focused more on the recruitment of boys from the English medium schools for his
future plans in last four years. Ilyas Kashmiri planned to organise some terror attacks in
big Indian cities like Delhi and Mumbai so that India and Pakistan would go to war.
He was more interested in the independence of Kashmir and wanted to take some
advantage out of an India-Pakistan war. He discussed this plan with some other militant
groups associated with Taliban, but consensus was not created on this because other
groups were more interested in fighting against the Pakistani state.

28

According to some reports Kashmiri managed to infiltrate dozens of his fighters inside
India in the last few years. Some of them came from Gujarat via Dubai or directly from
Delhi.
These boys came to Afghanistan under the cover of labourers and technicians, but
slipped to Eastern Afghanistan and entered to North Waziristan for training with 313
Brigade.

Ilyas Kashmiri recruited a big number of young boys not only from Rawalpindi and
Islamabad but also from Pakistan Occupied Pakistan.
Most of the boys had no past record of militancy. He abandoned those 'seniors' who
were having good relations with Pakistani state. His mixture of young and fresh
Pakistani boys with angry Muslim boys from India made him the biggest threat for
peace in South Asia.
Once I interviewed him in his big training camp near the mountains of Kotli where he
showed me the anti-air craft guns.
I asked him that what is the use of anti-air craft guns in guerilla warfare? He responded
that may be one day he will be attacked by the Indian Air Force and he will retaliate
with anti-aircraft guns.

29

On another occasion when I asked him that formation of a private army is the violation
of Article 256 of the Pakistani constitution which says "no private organisation capable
of functioning as a military organisation shall be formed and any such organisation will
be illegal'; he said, "I am fighting for the liberation of Kashmir while sitting in Kashmir,
its not Pakistan -- its Kotli."

Image: Exclusive Image: Hamid Mir chats with Ilyas Kashmiri

Photographs: Courtesy: Hamid Mir
Prev

Next

He developed differences with the Pakistani establishment when he was asked to join
Jaish-e-Muhammad of Maulana Masood Azhar.
I met him many times after his differences with Pakistani establishment in Islamabad.
He had more than two offices in Islamabad and many known religious clerics of the
capital were his frequent visitors.
But he disappeared one day.
The fate of Ilyas Kashmiri is a lesson for many 'good Talibans' as well as a lesson for the
establishment itself.
First lesson is that the Pakistani establishment used thousands of youngsters in the
name of jihad and liberation of Kashmir but is vulnerable to foreign pressure at any
point of time. They are not dependable.
Secondly, the Pakistani establishment must realise that creating private armies is the
violation of constitution. They must not create private armies and even if they have been
created, they should not mishandle them. They can become genies like Ilyas Kashmiri.
Image: Pakistani soldier Hamed holds a rocket launcher while securing a road in Khar,
the main town in Bajaur Agency, in Pakistan
Photographs: Reuters

30

http://www.rediff.com/news/slid
e-show/slide-show-1-india-50-most-wanted-terrorists/20110511.htm

31

Sajid Majid: An unheard of name, this man came into the limelight post 26/11.
His name came up repeatedly during the David Headley interrogation and it was
established that he was the handler with whom Headley stayed in touch during
his India operation. Rashid Abdullah: This man also goes by the alias Rehan and is an
operative of the Lashkar. His primary job was to arrange for local contacts during
terrorist strikes on Indian soil. Currently hiding in Bangladesh, it is said he was sent
there to mobilise forces to carry out strikes on Indian soil.
Major Iqbal: Charged now by the United States for taking part in the 26/11 attack, this
man is said to be an officer in the ISI.
During the Headley operation, he was said to be the main handler and guided Headley
through the operation. He is currently in Pakistan and his name will come up once
again when the Rana trial takes place on May 16th.
Major Sameer Ali: An officer in the Pakistan Army, his name cropped up during the
Headley case.
He is believed to have worked closely with Major Iqbal during the 26/11 operation and

32

had helped Headley too.

The rest of the most wanted list:
Anwar Ahmed Haji Jamal
Mohammed Dosa
Javed Chikna
Salim Abdul Ghazi
Riyaz Khatri
Munaf Halari
Mohammed Salim Mujhahid
Khan Bashir Ahmed
Yakub Yeda Khan
Mohammed Memon
Irfan Chaugule
Feroz Rashid Khan
Ali Moosa
Sagir Ali Shaikh
Aftab Batki
Azam Cheema
Syed Zabiuddin Jabi
Ibrahim Athar
Azhar Yusuf
Zahur Ibrahim Mistri
Akhtar Sayeed
Mohammed Shakir
Rauf Abdul
Amanullah Khan
Sufiyan Mufti
Nachan Akmal
Pathan Yaqoob Khan
CAM Bashir
Lakhbir Singh Rode
Paramjit Singh Pamma
Ranjit Singh
Wadhawa Singh
Amir Raza Khan

33

http://www.si
asat.pk/forum/showthread.php?63599-The-ISI-and-Terrorism-Behind-the-Accusations

http://totalwar-ar.wikia.com/wiki/File:Kashmiri_head.jpg

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35

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/19/the-journalist-and-the-spiesThe
Journalist And the Spies
The murder of a reporter who exposed Pakistans secrets.
BY DEXTER FILKINS

Pakistani intelligence officials warned

Shahzad to curb his reporting, which revealed links between the military and Al
Qaeda.CREDITILLUSTRATION BY SEAN MCCABE
On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named
Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin
his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates
overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris
with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a
human form.
Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally,
farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the
36

grates, but never a man in a suit. Even his tie and shoes were still on, Shafiq told me.
He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the mans identity: Syed
Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposs of the Pakistani military. Shahzad
had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped
in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported
on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country.
Meanwhile, the zamindarfeudal lordof a village twenty miles upstream from the
dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the
canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to
Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.

The previous afternoon, Shahzad had left his apartment, in the placid F-8/4
neighborhood of Islamabad, and driven toward Dunya studios, about five miles away. It
was five-thirty; the television interview was scheduled for six. According to a local
journalist who talked to a source in one of Pakistans cell-phone companies, Shahzads
phone went dead twelve minutes later. His route passed through some of the countrys
most secure neighborhoods, and no one had reported seeing anything suspicious. Some
Pakistanis speculated that Shahzad might even have known the people who took him
away.
It was a particularly anxious time in Pakistan. Four weeks earlier, American commandos
had flown, undetected, into Abbottabad, a military town northwest of Islamabad, and
killed Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Army, which for more than sixty years has
portrayed itself as the countrys guardian and guide, was deeply embarrassed: either it
had helped to hide bin Laden or it had failed to realize that he was there. Certainly it
hadnt known that the Americans were coming.
Less than three weeks after the Abbottabad raid, the Army was humiliated a second
time. A group of militants, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests,
breached one of the countrys most secure bases, the Pakistan Naval Air StationMehran, outside Karachi, and blew up two P-3C Orion surveillance planes that had
been bought from the United States. At least ten Pakistanis affiliated with the base died.
The components of several nuclear warheads were believed to be housed nearby, and
37

the implication was clear: Pakistans nuclear arsenal was not safe. In barracks across the
country, military officers questioned the competence of Pakistans two most powerful
men, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of the Army staff, and General Ahmad
Shuja Pasha, the chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I. Some officers
even demanded that the Generals resign. Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, publicly
disparaged the one institution that, until then, had seemed to function.
Amid this tumult, Shahzad wrote a sensational story for Asia Times Online, the Web
site that employed him, saying that the attack on the Mehran base had been carried out
by Al Qaedanot by the Pakistani Taliban, which had claimed responsibility. He said
that the Mehran assault had been intended to punish the military for having conducted
massive internal crackdowns on Al Qaeda affiliates within the Navy. A number of
sailors had been detained for plotting to kill Americans, and one was believed to have
received direct instructions from Hakeemullah Mehsudthe chief of the Pakistani
Taliban. It was not the first time that Shahzad had exposed links between Islamist
militants and the armed forcesa connection that Pakistans generals have denied for
years. But the Mehran article was his biggest provocation yet.
Shahzad, whose parents migrated from India after Partition, making him amuhajir
Urdu for immigrantwas an affable outsider within Pakistans journalistic circles.
Asia Times Online is not connected to any of the countrys established newspapers; its
editorial operations are based in Thailand. Shahzad had no local editor to guide him or
restrain him. Only a few other journalists had written as aggressively about Islamist
extremism in the military, and not all of them had survived.
A hallmark of Shahzads reporting was that it frequently featured interviews with
Islamist militants, including Al Qaeda fighters. His work was sometimes inaccurate, but
it held up often enough so that other journalists followed his leads. Perhaps because he
had cultivated so many militants as sources, he occasionally seemed to glorify the men
who were carrying out suicide bombings and assassinations. In 2009, he published a
breathless account of a meeting with Ilyas Kashmiri, a top Al Qaeda leader. Shahzad
noted that the terrorist cut a striking figure, was strongly built, and had a powerful
handshake, adding, Ilyas, with his unmatched guerrilla expertise, turns the strategic
vision into reality, provides the resources and gets targets achieved, but he chooses to

38

remain in the background and very low key. At other times, like many Pakistani
journalists, he seemed to spare the intelligence services from the most damning details
in his notebooks. But on several important occasionsas in the case of the Mehran
attackhe wrote what appeared to be undiluted truth about the Pakistani states
deepest dilemmas.
An autopsy report showed that Shahzad had died slowly and painfully, his rib cage
smashed on both sides, his lungs and liver ruptured. Someone, apparently, had
intended to send a message by killing him.
The media in Pakistan immediately suggested a culprit. According to the
newspaper Dawn, it was believed that Shahzad had been picked up by the I.S.I.
because of his recent story on the P.N.S.-Mehran base attack.

39

Well, it strikes me as hilariously ironic that someone as small as me is such a challenge to two
people as huge as you!BUY THE PRINT

Two days after Shahzads body was found, an I.S.I. official made a statement denying
that its agents had played any role in the killing. Shahzads death, he said, was
unfortunate and tragic, adding, Baseless accusations against the countrys sensitive
agencies for their alleged involvement in Shahzads murder are totally unfounded.
Forty-six journalists have been killed in Pakistan since 2001, and the I.S.I. had never
before issued such a stark denial. The statement hardly quieted suspicion; in fact, it
heightened it. Everybody knows who did it, Muhammad Faizan, a colleague of
Shahzads at Asia Times Online and a friend, told me. But no one can say.

40

I met Saleem Shahzad nine days before he disappeared, and he seemed to know that his
time was running out. It was May 20th, and Islamabad was full of conspiracy theories
about the Abbottabad raid: bin Laden was still alive; Kiyani and Pasha had secretly
helped the Americans with the raid. Mostly, the public radiated anger and shame.
I had called Shahzad to discuss a pair of stories hed written about bin Laden. In March,
five weeks before the raid in Abbottabad, Shahzad claimed that bin Laden had suddenly
come across the radar screens of several intelligence agencies: he was on the move. The
story also reported that bin Laden had held a strategy meeting with an old friend,
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan mujahideen whom the State Department considers a
global terrorist. Then, just after the Abbottabad raid, Shahzad published a report
claiming that the Pakistani leadership had known that the Americans were planning a
raid of some sort, and had even helped. What the Pakistanis didnt know, Shahzad
wrote, was that the person the Americans were looking for was bin Laden. Both stories
struck me as possibly dubious, but it was clear that Shahzad had numerous sources
inside Pakistani intelligence and other intelligence agencies in the region.
Shahzad and I agreed to meet at a Gloria Jeans coffee shop, not far from his home. For
years, Islamabad was a sleepy town of bureaucrats; however dangerous the rest of
Pakistan was, the capital was usually quiet. This was no longer true. In 2008, the
Marriott Hotel, only a few miles from Gloria Jeans, was destroyed by a suicide bomber,
who killed or wounded more than three hundred people. Lately, the Kohsar Market
the collection of expensive boutiques where the Gloria Jeans is situatedhad been
declared off limits for American Embassy personnel on weekends, out of fear that it
would be attacked.
Shahzad and I took our coffees upstairs. He pointed to a table in an alcove by a window.
Welcome to my private office, he said, with a smile. No one will be able to hear us
here.
We talked for a few minutes about the Abbottabad raid and the stories hed written.
Shahzad was tall and self-possessed; he had thick black hair and a round face offset by a
trim beard. He was warm and expressive, the sort of reporter whom people talked to
because he seemed genuinely nice. No wonder he got all those scoops, I thought. He

41

was wearing Western clothes and spoke flawless English. He told me that he knew some
of my colleagues, and offered to help me out in any way that he could.
And then Shahzad changed the subject. What he really wanted to talk about was his
own safety. Look, Im in danger, he said. Ive got to get out of Pakistan. He added
that he had a wife and three kids, and they werent safe, either. Hed been to London
recently, and someone there had promised to help him move to England.
The trouble, he said, had begun on March 25th, the day that he published the story
about bin Ladens being on the move. The next morning, he got a phone call from an
officer at the I.S.I., summoning him to the agencys headquarters, in Aabpara, a
neighborhood in eastern Islamabad. When Shahzad showed up, he was met by three
I.S.I. officers. The lead man, he said, was a naval officer, Rear Admiral Adnan Nazir, who
serves as the head of the I.S.I.s media division.
They were very polite, Shahzad told me. He glanced over his shoulder. They dont
shout, they dont threaten you. This is the way they operate. But they were very angry
with me. The I.S.I. officers asked him to write a second story, retracting the first. He
refused.
And then Admiral Nazir made a remark so bizarre that Shahzad said he had thought
about it every day since.
We want the world to believe that Osama is dead, Nazir said.
Bin Laden was still alive, his whereabouts presumably unknown, when that
conversation occurred. I pressed Shahzad. What did they mean by that?
He shrugged and glanced over his shoulder again. They were obviously trying to
protect bin Laden, he said.
Do you think the I.S.I. was hiding bin Laden? I asked him.
Shahzad shrugged again and said yes. But he hadnt been able to prove it. (The I.S.I.
calls this claim an unsubstantiated accusation of a very serious nature.)

42

Shahzad said that hed left I.S.I. headquarters that day thinking that he needed to be
careful. Now, two months later, there was another reason to worry: a book that hed
written, Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban, was being released in three days, in both
Pakistan and the West. The book, written in English, explored even more deeply the
taboo subject of the I.S.I.s relationship with Islamist militants.
Theyre going to be really mad, Shahzad said.
Since the founding of Pakistan, in 1947, one of the countrys central myths has been the
indispensability of the Army. Along with its appendage the I.S.I., it has intervened
regularly in domestic politics, rigging votes and overthrowing elected governments.
Civilians have been viewed by the Army as a collective nuisance, easily undermined or
ignored.
In the spring of 1999, when General Pervez Musharraf, then the chief of the Army staff,
sent Pakistani soldiers into the Kargil region of Indiasetting off a war between the two
countrieshe didnt even bother telling the Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. (Musharraf
denies this.) Sharif tried to fire him, but Musharraf threw Sharif in jail and took control
of the government. Musharraf ruled for nine years, bullying the Supreme Court and
fixing elections, and exhausting the publics patience for military rule. Since Musharraf
left office, in 2008, the military has continued to pay the countrys civilian leaders little
respect. In October, 2009, after an attack by Islamist militants on the Armys
headquarters in Rawalpindi, Rehman Malik, Pakistans Interior Minister, was prohibited
from entering the compound. The countrys current President, Asif Zardari, is seen as
serving merely at the militarys pleasure.

43

BU
Y THE PRINT
Pakistan is one of the worlds poorest countries, but it has the eighth-largest army,
which takes up nearly a quarter of the countrys federal budget. The Armys oligarchs
have appropriated a remarkable amount of the countrys wealth; they have substantial
investments in the oil-and-gas industry and own shopping centers, farms, banks, and
factories. Members of the Army are believed to traffic in narcotics, guns, and
mercenaries. Officers live behind high walls, in manicured compounds of a luxury
unimaginable to the average Pakistani. Army officers send their children to special
schools and avail themselves of special hospitals. The Pakistani Army is like a mafia,
Ayesha Siddiqa, an independent author who has written extensively about the Pakistani
military, said. The Army has its own interests, and it will eliminate any opposition to
those interests, including civilian governments.
But the most pernicious of the Armys activities has been its long alliance with Islamist
militants. Since the late seventies, the military and the I.S.I. have trained and directed
thousands of militants to fight in Indian Kashmiran area that Pakistan has claimed

44

since independenceand in Afghanistan. For years, the I.S.I. has offered sanctuary to
Taliban leaders, who have used Pakistan as a base for planning operations.
In an article published in October, 2010, Shahzad reported that I.S.I. officials knew
where top Taliban leaders were hiding in Karachi, yet had done nothing to pick them
up. Some Western officials believe that the I.S.I.s protection extends to the Talibans
supreme leader, Mullah Omar. In May, a retired senior Pakistani military officer told me
that Mullah Omar was living in Pakistan, with the knowledge of the countrys security
agencies. Our people have his address, he said. The I.S.I. also provides support to the
Haqqani network, a Taliban-related guerrilla group. Publicly, Pakistans generals claim
that they cannot find Taliban and Haqqani leaders. Although many American officials
consider this a lie, Pakistan continues to receive as much as three billion dollars a year
from the U.S.most of it for the military.
In recent years, as Pakistan has edged toward anarchy, the I.S.I. has grown bolder and
more violent. This spring, a witness testified in federal court in Chicago that I.S.I. agents
were deeply involved in the planning of the terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008, which
killed a hundred and sixty-three people. The witness, a Pakistani-American named
David Headley, said that he had received espionage training from I.S.I. operatives, and
that he had provided hours of video surveillance of the Mumbai target to the I.S.I. and a
terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba. Headley testified that he understood Lashkar to
be operating under the umbrella of the I.S.I. Shortly after the Mumbai attack, Shahzad
published an article alleging that the operation was based on an I.S.I. scheme for an
attack on another Indian target. At the time, the I.S.I. was under the direction of General
Kiyani.
Since the late nineties, the I.S.I.s links to bin Laden and Al Qaeda have been strong
enough to expose some embarrassing entanglements. In 1998, the Clinton
Administration fired cruise missiles at a jihadi training camp in Afghanistan, in the
hope of killing bin Laden. The missiles missed him, but they killed several Islamist
militantsand the team of I.S.I. agents who were training them.
The agencys links to bin Laden continued after the 9/11 attacks. This May, I travelled to
Afghanistan to meet an I.S.I. agent named Fida Muhammad, who had been arrested by
Afghan intelligence agents. He was being held in Pul-i-Charki prison, outside Kabul.
45

When I arrived, the Afghan guards brought Muhammad to a small room and left him
alone with me and my translator. Muhammad told me that hed been a prisoner since
2007. He was from Sada, a village in the Federal Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan,
near the border with Afghanistan. He described himself as a civilian employee of the
I.S.I. For much of the past decade, he said, he had escorted Haqqani fighters from their
sanctuaries in Pakistan into Afghanistan, where they fought against the Americans. He
had been hired for his knowledge of the trails that wind through the mountainous
border. I can pass right under the noses of the Americans and the Afghans, and they
will never see me, he said. Hed been arrested while spying on Indian agents inside
Afghanistan.
Muhammad told me that his most memorable job came in December, 2001, when he
was part of a large I.S.I. operation intended to help jihadi fighters escape from Tora Bora
the mountainous region where bin Laden was trapped for several weeks, until he
mysteriously slipped away. Muhammad said that when the American bombing of Tora
Bora began, in late November, he and other I.S.I. operatives had gone there, and into
other parts of eastern Afghanistan, to evacuate training camps whose occupants
included Al Qaeda fighters.
We told them, Shave your beards, change your clothes, and follow us, Muhammad
said. We led them to the border with Pakistan and told them they were on their own.
And then we went back for more.
Muhammad was part of a four-man team, and there were dozens of such teams. He
estimated that the I.S.I. teams evacuated as many as fifteen hundred militants from Tora
Bora and other camps: Not only Arabs but Pakistanis, Uzbeks, and Chechens. I didnt
see bin Laden. But there were so many Arabs. The operation had been sanctioned at
the highest levels of the I.S.I. There are people in the I.S.I. who believe the militants are
valuable assets, he said. (The I.S.I. denied Muhammads account.)
Amrullah Saleh directed the Afghan intelligence service from 2004 to 2010. He recently
told me that in 2005 his men arrested an I.S.I. operative, Syed Akbar Sabir, who had
escorted bin Laden from the Pakistani region of Chitral to Peshawar, passing through
Kunar Province, in Afghanistan, along the way. We believed that he was part of the
I.S.I. operation to care for bin Laden, Saleh said. In 2006, Sabir was convicted in an
46

Afghan court of aiding the insurgency, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. I spoke
to him at Pul-i-Charki in May. He told me that he was a trained physician and a member
of a militia financed by the Pakistani Army, but he denied that he was an I.S.I. operative.

T
he last of the paperwork harvest is in.BUY THE PRINT
Since the raid in Abbottabad, U.S. officials have openly suggested that the Pakistani
Army or the I.S.I. helped to hide bin Laden, but hard evidence has yet to be found.
Perhaps the most suggestive hint of official involvement comes in the shadowy figure of
Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj, who was the director of the I.S.I. in 2007 and 2008. He
was very close to Musharrafthey are reportedly related by marriage. Bruce Riedel, a
former C.I.A. officer, says that Taj was deeply involved with Pakistani militants,
particularly those fighting against India. Riedel, who oversaw President Barack Obamas
initial review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, said, Taj was very close to the
militant networks. And his fingerprints were on everything. In 2008, American officials

47

successfully pressured Musharraf to remove Taj, suspecting that he had been involved in
the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, earlier that year.
Before taking over the I.S.I., Taj was the commandant of the Pakistani military academy
in Abbottabad. That is, he was the senior military official in Abbottabad at the time that
American officials believe bin Laden began living there. Taj retired from the Pakistani
Army in April, just days before the raid in Abbottabad. Attempts to track him down in
Pakistan were unsuccessful.
Riedel said, Taj is the right person at the right time. If the I.S.I. was helping to hide bin
Laden, then it would make sense to park him somewhere permanently. Who better to be
the park policeman than Musharrafs favorite general?
Shahzad was not the only Pakistani journalist whose reporting made him a target of the
state. Umar Cheema, a reporter for the News, an important Pakistani daily, has
published numerous articles on the militarys failures. At three in the morning on
September 4, 2010, Cheema was driving home from a tea shop in Islamabad, where hed
met some friends, when he was forced off the road by two unmarked Toyotas. Two men
in police uniforms approached his car. They told him that he was suspected of running
over and killing a pedestrian.
The policemen directed Cheema into the back seat of a black Land Cruiser, where two
other men handcuffed him and covered his face with a shawl. After two hours, the car
came to a stop. He was led up a stairwell, and a heavy door closed behind him. Cheema
asked, What police station have we come to? One of the men responded, Shut up.
Thats when I knew I was in trouble, Cheema told me. During the next half hour, he
was stripped, beaten with rods and a leather strap, and sexually humiliated. I was
crying out to God, Cheema recalled. Then the shawl covering his face was removed:
standing around him were five masked men. They shaved his head and eyebrows and
took degrading photographs of him. Were going to make an example of you, one of
the men said.
Cheema, who is thirty-four, described his ordeal over tea at my hotel in Islamabad. He
spoke without hesitation, and seemed remarkably fit, given all that hed been through.

48

The torturers, Cheema said, put the shawl back over his face and drove him to a village
a hundred miles from Islamabad. One of the men removed the cuffs and told him to
walk into the street. Youll find your car right over there, the man said. Dont look
back. Theyd taken Cheemas glasses, wallet, and cell phone, and given him a hundred
rupeesthe equivalent of a dollar and twenty cents. That was for the toll on the way
home, he said.
Cheemas captors made it clear that they were working for the government. You are
being punished for your reporting, one of them said during the interrogation. Cheema
had no doubt that he had been detained by the I.S.I.; ten times over the previous six
months, he told me, the agency had warned associates of his that it was unhappy about
his reporting. (The I.S.I. denied that it had anything to do with the assault.)
Pakistani journalists say that it is not easy to predict when the security agencies will
detain, torture, or kill a reporter. Pakistan is a peculiar state: it is unjust and autocratic,
but it is also partly open and partly democratic. The media there is loud, lively, and
varied, and there are good newspapers, magazines, and television networks that
investigate official misconduct. And although reporters in Pakistan are routinely
threatened and sometimes brutalized, a small cohort seems able to write more freely
about sensitive subjects.
The journalist best known outside Pakistan is Ahmed Rashid, the author of several
books on Pakistan and Afghanistan; his book Taliban was a best-seller in the U.S. He
has published dozens of revelatory reports on the military and intelligence services.
Rashid says that he has been threatened repeatedly by the I.S.I. over the years, and was
once warned personally by Musharraf. Rashids colleagues believe that his prominence
in the West has protected him; he writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and
the Financial Times.
These days, Rashid says, he has had to be more careful. After a recent threat, he stayed
out of Pakistan for a couple of months before returning to his home, in Lahore. There is
a red line in Pakistanthere has always been a red line, Rashid said. But, after Saleem
Shahzad, no one knows where the red line is anymore. He went on, Its debilitating.
You cant really go out and report. Sometimes you just sit and think about what is going
to happen.
49

Saleem Shahzad wasnt well known outside the country. Asia Times Online, which he
joined in 2000, had only a small presence in Pakistan, and was struggling to attract
international readers. Shahzad seemed to enjoy the freedom that the Web site offered,
even if it meant that he had to surrender some influence. In the preface to Inside Al
Qaeda and the Taliban, he wrote, Independent reporting for the alternative media
best suits my temperament as it encourages me to seek the truth beyond conventional
wisdom. As a result, I study people and situations from a relatively uncompromised
position.
In the decade after 9/11, Shahzads reporting increasingly attracted notice within
Pakistani media circles. Many of his articles for Asia Times Online were reprinted in the
Pakistani press. What stood out was his legwork: he often travelled to the tribal areas
near the Afghan border to meet with members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Zafar
Sheikh, Shahzads best friend and a local correspondent for the Saudi state television
network, told me, Saleem would say, Lets have a joyride!, and then we would go off
to somewhere crazy to meet the militants. Shahzad took to the rugged life. During the
governments offensive against militants in the Swat Valley, in 2009, rebels were
impressed by his ability to sleep, untroubled, for hours in the open air.
Sheikh warned Shahzad that the stories he was writing could get him in trouble with
the authorities. I told him so many times, Saleem, youre going to be killed, what
youre doing is too dangerous, but he was reckless.

50

I
couldnt find a nail file, like you asked, so I brought you some nail polish and lip gloss
instead.BUY THE PRINT
In September, 2009, Pakistani officials announced that Ilyas Kashmiri, the Al Qaeda
operative, had been killed in a drone strike. On October 15th, Shahzad published a
memorable rebuttalhis account of meeting Kashmiri, with a dateline from North
Waziristan. We planned this battle to bring the Great Satan and its allies into this
swamp, Kashmiri told him. Shahzad got the story right: Kashmiri was still alive. The
articles tone bordered on gloating. Shahzad wrote that Kashmiris arrival in the border
areas would send a chill down spines in Washington as they realized that with his vast
experience, he could turn unsophisticated battle patterns in Afghanistan into audacious
modern guerrilla warfare.
Tony Allison, a South African who works in the Thailand offices of Asia Times Online,
was Shahzads editor. Sometimes, Saleem would disappear for three or four days, and I
wouldnt know where hed gone, and then he would emerge with a great story, he told
me. I knew he could get the story and I trusted him.

51

Shahzad was not universally respected by his peers. No doubt there was some
resentment over his scoops. But sometimes he seemed to be regurgitating the stories his
sources told him without checking whether they were true. Sometimes he got things
seriously wrong. His story claiming that Pakistans leaders assisted the Americans raid
in Abbottabad, for instance, is not supported by any available evidence.
I liked Saleem, but I didnt always know what was right and what was wrong, Cyril
Almeida, the chief political columnist for Dawn, told me. It was difficult to know where
he was getting this stuff.
In Shahzads book, there are many vivid anecdotes; for instance, he details an incident
in which an Al Qaeda militant and former Army officer, Major Haroon Ashik, smuggled
a shipment of night-vision goggles through Islamabad International Airport, assisted by
an aide to President Musharraf. The story seems solid, as it is based on an interview
with Ashik. But the books analysis is shallow: Shahzad depicts Al Qaeda not as an
embattled and fragmented entity, as most of the available evidence suggests it is, but,
rather, as an Islamist version of SPECTRE, from the James Bond filmsa monolithic,
secretive power whose influence stretches across the globe. Similarly, instead of
portraying the group as a far-flung franchise operation, as it is widely seen in the West,
he claims that Al Qaeda has been intimately involved in directing other militant groups
in the region, including the Taliban.
Shahzads book, even more than his daily journalism, leaves the impression that he
harbored sympathy for the killers he writes about. Not only does he describe with
enthusiasm the exploits of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters like Ilyas Kashmiri; he refers
several times to Khurasanan outdated term for Central Asia that Al Qaeda
followers often use to denote the region. At the end of the book, Shahzad writes, in an
oddly prophetic register, The promised messiah, the Mahdi, will then rise in the
Middle East and Al Qaeda will mobilize its forces from Ancient Khurasan for the
liberation of Palestine, where a final victory will guarantee the revival of a Global
Muslim Caliphate.
When Shahzad was in college, he was a member of the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami,
an Islamist political party that has fed thousands of recruits into militant groups. Some
of his classmates received training as guerrilla fighters, and Shahzad told other
52

journalists that these young men became key sources for his reporting in the field. In
recent years, friends and colleagues say, Shahzad stopped supporting Jamaat-e-Islami,
finding its ideology too radical.
Although Shahzad didnt support the militants aims, his feelings for them ran deep. I
think Saleem had great sympathy for the militants, not because he believed in the
caliphate but because he understood their side of the story, Allison, his editor at Asia
Times Online, said. He understood and empathized with them. He had empathy for
the Western soldiers in Afghanistan, too. This is why he was trusted by the militants. He
did not share their vision, but heunderstood their vision.
Shahzad was socially conservative: he didnt drink, and friends and colleagues describe
him as pious. But they say that he didnt support Islamist violence. Saleem felt that
there was a kind of endgame unfolding between the militants and the Americans,
because the Americans had been so stupid in Afghanistan, Hameed Haroon, the
publisher of Dawn, told me. This permeated his writing. But he was against the terror.
Because Shahzad had relationships with a number of I.S.I. agents, he was one of a small
class of reporters more likely to become targets of the intelligence agencies. Talking to
the I.S.I. allowed him to get privileged information, and to verify information that he
had picked up on his own. But maintaining a relationship with the I.S.I. may have
created expectations of loyalty. Almeida, the Dawn columnist, told me that he refuses to
talk to the I.S.I.: Once you start talking to these people, that creates a relationship, and
then they think you owe them. Then, if you do something they dont like, they feel
betrayed.

Ayesha Siddiqa, the independent author who has written scathingly of the military, said
that, two years ago, she turned down an offer to meet General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief.
Once you go into the headquarters, they have you, she told me. They can photograph
you there, they can put out the word that you were visiting, they can blackmail you.
Siddiqa, too, has been threatened repeatedly by associates of the military and the I.S.I.
Since Shahzads death, she has felt more pressure than ever before. It wears on me,
she said. Some days, you cant work. I know that they could come for me anytime.

53

Siddiqa spoke to Shahzad only hours before he disappeared. At about 4 P.M. on May
29th, he called her on her cell phone. She was driving, she said, so the conversation was
brief. Shahzad seemed interested in some aspect of official Pakistani duplicity. She
recalls him saying, Pakistan should stop lying to the U.S.even if we dont want to do
what they want us to do, we should stop lying about it. They agreed to speak later that
day.
According to Shahzads friends and colleagues, he had been warned by the I.S.I. at least
three times before he finally disappeared. Shahzad documented one of those encounters
in remarkable detail.

54

It
s the stress of freshman year, sir.BUY THE PRINT
On October 16, 2010, Shahzad published an article about Abdul Ghani Baradar, then the
deputy commander of the Taliban. The next day, he was summoned to the I.S.I.s
headquarters. The Baradar story touched on the I.S.I.s relationship with Taliban leaders
an extremely sensitive subject. Earlier that year, American and Pakistani intelligence
agents had arrested Baradar during a raid in Karachi. At the time, both the Americans
and the Pakistanis hailed Baradars arrest as a breakthrough in their difficult
relationship. But I.S.I. agents later told a different story: they had orchestrated Baradars
arrest, after discovering that he was holding secret peace talks with Afghanistans

55

leaders, without informing his I.S.I. handlers. The I.S.I. agents had set up the raid in
Karachi in order to cut off the peace talks. Shahzad, in his October article, wrote that the
I.S.I. had quietly released Baradar.
After a tense meeting with two I.S.I. officers about the article, Shahzad called Ali
Dayan Hasan, the director of Human Rights Watch in Pakistan. Hasan suggested that
Shahzad make notes of the meeting. Shahzad did so, and sent a copy of them to Hasan.
Shahzad wrote that he was met at headquarters by two I.S.I. officialsCommodore
Khalid Pervaiz and Rear Admiral Nazir, the same officer who gave him the warning in
March.

Nazir and Pervaiz were courteous as they asked him to reveal his sources for the
Baradar story. Shahzad refused. They asked him to publicly retract the story, and
Shahzad refused to do that, too. The I.S.I. officers did not push him, he wrote.
But at the very end of the conversation Nazir made an ominous remark. He said, We
recently arrested a terrorist and recovered a lot of datadiaries and other material
during the interrogation. The terrorist had a hit list with him. He then added, If I find
your name on the list, I will certainly let you know.
Seven months later, on May 22nd, the naval base at Mehran came under attack. The
siege lasted fifteen hours and was covered, live, on Pakistani television. Footage shot by
cameramen just outside the base showed plumes of fire from the ruined jets spiralling
into the night sky.
Five days after the incident, Shahzad published his report saying that the attack was a
reprisal for the Navys arrest of sailors who were Al Qaeda sympathizers. High-level
naval officers, Shahzad wrote, had been secretly negotiating with Al Qaeda over the fate
of the detained sailors. To move the discussions along, militants had already carried out
three attacks on naval targets in Karachi.
Shahzad quoted naval officers as saying that the arrest of the Islamist sailors had set off
a chain reaction. That was the beginning of huge trouble, one officer told Shahzad.
According to the article, top officers in the Navy believed that the ease with which the
56

militants had attacked the naval base indicated there was a sizable Al Qaeda
infiltration within the Navys ranks. Indeed, Shahzad wrote, the Mehran attack had
been carried out by a group of fighters led by Ilyas Kashmirithe Al Qaeda fighter
whom he had praised for his unmatched guerrilla expertise.
Three days after the attack, the naval base at Mehran got a new commander:
Commodore Pervaiz, one of the two I.S.I. officers who, in October, had warned Shahzad
to tone down his reporting. The embarrassing Asia Times Online report was published
on Pervaizs second day in command. Two days later, Shahzad disappeared.
Commodore Zafar Iqbal, an I.S.I. spokesman, told me that Pervaiz would not be
available for an interview. Out of the question, he said.
The Islamization of the Pakistani military causes deep worry among policymakers in
the United States and Europe. Pakistan, which is believed to possess about a hundred
nuclear warheads, has the fastest-growing atomic arsenal in the world. The fear is that
rogue members of the military could help a terrorist group like Al Qaeda acquire a
warhead, or that a group of Islamist military officers could overthrow the government.
The Pakistanis are worried to death about the security of their nuclear weapons, a
senior American military officer told me. They would never tell us that, but we are sure
of it.
Even before the attack on Mehran, there had been signs of violent radicalism inside the
Pakistani military. Two assassination attempts against President Musharraf in 2003, both
of which nearly succeeded, were carried out by Al Qaeda fighters who were assisted by
Air Force officers. And in October, 2009, came the attack on the Armys headquarters in
Rawalpindi, killing twenty-three people. The attackers wore Army uniforms and
seemed to know the layout of the headquarters. One of the lead attackers was a former
medic in the Pakistani Army.
Shahzad argues in his book that it was around the time of the attempts on Musharrafs
life that Al Qaeda made its first substantial inroads into the Army. From 2003 onwards
Al Qaeda succeeded in sowing the seeds of dissent within Pakistans armed forces,
Shahzad writes. Pakistans tribal youths and formerly pro-establishment jihadi cadres

57

moved away from Pakistans ruling establishment and promised allegiance to Al

Qaeda.
In the weeks after the Abbottabad raid, Islamist groups tried to capitalize on the
outpouring of anti-American anger inside the Pakistani military. The most active group
appears to have been Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global movement that advocates a peaceful
restoration of the caliphate, the theocratic state that once ruled the Islamic world from
Spain to the Arabian Sea. Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in Pakistan, but it is allowed to
operate in many countries, including the United Kingdom.
After the attack on the Mehran base, people working on behalf of Hizb ut-Tahrir
distributed leaflets at military bases and in cantonments in Karachi, with the aim of
stirring up a revolt. One leaflet said, O true officers of the Pakistan Army! Your leaders
broke their promises again. . . . These traitorous leaders are spilling your blood and the
blood of Muslims in Afghanistan and the tribal areas, and they are doing this for
America. . . . This is a request for you to prepare a plan to give power to Hizb ut-Tahrir.
The incidents, which took place on May 3rd, May 7th, and June 23rd, were confirmed by
Commodore Iqbal.
Pakistans military leaders have become acutely nervous about Hizb ut-Tahrir, and
about the Islamist threat more generally. In June, they announced the arrest of Brigadier
Ali Khan, who worked at Army headquarters, because of alleged associations with Hizb
ut-Tahrir. According to Pakistani press accounts, Brigadier Khan had denounced Kiyani
and Pasha in language similar to that used in the leaflets.

58

BU
Y THE PRINT
Iqbal told me that Khans arrest was approved at the highest levels. You dont just
arrest a brigadier, he said. Its a very big deal. Some American officials believe that
the arrest of Khan, who was only months from retirement, was designed to send a
message to lower-ranking officers that Islamist sentimentand insubordinationwould
not be tolerated. Khan was a fall guy, the senior American military officer told me.
Khans arrest may have been ordered to reassure the U.S. as well. American officials say
that Kiyani and Pasha, for all their faults, are the best allies the U.S. is likely to get.
The attack on the Mehran base was especially troubling, because it could be seen as a
test run for an assault on one of Pakistans nuclear bases. You have to appreciate how
impressive the attack in Karachi was, the senior American military officer said. They

59

practiced it. They knew the layout of the base. They probably built a mock-up of the
place. And no one knew a thing.
Commodore Iqbal did not rule out the possibility that the attackers were helped by Al
Qaeda sympathizers inside the base, but said that there was no proof yet. At least
three Pakistani sailors have been court-martialled.
The presence of Islamists in the Navy, and at Mehran, was not a secret among
Pakistanis. But Shahzads article was particularly incendiary. Not only did he report that
sailors at the base had helped the attackers; he wrote that the Navys leadership was
bargaining directly with Al Qaeda. Consider the time when Saleems piece came out,
a high-level American official told me. The military felt humiliated. It felt backed into a
corner. The official added, When youre backed into a corner like that, you strike
back.
The first order to harm Shahzad was issued shortly after his article on the Mehran attack
appeared. The initial directive was not to kill him but to rough him up, possibly in the
same way that Cheema had been dealt with. But a senior American official confirms
that, at some point before Shahzad was taken away, the directive was changed. He was
to be murdered.
Five weeks after the killing, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, said publicly that it had been sanctioned by the government of Pakistan. In fact,
according to the American official, reliable intelligence indicates that the order to kill
Shahzad came from a senior officer on General Kiyanis staff. The officer made it clear
that he was speaking on behalf of Kiyani himself. (General Athar Abbas, the spokesman
for the Pakistani Army, called this allegation preposterous.)
After the discovery of Shahzads body, some of his friends and family members told me
they believed that the I.S.I. agents had meant only to beat him, and that things got out of
hand. They had reason to think so. A year earlier, during an altercation with a guard
outside a social club in Islamabad, Shahzad had been shot. Shahzads brother-in-law,
Hamza Ameer, told me that the guard had become angry after Shahzad complained
about being denied entry, because he had forgotten his membership card. The bullet
had penetrated his liver, and it remained lodged near his spine. (According to Ameer,

60

Shahzad eventually pardoned the guard in a Pakistani court, as is allowed under the
law, so the guard went free.) Shahzads autopsy report says that a ruptured liver is one
of the things that killed him.
But Dr. Mohammed Farrukh Kamal, one of the physicians who performed the autopsy,
told me that Shahzad had been beaten with a heavy instrument, like a metal rod, and he
dismissed the notion that Shahzad had been killed by mistake. You dont hit a person
that hard by accident, he told me. They meant to kill him.
Shahzads journalism may not have been the sole reason that he was targeted. I.S.I.
officials may have become convinced that Shahzad was working for a foreign
intelligence agency. This could have elevated him in the eyes of the military from a
troublesome reporter who deserved a beating to a foreign agent who needed to be
killed.
In fact, Shahzad, at the time of his death, was in contact with several foreign intelligence
officials. He told me that a Saudi intelligence official was among those who had told him
that bin Laden had met with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen now considered a
terrorist. Shahzad himself, under questioning from the I.S.I., had admitted that another
source for that story was General Bismillah Khanthen the Interior Minister of
Afghanistan, and a loathed figure in the Pakistani military.
More crucially, it appears that, in the months before Shahzad was killed, some foreign
intelligence agencies tried to recruit him. Roger van Zwanenberg, the publisher of Pluto
Press, the London imprint that released Shahzads book, told me that members of
British intelligence had asked Shahzad for help during a short visit that he made to
London in March. The intelligence officers wanted Shahzad to help them get in touch
with Taliban leaders. Saleem declined, van Zwanenberg said. He added that, when
Shahzad attended a conference in New Delhi this spring, officers from an Indian
intelligence agency offered to put him on a retainer. Several of Shahzads colleagues
confirmed this.
There is no evidence that Shahzad was working for any foreign intelligence agency, but
mere suspicion on this front could have imperilled him. What is the final thing that
earns Shahzad a red cardthe final thing that tips him over from being a nuisance to an

61

enemy? a Western researcher in Islamabad said to me. If someone concluded that he

was a foreign agent, and that the stories he was putting out were part of a deliberate
effort to defame the I.S.I. and undermine the I.S.I.s carefully crafted information
strategyif anyone in the I.S.I. concluded that, then Saleem would be in grave danger.
On June 3rd, four days after Shahzad was found in the Upper Jhelum Canal, a C.I.A.
officer, operating a pilotless drone, fired a missile at a group of men who had gathered
in an orchard outside the village of Ghwa Khwa, in South Waziristan. Locals who ran to
the scene saw many bodies, but a group of militants who had survived told them to stay
back. Kashmiri Khan! Kashmiri Khan! one of them yelled. Among the dead was Ilyas
Kashmirithe terrorist whom Shahzad had once proved to be still alive, and who he
said was responsible for the attack on the Mehran base.
Three days later, Rehman Malik, Pakistans Interior Minister, announced that, this time,
Kashmiri was definitely dead.

62

I
would happily pay more in taxes, if somebody made me.BUY THE PRINT
Given the brief time that passed between Shahzads death and Kashmiris, a question
inevitably arose: Did the Americans find Kashmiri on their own? Or did they benefit
from information obtained by the I.S.I. during its detention of Shahzad? If so, Shahzads
death would be not just a terrible example of Pakistani state brutality; it would be a
terrible example of the collateral damage sustained in Americas war on terror.
If the C.I.A. killed Kashmiri using information extracted from Shahzad, it would not be
the first time that the agency had made use of a brutal interrogation. In 2002, Ibn alShaykh al-Libi, an Al Qaeda operative held by the Egyptian government, made
statements, under torture, suggesting links between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden;
this information was used to help justify the invasion of Iraq.
Kashmiri, who was forty-seven, was a guerrilla fighter who received training from both
the Pakistani Army and the I.S.I. According to American officials, he fought in the

63

guerrilla war inside Indian Kashmir, working closely with the I.S.I. According to one
frequently heard story, Kashmiri, returning from an operation in India, presented
Musharrafthen the chief of the Army staffwith the head of an Indian soldier.
But, as Musharraf began to curtail the activities of militant groups operating in India,
Kashmiri moved to the tribal areas and started waging war against the Pakistani state.
He brought together the 313 Brigade, an amalgam of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and other
fighters. Kashmiri was accused of playing a key role in one of the two unsuccessful plots
to assassinate Musharraf in 2003, and he is believed to have helped orchestrate the 2009
attack on the Armys headquarters. Earlier this year, David Headley, the PakistaniAmerican who testified in Chicago about the Mumbai attack, named Kashmiri as a key
terrorist planner.
On May 27th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Islamabad, and she presented to
Pakistani leaders a list of high-value targets. According to ABC News, Kashmiri was on
the list. That morning, Shahzad had published the article naming Kashmiri as the
perpetrator of the attack on the Mehran basebroadcasting, once again, his connection
to the militant leader.
Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. officer, said, After the Abbottabad raid, the Pakistanis
were under enormous pressure to show that they were serious about Al Qaeda.
Shahzad, at the time of his death, was in contact with several Taliban and Al Qaeda
militants. Its obvious from his book that Kashmiri was one of them. Muhammad
Faizan, Shahzads colleague, said, The militants used to call him, not the other way
around.
After Shahzads murder, the Pakistani government appointed a commission, led by a
justice of the Supreme Court, to investigate. In late July, the justice, Mian Saqib Nisar,
summoned a group of Pakistani reporters and editors and briefed them on his progress.
Bani Amin Khan, the inspector general of the Islamabad police, also appeared at the
meeting, with some of his investigators. According to reporters who attended the
briefing, one of the investigators said that he had seen something unusual in Shahzads
cell-phone records: more than two hundred and fifty-eight calls to and from a single
number during a one-month period.

64

Imtiaz Alam, the secretary-general of the South Asian Free Media Association, told me
that after the briefing he approached Khan and pressed him for details. Khans answer,
according to Alam: The calls were with Ilyas Kashmiri. When I asked Khan about
Shahzads case, he threw me out of his office.
The evidence is fragmentary, but it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which
Pakistani intelligence agents gave the C.I.A. at least some of the information that
pinpointed Kashmiri. Likewise, it seems possible that at least some of that information
may have come from Shahzad, either during his lethal interrogation or from data taken
from his cell phone. In the past, the I.S.I. and the C.I.A. have coperated extensively on
the U.S. drone program.
This relationship has been strained since the bin Laden killing. For the moment, much
of the drone program, once based in Pakistan, appears to be frozen. According to the
senior American military officer, the drones are no longer flying out of Shamsi Air Base,
in Pakistan, but from Afghanistan, and the intelligence used to target militants is now
being collected almost entirely by American networks. Most of the drone strikes are
being carried out without prior Pakistani knowledge.
We want the Pakistanis coperation, but we are prepared to go without it, the
military officer told me. The Americans unilateral approach to drone strikes is causing
intense tension with Pakistani leaders, and not just because of their claims that the
strikes kill many civilians. The drone strikes sometimes reveal that the Americans and
the I.S.I. are working against each other.
On March 17th, four missiles fired from a drone hit a group of men who had gathered
at a market in the village of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan. As many as forty-four
people died. The Pakistani government denounced the strike, claiming that it had killed
a number of tribal elders, and demanded an apology.
As with nearly all drone strikes, the precise number and nature of the casualties were
impossible to verify. The high-level American official told me that the tribal elders
were actually insurgent leaders. But he offered another reason that the Pakistani officials
were so inflamed: It turns out there were some I.S.I. guys who were there with the
insurgent leaders. We killed them, too. (The I.S.I. denied that its agents were present.)

65

What were I.S.I. agents doing at a meeting of insurgent commanders? The American
official said that he did not know.
A senior counterterrorism official said that the Kashmiri strike was not connected to
Shahzads death. At the same time, the official acknowledged that in the past the U.S.
had received intelligence from the Pakistanis on Kashmiri, and confirmed that the
Pakistanis continue to share information on targets.
Commodore Iqbal, the I.S.I. spokesman, reiterated the agencys insistence that it had no
involvement in Shahzads death. But he said that the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. were still
coperating. We are giving the Americans a lot of intelligence, Iqbal told me. We
dont feel like we are getting much in return. When I asked him if the I.S.I. had
coperated on the strike that killed Kashmiri, he said, I cant answer that.

BU
Y THE PRINT

66

These days, the high-level American official told me, most drone attacks in Pakistan are
signature strikes, which are carried out when a group of people match a certain
profilethey are operating a training camp, for instance, or consorting with known
militants. Such strikes are not directed at specific individualslike, say, Ayman alZawahiri, Al Qaedas new leader. Usually, the agency doesnt know the identities of the
people it is firing at. Most of the high-value targets have been killed this way, the
American official told me.
In the case of Kashmiri, the American official initially told me that he had been killed in
a signature strike. We did the strike, and we found out later that it was him, the
official said. When I pressed him, though, he said, We sort of thought he would be
there. He declined to elaborate.
Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. officer, said that helping the agency kill Kashmiri would
have made eminent sense to the I.S.I. Kashmiri had become an enemy of the Pakistani
state, and had maintained potentially embarrassing contacts with Pakistani security
services.
If you start from the premise that the Pakistanis had something to do with hiding bin
Laden, then you have to assume that they were trying very hard to put everything back
into the tube, Riedel said. And so it would have made sense for them to get rid of
Saleem Shahzad. And Kashmiri, too.
In Pakistan, reporting on Shahzads case ceased, for the most part, after a few weeks.
Shahzads wife, Anita, recently communicated with me, via e-mail. I dont want to
rewind to that bitter time, she said, adding that Shahzad had been a brave man. She
assured me that here in Pakistan they are trying their level best to find the culprit.
In the wake of Shahzads death and the Abbottabad raid, the tone of the Pakistani press
darkened. Some columnists argued that the Pakistani state was poised to fall to Islamist
militants. Ayman al-Zawahiri is the man waiting to become the caliph of Pakistan,
Khaled Ahmed wrote in the Friday Times, an influential weekly.
This spring, Umar Cheema, still recovering from his ordeal with the I.S.I., was invited to
the U.S., where he was honored by Syracuse University for his journalism. Cheema told

67

me that while in America he was offered several fellowships, as well as the prospect of
asylum. He decided to come home. If Pakistan were not in such dark shape, I would
leave, he told me. But it is my duty to try to make this a better country for the next
generation. He quickly broke a number of important stories, including one charging
that Yousaf Raza Gilani, the Prime Minister, and the twenty-five members of his cabinet
paid no taxes last year.
Zafar Sheikh, Shahzads friend and colleague, took a different path. Years ago, Sheikh
said, he regularly accompanied Shahzad on road trips to the tribal areas, and sat in mud
huts and interviewed Taliban commanders. He, too, had aspired to write revelatory
stories about the inner workings of the I.S.I. But now he has set those ambitions aside.
I used to be a brave journalist, Sheikh told me one day as we rode in a car across the
Punjabi plains. But I will be frank with you. I dont want to get killed like Saleem. I
dont want to suffer like Saleem did. So Im not part of the war anymore. I am just
writing stereotypical bullshit storiesand no one is angry.
We drove on for a little longer, toward the Upper Jhelum Canal, and, a few minutes
later, we found the place where the laborer had discovered Shahzads body. The water
was streaming into the intake grates.
I used to look for stories that would open peoples eyes, Sheikh said. Now I am just a
stupid correspondent doing stupid stories. And I am happy. I am happy.
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68

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Attack on GHQ: confessions of a terrorist mastermind

ISLAMABAD: The venue was Miramshah. The attendants of the meeting included some
of the most notorious militants of Pakistan. And their agenda was nothing short of
explosive an attack on the GHQ with the aim to take military officers hostage.
Shortly after the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in 2009, Aqeel Ahmed alias Dr
Usman alias Kamran alias Nazir Ahmed fled to Waziristan where he met the head of
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan`s Amjad Farooqui Group, Ustad Aslam Yasin and Ilyas
Kashmiri.
It was at this meeting that the idea of the attack on the General Headquarters was
floated, reveals the main accused of the attack, Ahmed, in a confessional statement. He
along with his seven accomplices was convicted by a military court on Aug 11, 2011, for
the audacious attack on the GHQ in October 2009. Shooting their way into the military`s
main headquarters, cowboy style, the militants took men hostage in one of the
buildings. They remained there till the next morning when commandos finally entered
the building, killing most of the militants and rescuing the hostages.
The brazen attack took the military and the nation by surprise; it was a successful
operation from the psychological point of view.
69

The confessional statement of Ahmed reveals the detailed planning that went into the
attack.
He also claims that in the Miramshah meeting he was reluctant to attack the army.
However, the other two men argued that the Pakistan Army as an ally of the United
States was a legitimate target.
[HI]
Ilyas Kashmiri said that the plan was to hold army generals hostage at the GHQ till they
could get detained militants released in exchange. According to the statement, Yasin
gave Ahmed a list with 115 names on it; these were the men whose release was to be
demanded. He also assured Ahmed that he would be accompanied by a team of trained
warriors.[/HI]
Ahmed also revealed that he and his accomplices used Google Earth to download the
maps of GHQ on the basis of which they planned their attacks.
The planning, according to the court documents, took the team months. Apart from
arranging for the weapons that were brought to Rawalpindi from Jhang, the accused
made multiple reconnaissance trips to the GHQ during the summer of 2009.
However, it was Wajid Mehmood, another accused from a non-military background,
who pointed out the locations where high-ranking army officials, including brigadiers
and generals, could be found.
Ahmed, who is known for his involvement in a number of high-profile attacks,
including those on Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf, joined Harkatul Jihad Al Islami in 1999
after completing his studies and went to Afghanistan twice.
After 9/11, he returned to Pakistan after being injured and joined the Army Medical
Corps (AMC) as a nursing assistant and was posted to the CMH in Rawalpindi. He was
still in touch with Jihadi `friends` then.
It was here that he became friends with another accused, Imran Siddique, who was then
a soldier in the army.
According to his statement, Ahmed deserted the army in 2005 and became involved
with the Amjad Farooqui group.

70

By August 2009, the GHQ plan was in full swing. Ahmed first rented a room at Bilal
Boys Hostel, Rawalpindi, and started surveillance of GHQ`s surroundings.
The weapons and explosives were brought over by Usman alias Ishfaq alias Gul Khan
hidden in a CNG cylinder.
In September, Ahmed rented a house near DHA`s phase II. He also acquired a van that
he then proceeded to fit with army number plates, his statement reveals.
Army uniforms for eight of his accomplices cost him Rs30,000.
According to the statement, from Oct 1 to 9, 2009, Ahmed along with his accomplice Ali
carried out surveillance of the area and also briefed others on the attack by using
distance measuring tool on Google Earth.
Initially, the attack was planned for Oct 6 but this was delayed to Oct 10 as some of the
accomplices fell ill.
The statement said the 10 attackers reached the GHQ via Murree Road and dispersed in
different directions. The audacious attack as the men broke past the checkpost resulted
in the death of five of them. The rest were able to make it in.
The statements of army officers that comprised the prosecution case highlights the
element of surprise with which the attack was carried out. In fact, the bulk of the
prosecution`s statements focus on what they saw once the men had made it in. There is
little information on what happened at the checkpost.
According to the court documents, the militants made hostage five officers and 20
civilians.
Before they took the men hostage, Ahmed also shot dead the driver of a jeep who
refused to tell the militants the locations of the offices of the generals. However, the
statement does not explain if the militants were looking for any specific generals or
army officers.
Ahmed claimed in his statement that by 11am the militants had taken over the GHQ
and the entire area was `within their firing range` though he added that they were
surrounded by the army.

71

The negotiations continued all night; at six in the morning, the SSG attacked and
entered the building. They killed the four other militants who were watching over the
hostages. Ahmed survived this attack as he was holed up in a separate room from
where he was carrying out negotiations over the phone.
In his statement he explains that he then hid in an office, coming out only to join the
men carrying out the rescue work; a building had collapsed and men were trying to
rescue those trapped beneath the rubble.
He nearly escaped scot-free but for a security officer who identified him.
Maj Akhtar Hussain Qamar, security officer (technical) at GHQ, who witnessed the
whole episode on CCTV, identified Ahmed. I saw the whole incident on CCTV and
observed that 10 attackers/terrorists had dismounted from a Suzuki van near the Tank
Chowk picket. Here they attacked the picket as well as some security staff and five of
them were hit, whereas other five managed to enter into the GHQ premises. I reported
this whole incident to my superiors. Later I assisted SSG persons and troops in planning
the counterattack and recognition of the attackers/terrorists since features/figures of
accused number 1 (Ahmed) were very clear in footage.
According to the chargesheet of Ahmed, security staff recovered nine rifles, one rocketlauncher, 16 empty magazines, 28 loaded magazines, four ammunition pouches, two fly
liver-grenades, six AP Claymore mines, six rockets, six expelling charges, eight handgrenades, eight detonators and 19 40mm grenades of Gp-25 from the militants.
The military court had sentenced Ahmed to death while his accomplice, former soldier
Imran Siddique, was sentenced to life in prison. Three civilians were also sentenced to
life in prison while two were sentenced to seven years each in prison[/RIGHT]
[HI]If these nasty people will do this kind of activities , then operation against them
must be launched.
[/HI]
http://www.siasat.pk/forum/showthread.php?126721-Operation-Tight-ScrewPlanned-joint-Pak-US-operation-in-North-Wazirastan-(-Must-read-article-on-WSJ)

72

Operation Tight Screw - Planned joint Pak-US operation in North Wazirastan ( Must
read article on WSJ)
http://www.siasat.pk/forum/showthread.php?126721-Operation-Tight-ScrewPlanned-joint-Pak-US-operation-in-North-Wazirastan-(-Must-read-article-on-WSJ)

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_R_oAf
mv6pe8/TJ91SeWJY_I/AAAAAAAAAo0/3aAG8xF1ENE/s400/25-09-2010-764660.jpg

Shortly after the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in 2009, Aqeel Ahmed alias Dr
Usman alias Kamran alias Nazir Ahmed fled to Waziristan where he met the head of
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan's Amjad Farooqui Group, Ustad Aslam Yasin and Ilyas
Kashmiri. File Photo
Attack on GHQ: confessions of a terrorist mastermind
ISLAMABAD: The venue was Miramshah. The attendants of the meeting included
some of the most notorious militants of Pakistan. And their agenda was nothing
short of explosive -- an attack on the GHQ with the aim to take military officers
hostage.
Shortly after the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in 2009, Aqeel Ahmed alias Dr
Usman alias Kamran alias Nazir Ahmed fled to Waziristan where he met the head of

73

Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan's Amjad Farooqui Group, Ustad Aslam Yasin and Ilyas
Kashmiri.
It was at this meeting that the idea of the attack on the General Headquarters was
floated, reveals the main accused of the attack, Ahmed, in a confessional statement. He
along with his seven accomplices was convicted by a military court on Aug 11, 2011, for
the audacious attack on the GHQ in October 2009. Shooting their way into the military's
main headquarters, cowboy style, the militants took men hostage in one of the
buildings. They remained there till the next morning when commandos finally entered
the building, killing most of the militants and rescuing the hostages.
.
(Farooqi allegedly was involved in the murder of Daniel Pearl, as well as conspiring
with Abu Faraj al-Libbi to kill General Pervez Musharraf during the assassination
attempts in Rawalpindi on December 14 and December 25, 2003Pakistani forces
launched a massive manhunt in May 2004, which ended with Farooqi's death in a twohour gun battle at a house in southern Sindh province.
Farooqi was a member of the Pakistani-based jihadi group Jaish-e-Mohammed (now
banned), which was founded by Masood Azhar after he was released by India because
of a deal with hijackers who hijacked an Indian plane in December 1999.)
He also claims that in the Miramshah meeting he was reluctant to attack the army.
However, the other two men argued that the Pakistan Army as an ally of the United
States was a legitimate target.
Ilyas Kashmiri said that the plan was to hold army generals hostage at the GHQ till they
could get detained militants released in exchange. According to the statement, Yasin
gave Ahmed a list with 115 names on it; these were the men whose release was to be
demanded. He also assured Ahmed that he would be accompanied by a team of trained
warriors.
Ahmed also revealed that he and his accomplices used Google Earth to download the
maps of GHQ on the basis of which they planned their attacks.

74

The planning, according to the court documents, took the team months. Apart from
arranging for the weapons that were brought to Rawalpindi from Jhang, the accused
made multiple reconnaissance trips to the GHQ during the summer of 2009.
Ahmed, who is known for his involvement in a number of high-profile attacks,
including those on Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf, joined Harkatul Jihad Al Islami in 1999
after completing his studies and went to Afghanistan twice.
After 9/11, he returned to Pakistan after being injured and joined the Army Medical
Corps (AMC) as a nursing assistant and was posted to the CMH in Rawalpindi. He was
still in touch with Jihadi 'friends' then.
It was here that he became friends with another accused, Imran Siddique, who was then
a soldier in the army.
According to his statement, Ahmed deserted the army in 2005 and became involved
with the Amjad Farooqui group.
By August 2009, the GHQ plan was in full swing. Ahmed first rented a room at Bilal
Boys Hostel, Rawalpindi, and started surveillance of GHQ's surroundings.
FROM THE NEWSPAPER PUBLISHED SEP 21, 2011
09:04AMhttp://www.dawn.com/news/660572/attack-on-ghq-confessions-of-aterrorist-mastermind
Farooqi had been linked to suicide bombings, hijackings, the killing of US journalist
Daniel Pearl and assassination attempts on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
A 20 million rupee ($330,000) reward was offered for information leading to his capture.
Hierarchy
According to Pakistan's Herald magazine, Farooqi was born in Pakistan's Punjab
province, part of a refugee family from Indian Punjab.
The magazine says Farooqi became a fundraiser for the now defunct Harkat-ul-Ansar
militant group in the mid 1980s.

75

Reportedly in his early 30s, he fought against Soviet rule in Afghanistan.

Pakistani authorities say it was there he linked with the now ousted Taleban regime,
developing close contacts with the top hierarchy of the al-Qaeda network.
He ran militant training camps, keeping lists of all those who attended, Pakistani
security services say.
They believe Farooqi sheltered Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, al-Qaeda's alleged No 3
behind Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, until Mohammed's capture near
Islamabad in March 2003.
Intelligence services said Mohammed was replaced by the Libyan Abu Faraj al-Libbi as
head of al-Qaeda's international operational wing, with the help of an Egyptian, Abu
Hamza Rabia.
Farooqi then worked with Libbi, who remains at large, on two assassination attempts on
President Musharraf on 14 and 25 December last year, intelligence services said.
Media reports said Farooqi had trained air force personnel for the first attack and hired
suicide bombers for the second, both in Rawalpindi.
President Musharraf escaped unhurt but at least 14 people were killed in the second
attempt.
.
The BBC's Paul Anderson in Islamabad says Farooqi was
also accused of involvement in the attempt to assassinate
prime minister-designate Shaukat Aziz in July.
At least five people were killed and 25 injured in the attack
on Mr Aziz's motorcade in Attock, northern Punjab. Mr
Farooqi was linked to the
Aziz was unhurt.
killing of US journalist
Daniel Pearl

76

Intelligence services say Farooqi was also close to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the
British-born militant convicted of plotting the kidnapping and killing of US journalist
Daniel Pearl in Karachi in January 2002.
Farooqi's family said he had been missing since the abduction. The Herald magazine
says Farooqi's wife and daughter have been living with her father since then.
Security forces also linked Farooqi to the suicide bombing on the US consulate in
Karachi in 2002 that killed 12 Pakistanis.
They believed he was a leader of the Lashkar-e-Jangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammed militant
groups,
A leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed, Maulana Masood Azhar, was one of the prisoners India
freed in exchange for passengers of a Indian airliner hijacked to Afghanistan in
December 1999.
Pakistani security services suspected Farooqi took part in the hijacking.
Residents of Farooqi's home village say he once served as a bodyguard to Mr Masood.

Monday, 27 September, 2004, 09:11 GMT 10:11 UK

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3692882.stm
Sep 30, 2004
Why Amjad Farooqi had to die
By B Raman
CHENNAI - Pakistani security agencies on Sunday killed Amjad Hussain Farooqi,
alias Mansur Hasnain alias Imtiaz Siddiqui alias Hyder alias Doctor, who, according
to them, was the mastermind behind the two aborted attempts to kill President
General Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi last December.
Pakistani officials believed that, as in the murder attempts against the president, Farooqi
was an anchor in the Pearl case. "The gruesome murder of Pearl and its video filming for

77

the world was the work of a Amjad Farooqi-Khalid Shiekh Mohammed combine," said a
senior intelligence official who did not want to be identified, referring to the
mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US.
The truth will now never be known. Somebody in the Pakistani military-intelligencepolice establishment did not want the truth to be known. Why? Who was Farooqi? What
were his links with the army, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and others in Pakistan?
To which organization did he belong?
The mujahideen's success in capturing power was made possible with the assistance of
a large number of jihadis from Pakistan'smadrassas (seminaries), who had been trained
and armed by the ISI and sent into Afghanistan to help the mujahideen. The Pakistani
contingents which participated in the invasion of Kabul belonged to the anti-Shi'ite
Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), the Harkatul Ansar (HUA), as the Harkat ul-Mujahideen
(HUM) was then known, and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET). Farooqi, then a late teenager,
entered Kabul as a member of the contingent of the SSP.
In 1994, there was a serious failure of the Pakistani cotton crop, which threatened to
bring its textile industry to a standstill. Asif Zardari, the husband of Benazir Bhutto,
then prime minister, flew to Turkmenistan and entered into a contract for the purchase
of a large quantity of cotton. The Turkmen authorities wanted to send the cotton to Iran
and from there ship it to Karachi.
Zardari did not agree. Instead, he asked them to send the cotton by road via
Afghanistan. He had the contract for the road transport of the cotton awarded to a
Pakistani crony of his based in Hong Kong. But the first two cotton convoys from
Turkmenistan were looted by mujahideen groups operating in the Herat area of
Afghanistan.
Zardari thereupon sent retired Major-General Nasirullah Babbar, Benazir Bhutto's
interior minister, and Pervez Musharraf (then just in the army) to Afghanistan to
provide protection to the cotton convoys. They asked Mullah Omar, who subsequently
became the amir of the Taliban, to collect a large number of students (Talibs) from
the madrassas of Pakistan and constitute them into a force for the protection of the cotton
convoys. Thus, in one sense, the Taliban was born as a force.
Babbar and Musharraf, who had heard of the exploits of Farooqi in Kabul in 1992, asked
him to help Mullah Omar in organizing this convoy protection force. He did so. Babbar
himself traveled with the first convoy after this arrangement came into force and Farooqi

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and his boys escorted it.

A few months later, Mullah Omar deputed Farooqi to raid Herat and capture it with the
help of his boys. He did so without difficulty, in September 1995, to the pleasant
surprise of many, including the ISI. Thus, from a cotton-convoy protection force, the
Taliban became the rulers of Kandahar and Herat and other areas. Assisted by Farooqi
and his associates, they started gradually extending their administrative control to other
areas.
In the beginning of 1995, Farooqi had left the SSP and joined the HUA. The HUA sent
him, along with some others, into India's Jammu & Kashmir, where they, under the
name al-Faran, kidnapped a group of Western tourists. One of the tourists was
beheaded and another managed to escape. The fate of the remaining is not known to
this day. They are believed to have been beheaded and buried, but this has not been
confirmed.
In October 1995, General Abdul Waheed Kakkar, then chief of the army staff (COAS)
under Benazir Bhutto, discovered a plot by a group of army officers headed by MajorGeneral Zaheer ul-Islam Abbasi to have him and Benazir assassinated, capture power
and proclaim the formation of an Islamic caliphate in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Abbasi
and his associates in the army were arrested. They were found to have been plotting in
tandem with a group in the HUA led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Abbasi, his associates
and Akhtar were arrested during the investigation. While Abbasi and his associates
were court-martialed and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, Akhtar was
released without any action being taken against him.
Before 1990, there were two main jihadi organizations, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
(HUM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI). The HUM was headed by Maulana
Fazalur Rehman Khalil and the HUJI by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Around 1990, the two
merged to form the HUA, with Khalil as the amir and Akhtar as his deputy. Farooqi
used to work closely with Akhtar.
In the late 1980s, Abbasi as a brigadier was posted in the Pakistani High Commission in
New Delhi as the head of the ISI station in India. The government of India had him
expelled. On his return to Pakistan, he was posted to the Northern Areas (Gilgit and
Baltistan). In the beginning of the 1990s, without the clearance of the late General Asif
Nawaz Janjua, the then COAS under prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Abbasi organized a
raid on an Indian army post in the Siachen area and was beaten back by the Indian army
with heavy casualties. Janjua had him transferred out and censured. Since then, he had
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been nursing an anger against the Pakistani army's senior leadership and hobnobbing
with Akhtar. A few months after capturing power on October 12, 1999, Musharraf had
Abbasi released from jail. He formed an anti-US organization called Hizbollah, which
acted in tandem with the HUJI.
In September 1996, the Taliban captured Jalalabad and Kabul. A large number of jihadi
students from the Pakistani madrassas joined the Taliban unit which invaded and
captured Kabul. Farooqi joined the unit at the head of a contingent of the HUA. After
helping capture Kabul, Farooqi and his boys raided the UN office, where Najibullah was
living, lynched him and hanged him from a lamp-post.
When the Taliban, with the help of the madrassa students from Pakistan, captured
Jalalabad, Osama bin Laden was living there. He had been permitted by the
Burhanuddin Rabbani government, which was in power in Kabul until September 1996,
to enter Afghanistan and take up residence in Jalalabad. It had taken the clearance of
the Benazir Bhutto government to do so. After capturing Jalalabad, the Taliban had bin
Laden moved to Kandahar by Farooqi and his men.
In October 1997, after establishing the involvement of the HUA in the 1995 kidnapping,
the US State Department designated it as a foreign terrorist organization under a 1996
US law. The HUA thereupon dissolved itself and the pre-1990 HUM and HUJI resumed
their original existence under their previous names. Akhtar took over as amir of the
HUJI and made Farooqi his deputy.
In February 1998, bin Laden announced the formation of his International Islamic Front
(IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. Among those who joined it
at its inception were the HUM and a Bangladeshi branch of the HUJI, identified as HUJI
(B). The Pakistani branch of the HUJI, the LET and the SSP joined it in 1999. Farooqi
used to represent Akhtar at the meetings of theshoora (consultative council) of the IIF. In
December 1999, a group of Pakistani hijackers, said to belong to the HUM, hijacked an
aircraft of Indian Airlines, which had taken off from Kathmandu, and forced the pilot to
fly it to Kandahar. They demanded, inter alia, the release of Omar Sheikh, a British
Muslim of Pakistani origin, and Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani Punjabi belonging
to the HUM. The government of India conceded their demands in order to terminate the
hijacking.
Among the hijackers was a Pakistani Punjabi by the name of Mansur Hasnain. Sections
of the Pakistani media have since reported that this hijacker was none other than
Farooqi. After their release from detention by Indian authorities, Maulana Azhar and
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Omar Sheikh went to Pakistan. The return of Azhar led to a split in the HUM. Azhar
and his followers formed a new organization called the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM),
which joined bin Laden's IIF. The formation of the JEM was blessed by the late Mufti
Nizamuddin Shamzai, of the Binori madrassa, Karachi, who used to be looked on as the
mentor of bin Laden, Mullah Omar and the Pakistani jihadi leaders.
Omar Sheikh took up residence in Lahore and was put in charge of an office run by alQaeda in that city. Among other tasks, he was made responsible by bin Laden for
procuring medicine and other humanitarian relief for the jihadis of the IIF. Azhar and
Omar Sheikh, who were working for the ISI before their arrest in India, resumed their
contacts with the ISI. Omar Sheikh used to visit Kandahar periodically to meet bin
Laden. During one of those visits, he claimed to have come to know of al-Qaeda's plans
for the September 11 terrorist strikes in the US and passed on the information to
Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq, the present director general of the ISI, who was then
posted as the Corps Commander in Peshawar.
When the United States launched its military operations in Afghanistan in October 2001,
the Pakistani components of the IIF called on their members to proceed to Afghanistan
to join in the jihad against the US. More than 30,000 Pakistani volunteers were estimated
to have gone into Afghanistan. The largest number of them belonged to the HUJI and
were led by Farooqi. The US air strikes inflicted heavy casualties on them and the
survivors, including Farooqi, fled back into Pakistan. Farooqi took up residence in the
Binori madrassa of Karachi, where he was sheltered by the late Mufti Shamzai. From his
sanctuary in the madrassa, he established contact with Omar Sheikh, who was living in
Lahore, and Khalid Shiekh Mohammed (KSM), who was living in Karachi along with
Ramzi Binalshibh.
On January 12, 2002, under pressure from the US in the wake of the attempted terrorist
strike on the Indian parliament at New Delhi in December 2001, Musharraf announced a
ban on the LET, the JEM and the SSP and had their leaders arrested or placed under
house arrest. The whole thing was a farce, as was seen subsequently. Intriguingly, he did
not ban the HUM and the HUJI, which had many supporters in the army, and did not
take any action against Akhtar or Farooqi.
Death of Daniel Pearl
In January 2002, Daniel Pearl, the correspondent of the United States' Wall Street Journal
in Mumbai (Bombay) in India, along with his wife Marianne, went to Karachi to inquire
into the Pakistani links of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. They reportedly stayed at
Karachi in the house of an American freelance journalist of subcontinental origin, who

81

had worked for some time as a freelancer for the Journal, where she had come to know
Pearl and Marianne. She had gone to Karachi in connection with a book she was writing
on the subcontinent.
Before going to Karachi, Pearl had contacted many people in Pakistan and the US to get
introductions to knowledgeable people in Karachi and elsewhere who might know
about the local contacts of Reid. It was alleged that among those whose help he sought
were James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and
Mansoor Ijaz, an American lobbyist of Pakistani origin who often used to write articles
for the US media jointly with Woolsey.
Pearl was particularly keen to meet Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, leader of the Jamaat-ulFuqra (JUF), a terrorist organization based in the US and the Caribbean with a large
following among Afro-Americans. Two of Gilani's four wives are stated to be AfroAmericans. Pearl wanted to talk to him about Richard Reid, since he had reportedly
heard that Reid was a member of the JUF and had been trained in a HUM camp in
Pakistan in the 1990s.
Even before coming to Karachi, Pearl was reportedly in e-mail contact with one Khalid
Khwaja, a retired officer of the Pakistani Air Force who had served in the ISI in the late
1980s, and one Mohammad Bashir, who later turned out to be none other than Omar
Sheikh. It was alleged that Mansoor Ijaz had given Pearl an introduction to Khwaja. It is
not known how he came to know of Bashir. According to the Karachi police, Pearl was
keen to meet Gilani and Omar Sheikh. Bashir promised to help him.
On January 23, 2002, Pearl went by a taxi driven by one Nasir to the Metropole Hotel of
Karachi. He asked the taxi to stop near the hotel and got out. He then went to a car
parked nearby in which four persons were waiting. One of them got out, introduced
himself and invited Pearl to get in. He willingly did so. The car then departed.
Subsequently, after the arrest of Omar Sheikh, Nasir identified him as the man who got
out of the parked car and invited Pearl to get in. The driver testified during the trial of
Omar Sheikh that from the willing manner in which Pearl got in it was apparent that he
did not suspect a trap.
Subsequently, e-mail messages announcing the kidnapping of Pearl with his
photographs started arriving in newspaper offices in Karachi. The Pakistani authorities
launched a drive for the recovery of Pearl. There was no success. They started searching
for Omar Sheikh after finding out that it was he who, under an assumed name, had laid
the trap for Pearl. They took into custody Omar Sheikh's wife and young child in order
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to force him to surrender.On February 5 he surrendered to retired Brigadier Ejaz Shah,

the home secretary of Punjab, who had previously worked in the ISI and was the
handling officer of Omar Sheikh. The ISI kept him in its custody until February 12, and
then handed him over to the Karachi police for interrogation. The public announcement
about his arrest claimed he was arrested on February 12 and did not refer to the fact that
he had been in the ISI's custody since February 5.
Omar Sheikh told the police that the kidnappers operated in three groups. Omar
himself and Muhammad Hashim Qadir, alias Arif, a resident of Bhawalpur, won the
confidence of Pearl and made him come to the hotel for a meeting. They kidnapped him
and handed him over to Farooqi for keeping him in custody. Omar Sheikh, with the help
of Adil Mohammad Sheikh, a member of the staff of the Special Branch of the Sindh
police, and his cousins Suleman Saquib and Fahad Nasim, arranged for photographs of
Pearl to be taken in custody, for them to be scanned and sent by email to the media and
others with their demands. According to the police, Saquib and Nasim belonged to the
JEM, thereby indicating the possibility that the kidnapping might have been jointly
planned and carried out by the HUJI, the HUM and the JEM.
A few days later, messages arrived announcing the killing of Pearl, along with pictures
showing his throat being slit. However, his body was not recovered. On May 16, the
Karachi police claimed to have recovered the remains of an unidentified dead body cut
into 10 pieces, which were found buried in a nursery (Gulzare Hijri) on a plot of land in
the outlying Gulshan-e-Maymar area of Karachi. They further claimed that the remains
were recovered after a tip-off that the remains were Pearl's. The local media also
reported that there was an improvised shed on the plot where Pearl was suspected to
have been held in captivity before his murder and that the plot belonged to the alRashid Trust of Karachi. DNA tests and other forensic examination determined that the
remains were of Pearl.
The al-Rashid Trust, whose accounts were ordered to be frozen under UN Security
Council Resolution No1373 because of its suspected links with al-Qaeda, is also closely
linked with the JEM. Before Musharraf's ban on the JEM, the offices of the two used to
be located in the same buildings in different cities of Pakistan.The two also had common
cadres to undertake fund-raising activities for both the organizations.
Initially, it was not clear who gave the information to the Karachi police about the burial
of the remains - a source as claimed by the police or by some new suspects who had
been picked up by the police, but whose arrest had not been shown in police records,
lest the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wanted to interrogate them or sought
83

their extradition to the United States.

The answer came in a report carried by Pakistan's prestigious daily The News (May 23,
2002) revealing that the information about the remains was given to the Karachi police
by one Fazal Karim - a resident of Rahim Yar Khan and a father of five - who was in
police custody, but had not been shown as arrested. According to the paper, Fazal Karim
had identified Lashkar-e-Jhangvi's Naeem Bukhari as the ringleader of the group that
also included "three Yemeni-Balochs" (father Yemeni and mother Baloch) who took part
in Pearl's kidnapping, his murder and disposal of his body parts. Naeem Bukhari was
wanted by police in Punjab and Karachi in more than a dozen cases of anti-Shi'ite
killings. Fazal Karim reportedly confirmed Omar Sheikh's role in planning Pearl's
kidnapping.
According to Karachi police sources, Farooqi was also taken into custody on the basis of
the tip-off from Fazal Karim, but the ISI ordered them to release him. Fazal Karim
reportedly named one of the Yemeni-Balochs involved in the beheading of Pearl as
KSM, but the military regime did not admit this. On the basis of his information, the
police also rounded up some others involved in the kidnapping and murder.
Intriguingly, on May 14, two days before the recovery of the remains of the body of Pearl
by the Karachi police, the Punjab police claimed that Riaz Basra, a long absconding
leader of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the militant wing of the SSP in which Farooqi had
started his career as a terrorist, and three of his associates, were killed in an encounter in
a Punjab village when they had gone there to kill a Shi'ite leader. Sections of the
Pakistani media expressed doubts over the police version and alleged that Riaz Basra
had been in the informal custody of the ISI since Pearl's kidnapping in January 2002,
without it taking any action against him and that the police, for reasons not clear, had
shown him as having been killed in an encounter.
During the trial of Omar Sheikh and his associates, the defense lawyers drew the
attention of the anti-terrorism court to media reports about the arrest of Fazal Karim
and others and urged that the court should order a reinvestigation of the case to
determine their responsibility for the offence. The prosecution described the media
reports as baseless and opposed any reinvestigation. The court rejected the defense
plea.
The court sentenced Omar Sheikh to death and others to various terms of
imprisonment. The appeal against the death sentence filed by Omar Sheikh has not been
disposed of by the court so far under some pretext or the other. In the meantime, KSM
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was arrested in Rawalpindi by Pakistani authorities in March 2003 and handed over to
the FBI, which had him flown out of the country. In an article written in Salon, an online
journal, in October 2003, the freelance journalist in whose Karachi house Pearl and his
wife had stayed said that Marianne had been informed by the US intelligence that KSM
had admitted having personally killed Pearl. The defense lawyers of Omar Sheikh again
raised the question of a reinvestigation, but their plea was again opposed by the
prosecution and rejected by the court.
In December 2003, two unsuccessful attempts were made to kill Musharraf in
Rawalpindi with explosives. In the second incident, suicide bombers were involved.
There were strong indications of the involvement of insiders from the Pakistani army
and police in both incidents. Until June Musharraf blamed the JEM for the attempts, just
as he had initially blamed it in 2002 for the kidnapping and murder of Pearl. Subsequent
investigation brought out that it was the HUJI and not the JEM which was involved. Of
all the pro-bin Laden jihadi organizations of Pakistan, the HUJI has the largest following
in the army. The investigation into Pearl's kidnapping and murder had also brought out
indicators of a possible HUJI penetration into the air force.
By the end of January, investigators had started gathering evidence of the involvement
of junior officials of the army and the air force belonging to the HUJI and the Hizbut
Tahreer in the two assassination attempts, which, according to them, were orchestrated
by Farooqi at the instance of the Libyan. However, Musharraf did not openly admit this.
On June 10, the corps commander of Karachi narrowly escaped an assassination attempt
in Karachi. With the help of a mobile phone, which the terrorists had left behind at the
scene, the Karachi police established that the attempt was jointly organized by the HUJI
and a new organization called Jundullah (Army of Allah), which had been trained by
the Uzbeks and Chechens in the South Waziristan area of the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. The police managed to identify and round up the
Jundullah members involved in the incident.
During their interrogation, they reportedly admitted their involvement and said they
were acting under the leadership of Farooqi. The police had kept the arrest and
interrogation of the Jundullah members a secret lest Farooqi be alerted before they got
him. But Sheikh Rashid, the information minister, prematurely announced it to the
media, thereby alerting Farooqi before the police could arrest him. He managed to
escape from his Karachi hideout and fled to Nawabshah.
For the first time, Musharraf admitted in an interview to a private TV channel in June
85

the involvement of junior officers of the army and the air force in the plot against him
and the role of Farooqi and the Libyan in the plot.
The police launched a manhunt for Farooqi and the Libyan. Before they could get
Farooqi alive, someone in the military-intelligence establishment would seem to have
ensured that he would not fall alive into the hands of the police. Who is that
somebody?
Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the amir of the HUJI, was picked up by Dubai authorities on
August 6 and handed over to Pakistani authorities, who had him flown to Pakistan the
next day. The results of his interrogation are not known so far.
After the suicide bomb attack in Karachi on May 8, 2002, which killed 11 French experts
working on a submarine project, Khaled Ahmed, the well-known Pakistani analyst,
wrote an article titled "The biggest militia we know nothing about" in the prestigious
Friday Times of Lahore. In this article he gave details of the HUJI. Extracts from the
article are given in the annex.
One of the most mysterious aspects of the activities of the jihadi organizations in
Pakistan is why Musharraf has always been reluctant to take or even afraid of taking
action against the HUJI. He has avoided banning it, even after evidence of its
penetration into the army and the air force and its involvement in the plots against him.
Annex: HUJI
Extracts from the article "The biggest militia we know nothing about" published in the
Friday Times of Lahore by Khaled Ahmed:
ARY Digital TV's host Dr Masood, while discussing the May 8 killing of 11 French
nationals in Karachi, named one Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami as one of the suspected
terrorists involved in the bombing. When the Americans bombed the Taliban and
Mullah Omar fled from his stronghold in Kandahar, a Pakistani personality also fled
with him. This was Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the leader of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami,
Pakistan's biggest jihadi militia headquartered in Kandahar. No one knew the name of
the outfit and its leader. A large number of its fighters made their way into Central Asia
and Chechnya to escape capture at the hands of the Americans, the rest stole back into
Pakistan to establish themselves in Waziristan and Buner. Their military training camp
(maskar) in Kotli in Azad Kashmir swelled with new fighters and now the outfit is
scouting some areas in the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province) to create a

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supplementarymaskar for jihad in Kashmir. Its "handlers" (in the Inter-Services

Intelligence) have clubbed it together with Harkatul Mujahideen to create Jamiatul
Mujahideen in order to cut down the large number of outfits gathered together in Azad
Kashmir. It was active in held Kashmir under the name of Harkatul Jahad Brigade 111.
The leader of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, was an adviser to Mullah
Omar in the Taliban government. His fighters were called "Punjabi" Taliban and were
offered employment, something that other outfits could not get out of Mullah Omar.
The outfit had membership among the Taliban too. Three Taliban ministers and 22
judges belonged to the Harkat. In difficult times, the Harkat fighters stood together with
Mullah Omar. Approximately 300 of them were killed fighting the Northern Alliance,
after which Mullah Omar was pleased to give Harkat permission to build six
more maskars in Kandahar, Kabul and Khost, where the Taliban army and police also
received military training. From its base in Afghanistan, Harkat launched its campaigns
inside Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Chechnya. But the distance of Qari Saifullah Akhtar
from the organization's Pakistani base did not lead to any rifts. In fact, Harkat al-Jahad
al-Islami emerged from the defeat of the Taliban largely intact. In Pakistan, Qari Akhtar
has asked the "returnees" to lie low for the time being, while his Pakistani fighters
already engaged are busy in jihad as before.
The Harkat is the only militia which boasts international linkages. It calls itself "the
second line of defense of all Muslim states" and is active in Arakan in Burma
[Myanmar], and Bangladesh, with well organized seminaries in Karachi, Chechnya,
Sinkiang, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The latest trend is to recall Pakistani fighters
stationed abroad and encourage the local fighters to take over the operations. Its
fundraising is largely from Pakistan, but an additional source is its activity of selling
weapons to other militias. Its acceptance among the Taliban was owed to its early
allegiance to a leader of the Afghan war, Maulvi Nabi Muhammadi and his Harkat
Inqilab Islami whose fighters became a part of the Taliban forces in large numbers. Nabi
Muhammadi was ignored by the ISI in 1980 in favor of [Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar and his
Hezb-i-Islami. His outfit suffered in influence inside Afghanistan because he was not
supplied with weapons in the same quantity as some of the other seven militias.
According to the journal al-Irshad of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami, published from
Islamabad, a Deobandi group led by Maulana Irshad Ahmad was established in 1979.
Looking for the right Afghan outfit in exile to join in Peshawar, Maulana Irshad Ahmad
adjudged Maulvi Nabi Muhammadi as the true Deobandi and decided to join him in
1980. Harkat Inqilab Islami was set up by Maulana Nasrullah Mansoor Shaheed and
was taken over by Nabi Muhammadi after his martyrdom. Eclipsed in Pakistan,
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Maulana Irshad Ahmad fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets until he was killed in
battle in Shirana in 1985. His place was taken by Qari Saifullah Akhtar, which was not
liked by some of the Harkat leaders, including Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, who
then set up his own Harkatul Mujahideen.
The sub-militia [of the HUJI] fighting in Kashmir is semi-autonomous and is led by
chief commander Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri. Its training camp is 20 kilometers from
Kotli in Azad Kashmir, with a capacity for training 800 warriors, and is run by one Haji
Khan. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami went into Kashmir in 1991 but was at first opposed by
the Wahhabi elements there because of its refusal to criticize the grand Deobandi
congregation of Tableeghi Jamaat and its quietist posture. But as days passed, its
warriors were recognized as "Afghanis". It finally had more martyrs in the jihad of
Kashmir than any other militia. Its resolve and organization were recognized when
foreigners were seen fighting side-by-side with its Punjabi warriors.
To date, 650 Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami mujahideen have been killed in battle against the
Indian army: 190 belonging to both sides of Kashmir, nearly 200 belonging to Punjab, 49
to Sindh, 29 to Balochistan, 70 to Afghanistan, five to Turkey, and 49 collectively to
Uzbekistan, Bangladesh and the Arab world.
The leader of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami in Uzbekistan is Sheikh Muhammad Tahir alFarooq. So far 27 of its fighters have been killed in battle against the Uzbek President
Islam Karimov, as explained in the Islamabad-based journal al-Irshad. Starting in 1990,
the war against Uzbekistan was bloody and was supported by the Taliban, until in 2001,
the commander had to ask the Pakistanis in Uzbekistan to return to base.
In Chechnya, the war against the Russians was carried on under the leadership of
commander Hidayatullah. Pakistan's embassy in Moscow once denied that there were
any Pakistanis involved in the Chechen war, but the journal Al-Irshad (March 2000)
declared from Islamabad that the militia was deeply involved in the training of
guerrillas in Chechnya, for which purpose commander Hidayatullah was stationed in
the region. It estimated that "dozens" of Pakistani fighters had been martyred fighting
against Russian infidels.
When the Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami men were seen first in Tajikistan, they were
mistaken by some observers as being fighters from Sipah Sahaba, but in fact they were
under the command of commander Khalid Irshad Tiwana, helping Juma Namangani
and Tahir Yuldashev resist the Uzbek ruling class in the Ferghana Valley. The antiUzbek warlords were being sheltered by Mullah Omar in Afghanistan.
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Maulana Abdul Quddus heads the Burmese warriors located in Karachi and fighting
mostly in Bangladesh on the Arakanese border. Korangi is the base of the Arakanese
Muslims who fled Burma to fight the jihad from Pakistan. A large number of Burmese
are located inside Korangi and the area is sometimes called mini-Arakan. Harkat alJahad al-Islami has opened 30 seminaries for them inside Korangi, there being 18 more
in the rest of Karachi. Maulana Abdul Quddus, a Burmese Muslim, while talking to
weekly Zindagi (25-31 January 1998), revealed that he had run away from Burma via
India and took religious training in the Harkat seminaries in Karachi and on its
invitation went to Afghanistan, took military training there and fought the jihad from
1982 to 1988. In Korangi, the biggest seminary is Madrassa Khalid bin Walid where 500
Burmese are under training. They were trained in Afghanistan and later made to fight
against the Northern Alliance and against the Indian army in Kashmir. The Burmese
prefer to stay in Pakistan, and very few have returned to Burma or to Bangladesh. There
are reports of their participation in the religious underworld in Karachi.
Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has branch offices in 40 districts and tehsils in Pakistan,
including Sargodha, Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan, Khanpur, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Mianwali,
Bannu, Kohat, Waziristan, Dera Ismail Khan, Swabi and Peshawar. It also has an office
in Islamabad. Funds are collected from these grassroots offices as well as from sources
abroad. The militia has accounts in two branches of Allied Bank in Islamabad, which
have not been frozen because the organization is not under a ban. The authorities have
begun the process of reorganization of jihad by changing names and asking the various
outfits to merge. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has been asked to merge with Harkatul
Mujahideen of Fazlur Rehman Khalil who had close links with Osama bin Laden. The
new name given to this merger is Jamiatul Mujahideen. Jamaat Islami's Hizbul
Mujahideen has been made to absorb all the refugee Kashmiri organizations. Jaish and
Lashkar-e-Tayba have been clubbed together as al-Jahad. All the Barelvi organizations,
so far located only in Azad Kashmir, have been put together as al-Barq. Al-Badr and
Hizbe Islami have been renamed as al-Umar Mujahideen.
B Raman is additional secretary (retired), Cabinet Secretariat, government of India, and
currently director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and distinguished fellow and convenor,
Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter. E-mail: corde@vsnl.com
Dawn, 27 September 2004
http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Farchives.dawn.com
%2F2004%2F09%2F27%2Ftop6.htm&date=2010-12-15

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Security forces kill Amjad Farooqi

By Zulfiqar Memon

NAWABSHAH, Sept 26: An alleged terrorist, who was later identified as an Al Qaeda
kingpin Amjad Farooqi, was killed and seven other people, including two women and
three children , were arrested after security forces raided a house in Ghulam Hyder
Shah Colony here on Sunday.
Acting on a tip-off, security forces surrounded the area before raiding the house. The
inmates offered resistance and opened fire on the raiding party which retaliated and
also fired tear gas shells inside the house.
The alleged terrorist tried to escape but he was shot dead by security forces. Two women
and three children who came out of the house were taken into custody. The security
forces also arrested two other persons whose identities were not disclosed, after an
hour-long exchange of fire.
The body was taken to the People's Medical College Hospital for postmortem and later
shifted to an undisclosed place. Sources said the raiding party seized laptops, CDs,
grenades and documents from the arrested persons.
Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Sherpao and Information Minister Sheikh Rashid
confirmed that the killed suspect was Amjad Farooqi. "I can confirm that Amjad Farooqi
has been killed in an encounter with security forces and we have also arrested three
important terror suspects," said Sheikh Rashid.
"We will disclose the identity of his accomplices in few days. They are all Pakistanis and
very important suspects," the minister said. Amjad Farooqi, allegedly behind an
assassination attempt on President Pervez Musharraf and indicted in the murder of US
journalist, Daniel Pearl.
Amjad Farooqi, Pakistan's most wanted terrorist, had a 20 million rupee bounty on his
head. A security official in Islamabad said that Farooqi, 30, and his accomplices put up
"very strong" resistance, firing at security officials with automatic weapons from inside
their hideout in Nawabshah.
President Musharraf had named Farooqi as the "Pakistani mastermind" of the Dec 25
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assassination plot on his convoy by two suicide bombers who rammed their explosivesladen vehicles close to presidential motorcade, leaving more than a dozen people dead.
The Christmas Day attack came two weeks after a road bridge was blown up in an
attempt to kill Gen Musharraf while he was going to his official army house residence in
Rawalpindi.
Amjad Farooqi was the lynchpin of the Al Qaeda network in Pakistan and had also been
involved in the kidnap-murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Pearl in Karachi in early
2002, the official said.
He was indicted over Pearl's murder but was never tracked down. Security officials had
described Farooqi as an "extremely intelligent and elusive terrorist operative," a master
planner who created cells of militants independent of each other and assigned them
different jobs.
Farooqi was a close associate of Libyan Abu Faraj Farj, operational chief of Al Qaeda in
the region, who has eluded a nation wide hunt by security agencies. His connection
with Islamic militants came early when, as a teenager, he joined the Harkatul Jihad-iIslami militant group.
In 1992 he was sent to Afghanistan for training and fought alongside the Taliban in their
battles against the rival Northern Alliance, according to security officials.
After the Taliban conquered most of Afghanistan in 1996 the young fighter's contacts
with Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his closest lieutenants deepened. Farooqi
had close contact with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Al Qaeda's number three and the
alleged chief planner of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks. Mohammad was arrested in March
2003 near Islamabad.
Farooqi provided the militants who kept Pearl in a shed on Karachi's outskirts after the
reporter was abducted on January 23, 2002, a police officer who investigated the case
had told AFP.
He also recruited the trio of men who slit Pearl's throat as a video-camera filmed and
was said to be "very close" to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British-born militant
convicted of plotting Pearl's abduction and murder. The provincial Sindh government
had offered a reward for Farooqi but a nation wide hunt had failed to deliver him.

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Sep 29, 2004 ATOL

http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atimes.com%2Fatimes
%2FSouth_Asia%2FFI29Df05.html&date=2010-12-15
Pakistan gets its man ... sort of
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Two days after Pakistani officials announced the death of Amjad Farooqi,
the circumstances surrounding the killing of the person who is being billed as the
country's most wanted man as well as a senior al-Qaeda figure remain murky.
Farooqi had been indicted in connection with the beheading of US journalist Daniel
Pearl in early 2002 and named by President General Pervez Musharraf as a mastermind
of two bomb attacks against the president's motorcades in December last year. Officials
had published a picture of Farooqi, with a reward of $330,000 for information leading to
his arrest.
The official version runs something like this: Farooqi was tracked through his mobile
telephone to a hideout in Nawabshah, a town 170 miles north of the port city of Karachi.
Security forces surrounded the house and met heavy automatic gunfire from within.
During the firefight, Farooqi and two others were killed, and three alleged accomplices
were arrested. According to official leaks, Farooqi might have been close to Abu Faraj alLibbi, a Libyan alleged to be al-Qaeda's head of Pakistan operations, who could now
also have been arrested.
"Farooqi's elimination is a crushing blow to the al-Qaeda network in Pakistan because
he was the man who had been providing al-Qaeda terrorists with the manpower to
carry out attacks," a senior Pakistani security official was quoted by the French news
service Agence France-Presse as saying.
Certainly, this is the view now widely disseminated in the international media, and
used as proof that Musharraf is keeping up his side of the bargain in hunting down alQaeda operatives in the US's "war on terror".
However, extensive Asia Times Online research throws up a different picture.
Before the "war on terror" was launched after September 11, 2001 - when Musharraf
threw in his lot with the US - Farooqi was an impoverished foot soldier in a jihadi
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organization. It is only in the past six months that he has suddenly emerged as a
"kingpin" and super villain, with the source invariably being from the official side.
Farooqi never got to tell his side of the story. His last words, as he lay mortally
wounded, were, "Oh God, you are the only one who sees." He then recited a few verses
from the Koran and died.
Apart from a few paragraphs in the Punjab police's "red book", Farooqi led a largely
insignificant life, until, overnight almost, he was elevated to being close to Khalid
Shiekh Mohammed, mastermind of the September 11 attacks.
According to information gathered by Asia Times Online from various sources,
including his native villagers, jihadi friends and security files, Farooqi was born in the
early 1970s in Chak 487 GB. Tehsil Samoundri, District Faisalabad, to a family that had
migrated to Pakistan at independence in 1947 from Indian Punjab's Houshyarpur
district.
Farooqi's childhood was passed in extreme poverty, and in need of a better life his
family sent him to an uncle's home in Toba Tek Singh, where he completed his
intermediate studies. Amjad had three brothers and three sisters. The most educated in
the family is brother Javaid Iqbal, a graduate who now runs a private school. The other
brothers are Fida Hussain, 28, and Amir, 22. The sisters, Zahida Parveen, Shahida
Parveen and Khalida Parveen, are all married in different villages in Shiekupura and
Faisalabad.
Farooqi married his maternal uncle's only daughter, Shabana Kausar, six years ago.
They have a daughter. Shabana Kausar has lived at her father-in-law's residence since
October 2001, when the US attacked Afghanistan. Since about that time, Farooqi had
been in hiding as he was wanted in connection with the Pearl murder. Shabana Kausar
has two brothers, Shebaz and Aqlak.
Different sources in his native town of Toba Tek Singh told Asia Times Online that
Farooqi collected funds for jihadis in the 1980s, and he was known to have taken part in
the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in 1987. Later he made many visits of Kashmir and
Afghanistan, like thousands of other jihadi foot soldiers. He was also associated with
the Harkatul Ansar (HA). The HA emerged from the Harkat-i-Jihad-i-Islami, which was
declared a terror organization by the US in the 1990s. The HA is led by Maulana Fazalur
Rehman Khalil. Later he was thought to have been in contact with the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi
(LJ), a banned Pakistani outfit involved in sectarian killings.
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Punjab police intelligence departments files mention Farooqi as active with the LJ's
commander, Shakil Ahmed, who was later killed in a police encounter near Wehyari
(Punjab). Soon after Farooqi's name appeared in these files, intelligence organizations,
including Inter-Services Intelligence and the Intelligence Bureau, studied his files, but
failed to definitively link him to any organization. Several called him a stand-alone
operator.
Subsequently, a high-profile official report allegedly based on investigations from
several intelligence sources maintained that he was in contact with militants in South
Waziristan, and that he also acted as a go-between for Khalid. The same report said that
Farooqi was a lieutenant of the founder of jihadi outfits in Pakistan, Saifullah Akhtar,
who was recently arrested in the United Arab Emirates and handed over to Pakistan.
Along with his alleged connection with Pearl's murder and the assassination attempts
on Musharraf, in which junior army officers were also said to be involved, the heat was
on Farooqi now.
Different proxy intelligence networks informed the security agencies about his presence
in Faisalabad, Kamalia, Karachi and Waziristan. In a matter of a few months, about 50
raids were conducted to find him. According to Criminal Investigation Department
records, on January 11 this year a raid was conducted on Farooqi's father-in-law's house,
number 687/27 GB, Tehsil Kamalia district, Toba Tek Singh. Six people were arrested,
including his brother-in-law Aqlak and cousin Attaul Manan.
After this raid, there is no record of any further ones, although police and security
agencies from time to time claimed that they were near to arresting Farooqi. Asia Times
Online reported on September 28 that Farooqi was probably arrested some months ago
(In Pakistan, dead men tell no tales).
Identity crisis
According to Asia Times Online sources, Farooqi's death did not play out as planned.
The authorities wanted to keep the encounter - which could well have been staged - a
secret until Musharraf returned from his overseas visit to the US, at which time
Farooqi's body would be produced.
However, a Dubai-based television channel broke the news of the encounter just a few
hours after it took place. The Ministry of Information immediately intervened and
ordered all stations to remove the clip. But Reuters news agency had already picked up
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the item and distributed it all over the world, although quoting senior officials who
would not confirm Farooqi's death.
By Tuesday morning the media were full of reports on Farooqi's death, and the
establishment reacted by releasing what it claimed was Farooqi's computerized identity
document. No one is questioning that Farooqi is the one who was killed in the shootout
- it was him.
What is at issue is the identity card shown to the media. A number of significant details
indicate that it could not have been Farooqi's legitimate one - from the fonts used in its
design to the data it carried, and importantly, that it was computerized - such cards only
came into force after Farooqi had been declared a wanted man. How, then, could he
have obtained an official ID? It appears that having been forced into making a hasty
announcement, the establishment did a poor job on faking the ID.
In the end, though, the officials produced their "high value" target, which pleases the
US, and with the murder of Pearl and the assassination attempts on Musharraf pinned
on Farooqi, awkward questions over these issues can be laid to rest.
Remember Farooqi's dying words," Oh God, you are the only one who sees."
(Mohammed Tahir, editor of Weekly Wajood, also contributed to this report.)

http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atimes.com%2Fatimes
%2FSouth_Asia%2FFI30Df05.html&date=2010-12-15
Feb 13, 2010
Al-Qaeda chief delivers a warning
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
ISLAMABAD - Asia Times Online has received a message from
top guerrilla commander Ilyas Kashmiri, whose 313 Brigade is anoperational arm of alQaeda. The message arrived on Monday morning, shortly after the deadly weekend
bombing of the German Bakery in the western Indian city of Pune. The message does
not specifically claim responsibility for the bombing, but implies the Brigade's

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involvement.

The text of the emailed message reads, in rough translation:

We warned the international community to play their role in getting the Kashmiris
their right of self-determination and preventing India from committing brutalities in
Kashmir, especially in Badipuar, raping the women and behaving inhumanly with
Muslim prisoners.
We warn the international community not to send their people to the 2010 Hockey
World Cup, IPL [Indian Premier League - a cricket competition involving international
players] and Commonwealth Games [to be held in Delhi later this year]. Nor should
their people visit India - if they do, they will be responsible for the consequences.
"We, the mujahideen of 313 Brigade, vow to continue attacks all across India until the
Indian Army leaves Kashmir and gives the Kashmiris their right of self-determination.
We assure the Muslims of the subcontinent that we will never forget the massacre of the
Muslims in Gujarat and the demolition of Babri Masjid [a Muslim mosque destroyed by
Hindu militants in 1992]. The entire Muslim community is one body and we will take
revenge for all injusticesand tyranny. We again warn the Indian government to
compensate for all its injustices, otherwise they will see our next action.
"From 313 Brigade"
The bombing and Kashmiri's warning come as Washington tries to bring India and
Pakistan together to work as allies in fighting the "war on terror". The intention seems to
be to reignite conflictbetween the two countries, diverting Pakistans attention from
Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas and preventing India playing a strategic role.
The Pune bombing killed nine people, including two foreigners, and injured 57. It came
a day after India and Pakistan agreed to foreign-secretary-level talks in New Delhi on
February 25.
Typically, 313 Brigade does not claim responsibilty for its actions, which are said to
include attacks on foreigners in India and Afghanistan and the Mumbai carnage of last
November. The Brigade has also been linked to the so-called "Chicago Conspiracy" to
massacre Indian military officers, attack the Indian nuclear arsenal, and attack the
cartoonists whose anti-Muslim illustrations were published by a Danish newspaper.

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It is unprecedented that 313 Brigade should send a message to a news outlet. However,
Asia Times Online has previously been in contact with Kashmiri, and interviewed him
last October. The interview, conducted in the Pakistani tribal agency of South
Waziristan, was arranged by Kashmiri, primarily to discount rumors that he had been
killed in a US drone attack. (See Al-Qaeda's guerrilla chief lays out strategy.)
The Indian government said on Monday that there would be no knee-jerk reaction to the
Pune bombing and that the talks with Pakistan would go ahead. If more attacks are
carried out in India, however, the tension between the countries would soar, and the USled "war on terror" would be an early casualty.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
The Growth of the Deobandi Jihad in Afghanistan
Publication: Terrorism Monitor Volume: 8 Issue: 2
January 14, 2010 04:13 PM Age: 6 yrs
By: Arif Jamal

Commander Ilyas Kashmiri

Three students from Karachis Jamia Uloom al-Islamia left their Islamic studies half way
to completion and took a train to Peshawar on February 18, 1980 to take part in the
nascent anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Anti-Russian passion was their only weapon,

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but they wanted to practice what they had learned in the classrooms of their madrassa.
[1] The three students - Irshad Ahmed, Abdus Samad Sial and Mohammad Akhtar later assumed grand religious titles; the first two became Maulana-s (Our Master, a
title used for religious leaders with formal qualifications) while the third came to be
known as Qari (Reader, i.e. one who recites the Quran). His colleagues later gave Qari
Akhtar another grand title, Saifullah (Sword of Allah). They decided to call their
three-member group the Jamiat Ansar-ul-Afghaneen (Party of the Friends of the Afghan
people) and chose Irshad Ahmed as their first amir. The three students who formed
Jamiat Ansar-ul-Afghaneen while still in their teens would later have a tremendous
influence on the rise of Deobandi jihadism in South and Central Asia and beyond.
On their way to Afghanistan the trio joined a small Afghan Deobandi group in
Peshawar, the Harakat-e-Inqilab-e-Islami Afghanistan (Islamic Revolutionary Movement
of Afghanistan - HIIA) of Maulana Nasrullah Mansoor. Armed by the HIIA, the group
crossed the Durand Line into Afghanistan where it became the principal jihadi group
for students from the Pakistani Deobandi madrassas. It had already trained some 4,000
Pakistani madrassa students by 1988 when the Soviets started leaving Afghanistan. The
Pakistani boys that the HIIA had trained were later organized under the name of
Harakat ul-Jihad al-Islami (Islamic Jihad Movement - HuJI) to wage jihad in Kashmir.
[2] These 4,000 Deobandi jihadists provided the foundation on which the entire
Pakistani Deobandi jihadist movement was founded in later years. Most of the Pakistani
jihadist groups, including parts of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), directly trace
their roots to the HuJI.
HIIA and HuJI played another more important role, mostly ignored until now, by
helping the Deobandi movement grow in largely Barelvi Afghanistan (the Barelvi are a
less politicized branch of Muslims who place more stress on rituals). They not only
recruited boys from the Pakistani Deobandi madrassas to fight jihad in Afghanistan, but
also helped place Afghans in the Pakistani madrassas. These students later founded the
Taliban movement. Thanks to HIIA, the Pakistani and Afghan Deobandis built a
relationship that has survived against all odds. Interestingly, all the Pakistani Deobandi
groups have split several times, but maintain unbreakable bonds with the Afghan
Taliban, the main Deobandi group in Afghanistan.

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HuJI in Kashmir and the First Split

At the end of the Afghan jihad in 1989, the HuJI looked for another theater of jihad and
found one in nearby Kashmir. HuJI temporarily abandoned the Afghan theater of jihad
completely and focused on Indian-administered Kashmir, which offered a gateway to
India. The beginning was slow as Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was not
ready to unleash Pakistani jihadi groups in Kashmir for fear of reprisals from India.
Moreover, the ISI was unable even to train and arm the boys crossing into Pakistan from
Kashmir until 1991. [3] This period of relative inactivity gave birth to internal frictions in
the group, which split in 1991. Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil and Maulana Masood
Kashmiri led the revolt against the founding members and founded Harakatul
Mujahideen. It is not clear what really caused the split. The founding members later
alleged that Maulana Khalil was too subservient to the ISI and always sought publicity.
[4] However, the split was a serious jolt to the HuJI, as the bulk of the mujahideen
followed Maulana Khalil, their commander and teacher.
Foundation of Harakatul Ansaar, al-Faran and the Second Split
The split in the HuJI, an important recipient of Saudi money, made the Saudis very
unhappy. They deputed a Mecca-based Deobandi alim (scholar), Maulana Abdul
Hafeez Makki, to reunite the two groups. Maulana Makki immediately established
contacts with an emerging jihadi alim, Maulana Masood Azhar, to fulfill this task
(Masood later founded Jaish-i-Mohammad in 2000). Maulana Makki became a regular
visitor to Pakistan in this period. [5] Their efforts bore fruit when the two groups
reunited in 1993 under the name of Harakatul Ansar. Maulana Sadatullah became the
amir of the united group. This is the time when the Kashmiri groups, particularly the
Hizbul Mujahideen (the armed wing of Pakistans Jamaat-i-Islami and distinct from
Harakatul Mujahideen), started showing weakness in the face of atrocities by the Indian
security forces. This was also the time when the inflow of Kashmiri boys began
decreasing. To keep the pot boiling in Kashmir, the ISI started encouraging Pakistani
jihadi groups such as the HuJI to play a bigger role in the jihad in Kashmir.
Harakatul Ansar attracted a lot of attention the following year when, helped by a small
group of Hizbul Mujahideen, it occupied the Islamic shrine at Charar Sharif in Indianadministered Kashmir. The event encouraged jihadis fighting in Kashmir and jolted the
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Indian security forces. After its success in Charar Sharif, Harakatul Ansar organized the
kidnapping of some European and American tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir.
A previously unknown group, al-Faran, believed to be a front group for the Harakatul
Ansar, claimed responsibility. After several months the United States designated
Harakatul Ansar as a terrorist group. As U.S. pressure increased on Pakistan to take
action against Harakatul Ansar, the ISI apparently asked them to split once more. The
group again split into HuJI and Harakatul Mujahideen. [6]
A Failed Coup dtat by Jihadist Major-General Abbasi
The al-Faran episode was a wake-up call for the Benazir Bhutto government, which
started putting pressure on the ISI to come clean on the jihadi scene. It also came down
a little harder on the jihadis. HuJI decided not to take all of this lying down. In the early
second half of 1995, the Pakistani civilian intelligence discovered a plot by a small group
of Islamist army officers led by Major General Zahirul Islam Abbasi. The officers were
accumulating arms to take over command of the army and the government. The
intelligence services discovered that the plotters had planned to eliminate the entire
military command during the corps commanders conference on September 30, 1995.
Major General Abbasis group was closely affiliated with HuJI and wanted to overthrow
the Bhutto government to pave the way for a Taliban takeover similar to Afghanistan.
HuJI was to help the rebel army officers. In his first interview with the author, Major
General Abbasi denied any plan to overthrow the government but did admit that his
group was transporting arms and ammunition from the Afghan mujahideen to the
Kashmiri mujahideen. [7] However, in a subsequent interview, he admitted that they
were taking action against the Bhutto government and the army command as part of
their faith. [8] During both interviews, he admitted his links with the HuJI. However,
before the trial of the military began, the ISI asked Qari Akhtar to go to Afghanistan.
Qari Akhtar returned to Pakistan only when General Musharraf dismissed Prime
Minister Sharifs government.
9/11 New Directions
In spite of severe differences amongst them, all of the Pakistani Deobandi groups and
political parties maintained close links with the Afghan Taliban. Jihadi groups went
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further and established links with al-Qaeda after the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Many of them, such as HuJI, trained their cadres in al-Qaedas training camps. The U.S.
bombing and occupation of Afghanistan enraged the entire Deobandi movement in
Pakistan. They turned their guns against General Musharraf when he decided to join the
U.S.-led coalition against terror in order to save the Kashmir jihad. Half of the Deobandi
jihadi movement decided to fight General Musharraf while the other half would remain
in sleeper cells as part of the grand strategy. Qari Akhtar took up arms against his
former benefactor, General Musharraf but fled Pakistan after failed assassination
attempts on the Pakistani president. Qari Akhtar was arrested in Dubai in August 2005
and extradited to Pakistan. However, under the growing influence of the Islamists, he
was never prosecuted. After the suicide attack on the arrival ceremony of Benazir
Bhutto in October 2007 (which she survived), she blamed Qari Akhtar and others for
planning it. He was arrested but was again let off the hook.
HuJI carried out several high-profile terrorist attacks in the years following 9/11 but
claimed responsibility through previously unknown front groups. The attack on the
then-finance minister and later prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, was claimed by the
Islambouli Brigade; the attack on Lieutenant General Ahsan Saleem Hayat was claimed
by the Jundullah of Karachi, and so on. Some of the other terrorist acts were claimed by
or blamed on HuJI-al-Almi. It is important to note that most of the terrorists arrested in
the post-9/11 period in Pakistan belonged to HuJI or to groups split from HuJI.
Commander Ilyas Kashmiri and al-Qaeda
HuJI ran at least six training camps, three in Pakistan and three in Afghanistan, before
the 9/11 attacks forced the terrorists to go underground. These training camps included
Maaskar (camp) Mehmood Ghaznavi in Kotli (Pakistan-administered Kashmir),
Maaskar Abu Ubaida bin Jarrah in Gilgit (Northern Areas of Pakistan) and Maaskar
Abu Haneefa in Mansehra (North-West Frontier Province). In Afghanistan, they ran
Maaskar Irshad in Jalaabad, Maaskar Khalid Zubair Shaheed in Rashkor near Kabul
and another camp in Kirgha near Kabul. Maaskar Mehmood Ghaznavi in Kotli was
used by Brigade 313 [9], the wing dedicated to jihad in the Jammu region of Indian
administered Kashmir while the remaining five trained jihadis from all over the world,
including al-Qaeda cadres. [10] 313 Brigade leader Ilyas Kashmiri was arrested in the
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wake of the failed assassination attempt on Musharraf in December 2003, while Qari
Akhtar succeeded in escaping for a time but was later arrested. Like Qari Akhtar and
others, Commander Kashmiri escaped punishment thanks to the growing influence of
the Islamists. In 2005, Commander Kashmiri moved to the Waziristan region where he
coordinates his groups activities with the TTP and al-Qaeda. Commander Kashmiri is a
prime suspect in coordinating the suicide attack on Forward Operating Base Chapman
in the Khost province of Afghanistan in December 2009 that killed seven CIA officers
and injured six others. The United States is currently seeking his extradition from
Pakistan (The News, January 6).
Notes:
1. Authors interview with Abdus Samad Sial, July 30, 2001.
2. Ibid.
3. See Arif Jamal, Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir, Melville House,
New York, 2009.
4. Authors interview with Qari Saifullah Akhtar, Afghanistan, July 1999.
5. Authors interview with Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, Rawalpindi, October 2000.
6. Authors interview with Maulana Ameen Rabbani, Rawalpindi, December 1999.
7. Authors interview with Major General Zahirul Islam Abbasi, Rawalpindi, March
2002.
8. Authors interview with Major General Zahirul Islam Abbasi, July 2005.
9. 313 Muslims won the first jihad under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad
against an army 10,000 infidels.
10. Authors interview with Commander Ilyas Kashmiri, Kotli, June 2000.

http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news
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The News, Karachi, 11 June 2011

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Also published in Kashmiri aimed for Indo-Pak war, Daily Star, 8 June 2011,
http://archive.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=189081

Home Original Articles Why did Takfiri Deobandis of Sipah Sahaba kill senior
Deobandi scholar Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai?
Why did Takfiri Deobandis of Sipah Sahaba kill senior Deobandi scholar Mufti
Nizamuddin Shamzai?

Related post: Maulana Hassan Jan, a moderate

Deobandi cleric killed by Takfiri Deobandis of Sipah Sahaba
In September 2004, Pakistan announced that paramilitary police had killed Amjad
Farooqi, a Takfiri Deobandi militant of Sipah Sahaba Taliban (SST), wanted in
connection with the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl
in 2002, as well as for two assassination attempts against General Musharraf in
December 2003. Pakistani and international media conveniently ignored the fact that
Amjad Farooqi Deobandi was last seen in Karachis Quaidabad suburb in the Tariq
Hotel, on the same day (30 May 2004) that Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a leading Sunni

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Deobandi cleric and head of Islamic religious school Jamia Binoria, was assassinated
(Source). Amjad Farooqi Deobandi was a member of the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (aka Sipah
Sahaba Taliban), a banned group of sectarian assassins who target Shia, Sunni Barelvi,
Ahmadi and Christian communities. Farooqi had been tasked by none else than a
leading (Takfiri) Deobandi cleric to assassinate Mufti Shamzai.

Why did Takfiri Deobandi militants of Sipah Sahaba Taliban kill a senior Deobandi
cleric? The following are some interconnected answers:
1. Despite his close association with the Taliban and the ISI, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai
had become growingly unhappy about indiscriminate violence and acts of terrorism by
Takfiri Deobandi militants. He had issued a number of fatwas against suicide bombing
and increasing acts of violence by the Taliban, Sipah Sahaba and Al Qaeda in Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia.
2. Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai was becoming increasingly vocal against Nasibis
(enemies of Hazrat Ali r.a. and Ahl-e-Bait r.a.) present in Takfiri Deobandis and Takfiri
Salafists. He wrote books and gave a number of speeches in which he condemned and
rejected Nasibi Salafist clerics including Ibn Taymiyya and Ibne Khaldun.
3. By murdering Mufti Shamzai, Takfiri Deobandis of Sipah Sahaba not only stopped
the way of his fatwas against Taliban and Sipah Sahabas terrorism and suicide
bombing, they also tried ignite Sunni Shia sectarian violence by blaming Shia Muslims
for the murder of Mufti Shamzai. It is the same strategy which they also used in the case
of Maulana Hasan Jan Deobandis murder in Peshawar in 2007. In the aftermath of
Shmazais murder, Takfiri Deobandis of Sipah Sahaba killed at least 28 Shia Muslims in
Karachis Ali Raza mosque the very next day. It must be noted that many of Shamzais
colleagues in the Binori madrassa refrained from blaming Shia extremists for the
assassination and condemned attempts to project it as the outcome of the growing ShiaSunni divide in Pakistan in general and in Karachi in particular (Source).
In Pakistans religious hierarchy, Mufti Shamzai occupied the second position after
Mufti Rafiuddin Usmani Deobandi, who is the chief Mufti of Pakistan and his brother

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Mufti Taqi Usmani Deobandi (patron of Sipah Sahaba Taliban). He was better known
than Usmani brothers in Pakistan and the Islamic world and had a much larger
following in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Binori Deobandi madrassa came to
prominence in 1979 when the late General Zia-ul Haq Deobandi nominated its then
chief and founder Maulana Yusuf Binori Deobandi as chairman of the Council of
Islamic Ideology. After the Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan towards the end of 1979,
Shamzai in association with other mullahs of Pakistan issued a fatwa calling for a jihad
against the Soviet Union. Mufti Shamzai was then the blue-eyed mullah of not only
Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence but also of the US Central Intelligence Agency and
the Saudi intelligence and played an active role in the recruitment of Muslims from
Pakistan and other Islamic countries and training them with the help of Pakistans
military-intelligence establishment for waging a jihad against Soviet troops. He became
close to General Zia, General Pervez Musharraf, General Mohammad Aziz, then
chairman, joint chiefs of staff committee, General Muzaffar Usmani (retired), former
corps commander, Karachi, and vice-chief of the army staff, and three former jihadi
chiefs of the ISI, namely, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, Lieutenant General Javed
Nasir and Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed. During his career, he issued nearly
2,000 fatwas. In the 1970s and 1980s, his fatwas were mainly directed against the USSR,
India and Israel. After Osama bin Laden formed his International Islamic Front in
February 1998, his fatwas became increasingly directed against the US. After the US-led
coalition started its so-called war against terrorism in Afghanistan in October 2001, he
issued a fatwa calling upon the Muslims of the world to join the jihad against the US.
Shamzai was the mentor and godfather of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Sipah-e-Sahaba
Pakistan (of Haq Nawaz Jhangvi Deobandi) and its militant wing the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
(of Malik Ishaq Deobandi), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and
the Jaish-e-Mohammad. He was designated patron-in-chief of the Jaish and was a
member of the shura of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Maulana Fazlur Rahman Deobandis
Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam. Shamzai, who strongly backed Musharrafs seizure of power in
October 1999, became increasingly critical of him after the general decided to cooperate
with the US in its operations against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. He and his followers
helped the leaders of the Taliban, including Mullah Omar, to escape from Afghanistan
into Pakistan and take sanctuary there. It was reported in 2002 that during the US
operations against Al Qaeda in Tora Bora, Shamzais followers evacuated bin Laden,
who had sustained a sharpnel injury, to the Binori complex in Karachi where he was
106

treated till August 2002, by serving and retired medical doctors of the Pakistan army. He
later left the madrassa. Post-9/11, Shamzai promoted the formation of a clandestine
organisation called Brigade 313 (the number of warriors in the battle of Badr at the time
of the Holy Prophet) to wage jihad against Western nationals and interests and
Christians in Pakistani territory. It consisted of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, the Jaish, the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. All the
members of this Deobandi brigade are also members of the International Islamic Front.
At his instance, members of this brigade infiltrated into Iraq to join the jihad against the
US troops there. Since the beginning of 2003, there were reports of differences in Al
Qaeda/Sipah Sahaba and the International Islamic Front of Mufti Shamzai over
targeting the Saudi ruling family and its administration by certain sections of these
outfits. Shamzai, who had close contacts with the Saudi ruling family and religious
clerics and received large funds from them, was reportedly increasingly critical of the Al
Qaeda leadership for allegedly weakening the jihad against the US and Israel by
targeting the Saudi authorities and thereby losing their support for international jihad.
Al Qaeda elements were accusing him of letting himself be bought by the Saudi
authorities and supporting the pro-US apostate regimes of the Islamic world.
Apparently these differences played a key role in his assassination. (Source).
Although Shamzai was never accused of direct involvement in the Sunni-Shia violence
in Pakistan, it is now becoming increasingly clear that the Deobandi platform that has
spawned Jehad in South Asia has an intrinsic sectarian element. Shamzai has long been
considered the spiritual head of the various Jehadi groups active in Jammu and
Kashmir and Afghanistan, including the Jaish, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Harkat-ul-Jehadie-Islami (HuJI), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and its splinter group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen Alalami (HuMA) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Many of the graduates from Binoria have
been at the forefront of terrorist activity in South Asia and Afghanistan. Shamzai,
however, would not be a natural target for the Shia or Sunni Barelvi, as he is not directly
implicated in sectarian violence in Pakistan. (Source)
The following are scanned pages of the book in which Mufti Shamzai Deobandi
criticized Ibn Khaldun and described him as a Nasibi (enemy of Hazrat Ali r.a. and Ahle-Bait r.a.). Given that Takfiri Deobandis, Takfiri Salafists including those of Sipah
Sahaba and Taliban often refer to Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Taymiyya to justify their hatred

107

of Hazrat Ali, Hazrat Hussain and their Shia followers, they were very unhappy with
Mufti Shamzais book. According to some sources, one Nasibi Deobandi cleric in
Karachi namely Mufti Taqi Usmani (known for close contacts with Sipah Sahaba and
other Takfiri Deobandi militants) became angry with Mufti Shamzai and may have
encouraged Takfiri Deobandis to take action against Shamzai.
Here are the scanned pages (Source):

108

109

110

111

112




2004 6








.
.

.

.

Shamzai has long been considered the spiritual head of the various Jehadi groups active
in Jammu and Kashmir and Afghanistan, including the Jaish, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT),
Harkat-ul-Jehadi-e-Islami (HuJI), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and its splinter group Harkatul-Mujahideen Al-alami (HuMA) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Many of the graduates
from Binoria have been at the forefront of terrorist activity in South Asia and
Afghanistan. Shamzai, however, would not be a natural target for the Shia or Sunni
)Barelvi, as he is not directly implicated in sectarian violence in Pakistan. (Source
The following are scanned pages of the book in which Mufti Shamzai Deobandi
criticized Ibn Khaldun and described him as a Nasibi (enemy of Hazrat Ali r.a. and Ahle-Bait r.a.). Given that Takfiri Deobandis, Takfiri Salafists including those of Sipah
Sahaba and Taliban often refer to Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Taymiyya to justify their hatred
of Hazrat Ali, Hazrat Hussain and their Shia followers, they were very unhappy with
Mufti Shamzais book. According to some sources, one Nasibi Deobandi cleric in
Karachi namely Mufti Taqi Usmani (known for close contacts with Sipah Sahaba and
other Takfiri Deobandi militants) became angry with Mufti Shamzai and may have
encouraged Takfiri Deobandis to take action against Shamzai.
113

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE > PAKISTAN

Alleged killer of Mufti Shamzai nailed
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Alleged killer of Mufti Shamzai nailed
By Faraz Khan
Published: September 14, 2015
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File photo of Karachi police. PHOTO: AFP

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KARACHI: The city police claim to have arrested a target killer allegedly involved in
several high-profile murders, including the assassination of famous religious scholar
Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai.
According to the police, Wasi Haider, who was arrested after a gunfight in the Federal
B Industrial Area, has made a startling revelation during the preliminary
interrogation. He has confessed to killing Mufti Shamzai in 2004 near Jamia Binoria, a
famous Islamic seminary, in a targeted attack that had also left his driver, son and
nephew injured.
Mufti Shamzais assassination had triggered violence across the metropolis as an
angry mob had ransacked the Jamshed Quarters police station while setting fire to at
least 20 vehicles, two banks and a petrol station. The rioters had also attacked the
office of the Quaid-e-Azam Academy.
An official claimed that the alleged target killer has also confessed to murdering Jamia
Binorias vice president Mufti Abdul Majeed Deenpuri, along with his colleague,
Mufti Saleh, and a seminary student, Hassan Ali, on January 31, 2013.
Federal B Industrial Area SHO Naeem Khan told The Express Tribunethat the alleged
target killer also claimed to have killed Brigade police station SHO Inspector Nasirul
Hassan and his security guard, Khurram Butt.
SHO Hassan had played a pivotal role in the operation against a political party in
Karachi in 1990s. Two motorcyclists had ambushed him and his security guard when
they were carrying out routine snap-checking in the citys Lines Area.
The accused has also confessed that he killed a Sindh High Courts employee Bashir
Ahmed and three scrap dealers, who had refused to pay extortion money. He has also
confessed to killing workers of Muhajir Qaumi Movement and Sipah-e-Sahaba
Pakistan, he said.
Naeem Khan said Wasi Haider arrived in Karachi from Hyderabad in 2002 and joined
a political party in 2004. So far he has accepted involvement in more than a dozen
cases of high-profile targeted killings while the police are also trying to trace and
arrest his accomplices, he said.
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Police officials claim to have recovered a hand grenade and a pistol from his
possession. A case against him has been registered while the suspect will be produced
before a court today (Monday).
Published in The Express Tribune, September 14 th, 2015.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/956309/alleged-killer-of-mufti-shamzai-nailed/
Religious scholar Shamzai shot dead
PUBLISHED MAY 31, 2004 12:00AM
http://www.dawn.com/news/394536/religious-scholar-shamzai-shot-dead
KARACHI: Police on Sunday claimed to have arrested a key suspect behind the
killing of several religious leaders in Karachi.
The suspect, identified as Wasi Haider, is accused of killing Mufti Nizamuddin
Shamzai, Mufti Mohammad Abdul Majeed Deenpuri, Hafiz Mohammad Ahsan, Mufti
Saleh Mohammad Qazi and others.
According to DIG West feroz Shah, police arrested Wasi Haider from Karachi's Federal B
Industrial Area and recovered weapons and a grenade from the suspect. The suspect
belongs to a political party, he said.
Police officials claimed that the Haider has been involved in target-killing activities in
Karachi since 2005. They said that Haider and his accomplices carried out the murder of
Mufti Shamzai in 2005 near Gurumandir area. In 2007, he allegedly killed local resident
Safdar in Lines Area for not paying extortion money. In 2009, he murdered SHO Brigade
Nasirul Hasan, also in Lines Area neighbourhood.
In January 2013, Haider gunned down Jamia Banuri Uloom Islamia top cleric Mufti
Mohammad Abdul Majeed Deenpuri, his fellow cleric Mohammad Saleh and Hassaan
Shah in broad daylight on the busy Shahrae Faisal road, officials claimed.

116

Officials also accused the suspect of carrying out the target-killings of several other
political and religious leader activists and local residents for not paying extortion
money.
Haider is said to have moved to Karachi in 2002 when he found residence in the Lines
Area locality. In 2004, he joined a political party. Haider is under police custody and is
being further interrogated.
http://www.geo.tv/article-197303-Target-killer-of-several-religious-leaders-arrestedin-Karachi-policeAttack on GHQ: confessions of a terrorist mastermind

ISLAMABAD: The venue was Miramshah. The attendants of the meeting included some
of the most notorious militants of Pakistan. And their agenda was nothing short of
explosive an attack on the GHQ with the aim to take military officers hostage.
Shortly after the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in 2009, Aqeel Ahmed alias Dr
Usman alias Kamran alias Nazir Ahmed fled to Waziristan where he met the head of
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan`s Amjad Farooqui Group, Ustad Aslam Yasin and Ilyas
Kashmiri.
It was at this meeting that the idea of the attack on the General Headquarters was
floated, reveals the main accused of the attack, Ahmed, in a confessional statement. He
along with his seven accomplices was convicted by a military court on Aug 11, 2011, for
the audacious attack on the GHQ in October 2009. Shooting their way into the military`s
main headquarters, cowboy style, the militants took men hostage in one of the
buildings. They remained there till the next morning when commandos finally entered
the building, killing most of the militants and rescuing the hostages.
The brazen attack took the military and the nation by surprise; it was a successful
operation from the psychological point of view.
The confessional statement of Ahmed reveals the detailed planning that went into the
attack.
He also claims that in the Miramshah meeting he was reluctant to attack the army.

117

However, the other two men argued that the Pakistan Army as an ally of the United
States was a legitimate target.
[HI]
Ilyas Kashmiri said that the plan was to hold army generals hostage at the GHQ till they
could get detained militants released in exchange. According to the statement, Yasin
gave Ahmed a list with 115 names on it; these were the men whose release was to be
demanded. He also assured Ahmed that he would be accompanied by a team of trained
warriors.[/HI]
Ahmed also revealed that he and his accomplices used Google Earth to download the
maps of GHQ on the basis of which they planned their attacks.
The planning, according to the court documents, took the team months. Apart from
arranging for the weapons that were brought to Rawalpindi from Jhang, the accused
made multiple reconnaissance trips to the GHQ during the summer of 2009.
However, it was Wajid Mehmood, another accused from a non-military background,
who pointed out the locations where high-ranking army officials, including brigadiers
and generals, could be found.
Ahmed, who is known for his involvement in a number of high-profile attacks,
including those on Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf, joined Harkatul Jihad Al Islami in 1999
after completing his studies and went to Afghanistan twice.
After 9/11, he returned to Pakistan after being injured and joined the Army Medical
Corps (AMC) as a nursing assistant and was posted to the CMH in Rawalpindi. He was
still in touch with Jihadi `friends` then.
It was here that he became friends with another accused, Imran Siddique, who was then
a soldier in the army.
According to his statement, Ahmed deserted the army in 2005 and became involved
with the Amjad Farooqui group.
By August 2009, the GHQ plan was in full swing. Ahmed first rented a room at Bilal
Boys Hostel, Rawalpindi, and started surveillance of GHQ`s surroundings.
The weapons and explosives were brought over by Usman alias Ishfaq alias Gul Khan
hidden in a CNG cylinder.
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In September, Ahmed rented a house near DHA`s phase II. He also acquired a van that
he then proceeded to fit with army number plates, his statement reveals.
Army uniforms for eight of his accomplices cost him Rs30,000.
According to the statement, from Oct 1 to 9, 2009, Ahmed along with his accomplice Ali
carried out surveillance of the area and also briefed others on the attack by using
distance measuring tool on Google Earth.
Initially, the attack was planned for Oct 6 but this was delayed to Oct 10 as some of the
accomplices fell ill.
The statement said the 10 attackers reached the GHQ via Murree Road and dispersed in
different directions. The audacious attack as the men broke past the checkpost resulted
in the death of five of them. The rest were able to make it in.
The statements of army officers that comprised the prosecution case highlights the
element of surprise with which the attack was carried out. In fact, the bulk of the
prosecution`s statements focus on what they saw once the men had made it in. There is
little information on what happened at the checkpost.
According to the court documents, the militants made hostage five officers and 20
civilians.
Before they took the men hostage, Ahmed also shot dead the driver of a jeep who
refused to tell the militants the locations of the offices of the generals. However, the
statement does not explain if the militants were looking for any specific generals or
army officers.
Ahmed claimed in his statement that by 11am the militants had taken over the GHQ
and the entire area was `within their firing range` though he added that they were
surrounded by the army.
The negotiations continued all night; at six in the morning, the SSG attacked and
entered the building. They killed the four other militants who were watching over the
hostages. Ahmed survived this attack as he was holed up in a separate room from
where he was carrying out negotiations over the phone.

119

In his statement he explains that he then hid in an office, coming out only to join the
men carrying out the rescue work; a building had collapsed and men were trying to
rescue those trapped beneath the rubble.
He nearly escaped scot-free but for a security officer who identified him.
Maj Akhtar Hussain Qamar, security officer (technical) at GHQ, who witnessed the
whole episode on CCTV, identified Ahmed. I saw the whole incident on CCTV and
observed that 10 attackers/terrorists had dismounted from a Suzuki van near the Tank
Chowk picket. Here they attacked the picket as well as some security staff and five of
them were hit, whereas other five managed to enter into the GHQ premises. I reported
this whole incident to my superiors. Later I assisted SSG persons and troops in planning
the counterattack and recognition of the attackers/terrorists since features/figures of
accused number 1 (Ahmed) were very clear in footage.
According to the chargesheet of Ahmed, security staff recovered nine rifles, one rocketlauncher, 16 empty magazines, 28 loaded magazines, four ammunition pouches, two fly
liver-grenades, six AP Claymore mines, six rockets, six expelling charges, eight handgrenades, eight detonators and 19 40mm grenades of Gp-25 from the militants.
The military court had sentenced Ahmed to death while his accomplice, former soldier
Imran Siddique, was sentenced to life in prison. Three civilians were also sentenced to
life in prison while two were sentenced to seven years each in prison[/RIGHT]
http://www.dawn.com/news/660572/attack-on-ghq-confessions-of-a-terroristmastermind
THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE > PAKISTAN
Terror convicts Dr Usman, Arshad Mehrban hanged in Faisalabad jail
By Zahid Gishkori / Web Desk / Shamsul Islam
Published: December 19, 2014
ISLAMABAD / FAISALABAD: Two convicted terrorists were hanged at the
Faisalabad District Jail on Friday evening after prison officials received their death
warrants.

120

The two hanged were Mohammed Aqeel, a former member of the armys medical
corps, who goes by the alias of Dr Usman. He was among the seven people convicted
for their role in the attack on Army headquarters in Rawalpindi.
The second convict who was hanged on Friday evening was Arshad Mehrban.
Mehrban had been convicted for his involvement in the attack on former president
General Pervez Musharraf.
Later on, bodies of the two were handed over to their respective families.
Body of Dr Usman was received by his brother Muhammad Usman while Mehrbans
body was handed over to his brother Sarfraz Mehrban.
Dr Usman and Mehrban were among the six terrorists whose death warrants had been
signed by Army Chief General Raheel Sharif on Thursday.
Yes, two militants Aqil alias Doctor Usman and Arshad Mehmood have been hanged
in Faisalabad jail, Punjab Home Minister Shuja Khanzada told AFP.
A senior official from the prison department also confirmed the executions.
The move came after the prime ministers decision to lift moratorium on executions
following the massacre by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan at Peshawars Army Public
School and College on Tuesday.
Earlier today, Express News reported the mastermind of the attack on GHQ in
November 2009 will be hanged within the next 24 hours, following the army chiefs
action of signing death warrants of six hardcore terrorists .
Preparations for the execution of the GHQ mastermind at Central Jail Faisalabad have
been completed, and several Elite Force vehicles have arrived at the prison.
Mohammed Aqeel, a former member of the armys medical corps, who goes by the
alias of Dr Usman, was among the seven people convicted for their role in the attack
on GHQ and is among the six who are expected to be hanged tonight.

121

Preparations for the execution of the GHQ mastermind at Central Jail Faisalabad have
been completed, and several Elite Force vehicles have arrived at the prison.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/809316/death-penalty-22-more-prisoners-cleared-forexecution/
Adnan Rashid is a militant commander of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan. He is the chief of
Ansar Al-Aseer, the TTP's unit tasked to free militant prisoners. Rashid, an
ethnic Pashtun, is a resident of the Chota Lahor area of Swabi district. He joined
the Pakistan Air Force as a junior technician in 1997, but was latter dismissed due to his
suspicious activities. Rashid was convicted for an attack on then President General
Pervaiz Musharraf in December 2003 and was given the death penalty. However, he was
freed, along with 400 other inmates, by Taliban militants when they stormed
the Bannu Prison in 2012.[2][3]
He masterminded the Dera Ismail Khan jailbreak on 30 August 2013, in which 175
prisoners were freed including 35 high profile militants

122

Pakistani villagers carry the coffin of army commando Arshad Mehmood, who was convicted for
his involvement in a 2003 assassination attempt on former military ruler General Pervez
123

Musharraf, for his funeral in Javera village around 60km from Islamabad on December 20, 2014,
after his execution in Faisalabad. (AFP photo)
People carrying the body of Arshad Mehmood for his burial in Javera village. Arshad
Mehmood: Hanged, then buried by crowds of well-wishers
21st December 2014 | AFP
Arshad Mehmood, a former military trooper, was among five convicts who were
handed out the death sentence for their role in an Al Qaeda-inspired assassination
attempt on Musharrafs life in late 2003.
http://www.dawn.com/news/1152270
Funeral of Arshad Mehmood in Javera village Islamabad, hanged for trying to kill
ex-military dictator Musharraf
https://twitter.com/khalidkhan787/status/546685152022126592
Another convict in Musharraf attack case executed
DAWN.COM | WASEEM AHMAD SHAH UPDATED DEC 31, 2014 08:56AM
PESHAWAR: Niaz Mohammad, a former Pakistan Air Force junior technician, convicted
in the Pervez Musharraf assassination attempt case, was executed early on Wednesday,
DawnNews reported. Niaz Mohammad was a resident of Swabi district. He was kept at
the Haripur Central Prison until Tuesday, from where he was shifted to the Peshawar
Central Prison in a helicopter.
Earlier the administration had deployed the police and army personnel in and around
the prison amid terrorist threats. The Sher Shah Suri Road, where the prison is situated,
had already been closed to the traffic at night.
In the first attempt on the life of General (retd) Pervez Musharraf, which took place near
Jhanda Chichi bridge in Rawalpindi on Dec 14, 2003, six PAF personnel were convicted
by a field general court martial at the PAF Base Chaklala on Oct 3, 2005, after they were
kept in detention for over 20 months.

124

Besides Niaz Mohammad, four personnel were also sentenced to death including
former junior technician Adnan Rashid, who later escaped during the 2012 Bannu
jailbreak; former chief technician Khalid Mehmood; former senior technician Karam
Din, and former corporal Nawazish.
However, the sixth convict, Nasrullah, also a junior technician, was sentenced to life
imprisonment.
Their joint appeal was dismissed in Feb 2006. Later on March 28, 2006, the Lahore High
Court dismissed their petitions.
A soldier of Pakistan Army, Abdul Islam Siddiqui, who was separately tried in the same
case by a court martial, was executed on Aug 20, 2005 after conviction.
Similarly, seven people were on death row in the second attempt on the life of
Musharraf in Rawalpindi on Dec 25, 2003. Five of them, including former Pakistan
Army Naik Arshad Mehmood, Zubair Ahmad, Rasheed Qureshi, Ghulam Sarwar Bhatti
and Russian citizen Akhlaque Ahmad, have already been executed after the moratorium
on death penalty was lifted in the wake of the Dec 16 Taliban attack on a Peshawar
school, which left 151 people mostly children dead.
http://www.dawn.com/news/1154234
Pakistan gets its man ... sort of
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Two days after Pakistani officials announced the death of Amjad
Farooqi, the circumstances surrounding the killing of the person who is being billed
as the country's most wanted man as well as a senior al-Qaeda figure remain murky.

Farooqi had been indicted in connection with the beheading of US journalist Daniel
Pearl in early 2002 and named by President General Pervez Musharraf as a
mastermind of two bomb attacks against the president's motorcades in December last
year. Officials had published a picture of Farooqi, with a reward of $330,000 for
information leading to his arrest.
125

The official version runs something like this: Farooqi was tracked through his mobile
telephone to a hideout in Nawabshah, a town 170 miles north of the port city of
Karachi. Security forces surrounded the house and met heavy automatic gunfire from
within. During the firefight, Farooqi and two others were killed, and three alleged
accomplices were arrested. According to official leaks, Farooqi might have been close
to Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan alleged to be al-Qaeda's head of Pakistan operations,
who could now also have been arrested.

"Farooqi's elimination is a crushing blow to the al-Qaeda network in Pakistan

because he was the man who had been providing al-Qaeda terrorists with the
manpower to carry out attacks," a senior Pakistani security official was quoted by the
French news service Agence France-Presse as saying.

Certainly, this is the view now widely disseminated in the international media, and
used as proof that Musharraf is keeping up his side of the bargain in hunting down
al-Qaeda operatives in the US's "war on terror".

However, extensive Asia Times Online research throws up a different picture.

Before the "war on terror" was launched after September 11, 2001 - when Musharraf
threw in his lot with the US - Farooqi was an impoverished foot soldier in a jihadi
organization. It is only in the past six months that he has suddenly emerged as a
"kingpin" and super villain, with the source invariably being from the official side.
Farooqi never got to tell his side of the story. His last words, as he lay mortally
wounded, were, "Oh God, you are the only one who sees." He then recited a few
verses from the Koran and died.
Apart from a few paragraphs in the Punjab police's "red book", Farooqi led a largely
insignificant life, until, overnight almost, he was elevated to being close to Khalid
Shiekh Mohammed, mastermind of the September 11 attacks.
According to information gathered by Asia Times Online from various sources,
including his native villagers, jihadi friends and security files, Farooqi was born in
the early 1970s in Chak 487 GB. Tehsil Samoundri, District Faisalabad, to a family

126

that had migrated to Pakistan at independence in 1947 from Indian Punjab's

Houshyarpur district.
Farooqi's childhood was passed in extreme poverty, and in need of a better life his
family sent him to an uncle's home in Toba Tek Singh, where he completed his
intermediate studies. Amjad had three brothers and three sisters. The most educated
in the family is brother Javaid Iqbal, a graduate who now runs a private school. The
other brothers are Fida Hussain, 28, and Amir, 22. The sisters, Zahida Parveen,
Shahida Parveen and Khalida Parveen, are all married in different villages in
Shiekupura and Faisalabad.
Farooqi married his maternal uncle's only daughter, Shabana Kausar, six years ago.
They have a daughter. Shabana Kausar has lived at her father-in-law's residence since
October 2001, when the US attacked Afghanistan. Since about that time, Farooqi had
been in hiding as he was wanted in connection with the Pearl murder. Shabana
Kausar has two brothers, Shebaz and Aqlak.

Different sources in his native town of Toba Tek Singh told Asia Times Online that
Farooqi collected funds for jihadis in the 1980s, and he was known to have taken part
in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in 1987. Later he made many visits of
Kashmir and Afghanistan, like thousands of other jihadi foot soldiers. He was also
associated with the Harkatul Ansar (HA). The HA emerged from the Harkat-i-Jihad-iIslami, which was declared a terror organization by the US in the 1990s. The HA is
led by Maulana Fazalur Rehman Khalil. Later he was thought to have been in contact
with the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ), a banned Pakistani outfit involved in sectarian
killings.
Punjab police intelligence departments files mention Farooqi as active with the LJ's
commander, Shakil Ahmed, who was later killed in a police encounter near Wehyari
(Punjab). Soon after Farooqi's name appeared in these files, intelligence
organizations, including Inter-Services Intelligence and the Intelligence Bureau,
studied his files, but failed to definitively link him to any organization. Several called
him a stand-alone operator.
Subsequently, a high-profile official report allegedly based on investigations from
several intelligence sources maintained that he was in contact with militants in South
Waziristan, and that he also acted as a go-between for Khalid. The same report said
that Farooqi was a lieutenant of the founder of jihadi outfits in Pakistan, Saifullah

127

Akhtar, who was recently arrested in the United Arab Emirates and handed over to
Pakistan.
Along with his alleged connection with Pearl's murder and the assassination
attempts on Musharraf, in which junior army officers were also said to be involved,
the heat was on Farooqi now.
Different proxy intelligence networks informed the security agencies about his
presence in Faisalabad, Kamalia, Karachi and Waziristan. In a matter of a few
months, about 50 raids were conducted to find him. According to Criminal
Investigation Department records, on January 11 this year a raid was conducted on
Farooqi's father-in-law's house, number 687/27 GB, Tehsil Kamalia district, Toba Tek
Singh. Six people were arrested, including his brother-in-law Aqlak and cousin
Attaul Manan.
After this raid, there is no record of any further ones, although police and security
agencies from time to time claimed that they were near to arresting Farooqi. Asia
Times Online reported on September 28 that Farooqi was probably arrested some
months ago (In Pakistan, dead men tell no tales).
Identity crisis
According to Asia Times Online sources, Farooqi's death did not play out as planned.
The authorities wanted to keep the encounter - which could well have been staged - a
secret until Musharraf returned from his overseas visit to the US, at which time
Farooqi's body would be produced.
However, a Dubai-based television channel broke the news of the encounter just a
few hours after it took place. The Ministry of Information immediately intervened
and ordered all stations to remove the clip. But Reuters news agency had already
picked up the item and distributed it all over the world, although quoting senior
officials who would not confirm Farooqi's death.
By Tuesday morning the media were full of reports on Farooqi's death, and the
establishment reacted by releasing what it claimed was Farooqi's computerized
identity document. No one is questioning that Farooqi is the one who was killed in
the shootout - it was him.
What is at issue is the identity card shown to the media. A number of significant
details indicate that it could not have been Farooqi's legitimate one - from the fonts
used in its design to the data it carried, and importantly, that it was computerized such cards only came into force after Farooqi had been declared a wanted man. How,

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then, could he have obtained an official ID? It appears that having been forced into
making a hasty announcement, the establishment did a poor job on faking the ID.
In the end, though, the officials produced their "high value" target, which pleases the
US, and with the murder of Pearl and the assassination attempts on Musharraf
pinned on Farooqi, awkward questions over these issues can be laid to rest.
Remember Farooqi's dying words," Oh God, you are the only one who sees."

(Mohammed Tahir, editor of Weekly Wajood, also contributed to this report.)

Syed Saleem Shahzad, Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached
at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atimes.com%2Fatimes
%2FSouth_Asia%2FFI29Df05.html&date=2010-12-15
Sep 28, 2004
In Pakistan, dead men tell no tales
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Pakistan's establishment recently labeled Amjad Farooqi as al-Qaeda's mastermind in the
country. However, Asia Times Online contacts vigorously dispute this claim ... and they suspect
that Farooqi has already been arrested in Karachi and that he will be "presented" at a later date.
- Twin hot spots near boiling point, Asia Times Online, Jun 5
KARACHI - Even as President General Pervez Musharraf played to the international
gallery on his trip to the United Nations and beyond, at home, Pakistan was cooking up
another treat to be served on the tour.
On Sunday, Pakistan announced that paramilitary police had killed Amjad Farooqi, a
suspected top al-Qaeda operative wanted in connection with the kidnapping and
murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl two years ago, as well as for two
assassination attempts against Musharraf last December.
Asia Times Online contacts, however, are adamant that Farooqi was in fact arrested
some months ago, and that the "incident" resulting in his death in the southern
Pakistani city of Nawabshah was in fact stage-managed by Pakistani security forces.

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Pakistan's establishment recently labeled Farooqi al-Qaeda's mastermind in the country.

However, Asia Times Online contacts say that, certainly, Amjad was wanted in
connection with the murder of Pearl in Karachi in 2002. The contacts claim, though, that
Amjad was in fact a "stand-alone" operator who did not draw support from any one
organization as he was able to gather his own manpower and financial resources. Senior
intelligence officers told Asia Times Online that while Farooqi was a stand-alone
operator, he carried out specific operations in conjunction with local and foreign
elements.
In the Punjab police criminal investigation department's "red book", Farooqi is serialized
as No 1497 under the name of Amjad Hussain alias Farooqi, alias Haider Ali, son of
Mohammed Afzal, a 30-year-old standing five feet seven inches (170 centimeters). He is
listed as coming from Toba Taik Singh, but southern Punjab has been his main playing
field. He was last seen in Karachi's Quaidabad suburb in the Tariq Hotel, on the same
day that Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a leading Sunni cleric, was assassinated. Farooqi
was at some stage a member of the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a banned group of sectarian
assassins who target Shi'ite Muslims.
After Riaz Basra, Farooqi is the second high-profile wanted person to have died with his
secrets, especially in relation to the murder of Pearl, in which he is said to have been
involved directly. Pearl had became deeply involved in investigations into the arrest of
Abu Zobaida, a chief al-Qaeda operator, in Faisalabad. He was in the process of making
a connection between Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence-backed groups and the
seminaries of Faisalabad when he was abducted and murdered. Farooqi, incidentally,
comes from the same area.
Basra, the founder of the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, moved to Kabul in Afghanistan after police
stepped up their hunt for him during Nawaz Sharif's government in connection with
the murder of Iranian diplomats and officials in Pakistan in the 1990s. After the Taliban
retreated from Kandahar in early 2002, he tried to sneak into Pakistan through the
Chaman border, but was caught by Pakistani security agencies. He was kept in secret
detention without news of his arrest being officially released. He was subsequently
shown killed in an encounter with police in Punjab.
Even though it runs contrary to Asia Times Online's information, Farooqi has been
widely touted as a significant figure in the "war on terror" and was the only Pakistani
desperately wanted by many Western intelligence agencies. He was recently named as
one of the four top al-Qaeda wanted operators, and his head carried a handsome
bounty.
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Farooqi, according to security sources who spoke to Asia Times Online, had worked
hand-in-glove with army officials in the attack on Musharraf's motorcade in Rawalpindi
last year. Had he stood for trial, some interesting information might have been released.
An expert on jihadi groups, Mohammed Tahir, editor of a local weekly, maintains that
Farooqi's death is meant to close the files on the conspiracy to kill Musharraf, as well as
the Pearl case.
And give the "war on terror" a boost. Recently, several characters wanted in this have
been arrested in Pakistan. However, contacts say their arrests were revealed only when it
suited the authorities. For instance, in late July, the US confirmed the capture in Gujrat,
a town in Punjab province, of Tanzanian al-Qaeda suspect Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani,
even though he was arrested many weeks earlier in the capital Islamabad.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached
at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atimes.com%2Fatimes
%2FSouth_Asia%2FFI29Df05.html&date=2010-12-15
Ilyas Kashmiri, 313 Brigadde, Harakat ul Jihad al Islami, Al Qaeda
Village of Thathi, Samahani Valley, in Bhimber district, more than nine hours drive
from Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir.
But in a 2009 newspaper interview with Asia Times Online - to disprove claims that he
was killed in another US drone strike - he denied he was a soldier, and instead stated
that he had fought with Huji in Afghanistan during the 1980s. He is believed to have
lost his eye and an index finger in battle.
Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, Kashmiri joined Huji members fighting Indian
rule in the disputed Kashmir region.
He later became the commander of Brigade 313, a special unit within Huji comprising
experienced fighters, which carried out high-profile missions against Indian targets,
allegedly with the support of the Pakistani military and security services.

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During one such raid in February 2000, Brigade 313 famously attacked Indian soldiers
near the Line of Control (LoC) - in retaliation for the alleged massacre of 14 Pakistani
civilians. One infantry soldier was captured and beheaded.
Kashmiri is said to have crossed back into Pakistani territory with the head in a bag, and
later driven through the town of Kotli with it on top of a pick-up truck.
Several newspapers published photos of the incident, gaining Kashmiri instant
notoriety. Pakistani generals are even alleged to have paid him a reward.
In June 2010, he was identified as the leader of al-Qaeda in Kashmir in an audio
statement by the late Mustafa Abu al-Yazid.
Kashmiri also seems to have had ambitions to attack Western targets abroad.
In 2010, US prosecutors quoted a Chicago taxi driver charged with sending money to
Kashmiri as saying the militant told him he "wanted to train operatives to conduct
attacks in the United States".
Kashmiri was charged with helping to plot an attack against the Danish newspaper,
Jyllands-Posten, which published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad which
angered Muslims worldwide.
He also allegedly met David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American who has admitted
to scouting targets for the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group for the November 2008 attacks
in Mumbai (Bombay), which left more than 160 people dead.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-13655883
Al-Qaeda 'hijack' led to Mumbai attack
By Syed Saleem Shahzad Dec 2, 2008
The network of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, which was a major supporter of the ISI in
the whole region, especially in Bangladesh, was shattered and fell into the hands of alQaeda when Maulana Ilyas Kashmiri, chief of Harkat, a hero of the armed struggle in
Kashmir who had spent two years in an Indian jail, was arrested by Pakistani security

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forces in January 2004. He was suspected of having links to suicide bombers who
rammed their vehicles into then-president General Pervez Musharraf's convoy on
December 25, 2003.
He was released after 30 days and cleared of all suspicion, but he was profoundly
affected by the experience and abandoned his struggle for Kashmir's independence and
moved to the North Waziristan tribal area with his family. His switch from the Kashmiri
struggle to the Afghan resistance was an authentic religious instruction to those in the
camps in Kashmir to move to support Afghanistan's armed struggle against foreign
forces. Hundreds of Pakistani jihadis established a small training camp in the area.
Almost simultaneously, Harkat's Bangladesh network disconnected itself from the ISI
and moved closer to al-Qaeda. That was the beginning of the problem which makes the
Mumbai attack a very complex story.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JL02Df05.html
Kashmiri reportedly masterminded the deadly suicide attack on a CIA base in the
Khost province of Afghanistan in December 2009. He also claimed to have been
behind the German Bakery bombing in February 2010 in Pune. His name has also
been linked with the 26/11 attacks.
Ilyas Kashmiri's involvement in the suicide attack on a CIA forward base in Khost on
December 31, 2009, which killed seven of its officers and wounded six others. Soon after
that, the Pakistani media reported that the U.S. had demanded his arrest and extradition
to the U.S.
And it was to Shahzad that he is purported to have sent an email claiming that the alQaeda was behind the German Bakery attack in Pune in February 2010, also warning of
more attacks in India targeting international sporting events due to be held that year.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/he-was-linked-to-every-terroristplot/article2077216.ece
As the sun set on February 25, 2000, a group of Indian army commandoes allegedly
crossed the tense Line of Control (LoC) that divides the former princely state of Jammu
and Kashmir into the Pakistani-controlled portion of territory known as Azad (Free)
Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). The Indians occupied an obscure hamlet called Lonjot
hugging the LoC. While the evening chill kept the Pakistani soldiers inside their
bunkers, the Indian soldiers killed some 14 civilians, slitting the throats of three girls

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and kidnapping two others (The News International [Karachi], September 20, 2009).
They returned to Indian-controlled space before dawn. In the morning, the Indian
commandoes hurled the severed heads towards the Pakistani opponents across the LoC.
The news made it to the front pages of several major Pakistani newspapers the next day.
The Pakistani Army did not choose to retaliate in kind for fear of risking a full-blown
war with its bitter nuclear rival. The whole of Pakistan seemed to seethe with rage over
the incident. In less than 48 hours, over two dozen jihadists belonging to a group calling
itself Harakat-ul Jihad al-Islami (HuJI), led by Commander Ilyas Kashmiri, crossed the
LoC into Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir and fought a skirmish with nearby
Indian troops. After losing one jihadist, the HuJI cadres captured an Indian army
soldier, Sepoy Bhausaheb Maruti Talekar of the 17 Maratha Light Infantry (MLI).
(Indian Express, September 22, 2009). Kashmiri beheaded the captive soldier and
crossed back to AJK with Talekars bagged, decapitated head. The following morning,
Kashmiris men placed the head atop a pickup truck in a gruesome display and paraded
it through the streets of the town of Kotli. HuJI invited the press to see how their
mujahideen would retaliate against the atrocities by the Indian army [1].
1. I was the only journalist from outside Kotli who witnessed this incident
Arif Jamal, South Asias Architect of Jihad: A Profile of Commander Mohammed Ilyas
Kashmiri, Militant Leadership Monitor, Vol 1, Issue 1, January 30, 2010, p.8.
http://www.jamestown.org/uploads/media/MLM_001_1.pdf

https://umarmedia.wordpress.com/videos/
Jasn-e-Azadi?? Pakistan ki azadi ka bhayanak tarikh. Razon se pardah utha hi
gaya delkhiye, is video mein link par klik karein.. at
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B64kDnR5EYPkd19SenpYS21zRW8/view
https://archive.org/details/TSGTRAINING
TTP's Training camp Mehdi Alaih Rizwan "some where in Pakistan", June 22, 2015,
uploaded by Abid Mansoor,
Several of its top-ranking commanders and office bearers joined hands with Al
Qaeda militants. A millionaire Karachi-based businessman, Arif Qasmani, who was a
major donor for ISI-sponsored LeT operations in India, was arrested for playing a
double game - he was accused of working with the ISI while also sending money to

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Pakistans South Waziristan tribal area for the purchase of arms and ammunition for
Al Qaeda militants.
Khaled Ahmad, Theyll kill me..., The Friday Times, Vol. XXIII, No. 17, June 10-16,
2011 at http://www.thefridaytimes.com/10062011/page2.shtml

Structures of Violence The Indian State In Jammu and Kashmir,

http://www.jkccs.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Untitled_1.pdf

The TTP remains an ideologically anchored outfit keen to spread its brand of sharia
across not just provincial but state boundaries as well. The tactical restraint the TTP
and its allies have shown in Punjab helps it bide time till things become clearer in
Afghanistan, ward off a potential military action and perhaps bag sections of FATA in
the interim. However, in this sordid saga, the grand prize remains the Pakistani
state, which the TTP may never get but, in its mind, deems imperative for helping
and waging the global jihad. The Punjab-based rulers can try to encapsulate the TTP
within the Pashtun lands but they are sitting on the powder keg of jihadism with
assorted jaishes and lashkars headquartered in their province. The reprieve
bought at the expense of the Pashtuns will run out in years, not decades. Dr

Mohammad Taqi, Pashtuns: thrown under the sharia bus?, Daily Times, February 13,
2014, http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/13-Feb-2014/pashtuns-thrown-underthe-sharia-bus

Dec 24, 2008

Why Pakistan's military is gun shy
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
When Pakistan changed its Afghan policy, Musharraf, who was also chief of army
staff, informed all jihadi organizations that the policy was necessary to preserve
Pakistan's interests in Kashmir. However, when the Kashmir policy changed and
operations started in the tribal areas, the jihadi organizations reacted.
By 2005, all the big names in the LET had left the Kashmiri camps and taken up in
the North and South Waziristan tribal areas. The same happened with Jaish and
other organizations. The most respected name of the Kashmiri struggle, Maulana
Ilyas Kashmiri, the commander of Harkatul Jihad al-Islami, also moved to
Waziristan.
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This was the beginning of serious problems for Pakistan and also resulted in a
change in the dynamics of the Afghan war. Trained by Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence's India cell, these disgruntled militants caused havoc in Afghanistan and
played a significant role in bringing the latest guerrilla tactics to Afghanistan. They
also introduced major changes in the fighting techniques of the tribal militants
against the Pakistani forces.
In this situation, the only peaceful place in Pakistan is Punjab, the largest province
and the seat of government. But this peace can only be ensured through central
Punjabi jihadi leaders like Hafiz Muhammad Saeed of the LET and southern Punjabi
jihadi leader Azhar. Azhar has influence in the jihadi networks in Punjab and he
convinced jihadis, after a wave of suicide attacks in Lahore, Rawalpindi and
Islamabad, to go to Afghanistan and spare Punjab.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JL24Df03.html

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From the section Asia

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24466791

A look at the Pakistani Taliban and those being discussed as successors to

Hakimullah Mehsud, who was killed in an U.S. drone strike Friday:
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan: An umbrella organization of militant groups based in the
tribal areas of northwest Pakistan that are fighting to overthrow the Pakistani
government and install a hard-line form of Islamic law. The TTP was formed in 2007
and is loosely affiliated with the Taliban in Afghanistan but has a separate leadership
and decision-making process.
Khan Sayed: The leader in the South Waziristan wing of the TTP. Hes often referred
to as Sajna, which means close friend in Punjabi. Sayed was close to Waliur
Rehman, the deputy leader of the TTP who was killed in a May drone strike. He is a
leading member of a TTP group responsible for training suicide bombers. While
some reports suggest hes more moderate than Hakimullah Mehsud, hes also been
described as a merciless, experienced fighter. Sayed is the only one of the three
prospective leaders who is from the Mehsud tribe.
Mullah Fazlullah: Head of wing for the northwest Swat Valley. His group began to
infiltrate the valley in 2007 and spread fear among residents by forcing men to grow
beards, preventing women from going to the market and blowing up schools. A
military offensive in 2009 pushed the group out of the valley. Fazlullah escaped and
is believed to operate from eastern Afghanistan.
Omar Khalid Khurasani: Head of wing in the Mohmand tribal area. Hes considered
an effective and powerful leader with close ties to al-Qaida. He is a poet and writer
who studied at a seminary in Karachi. Hes believed to have fought in Kashmir, a
region claimed by both Pakistan and India, and in Afghanistan against NATO troops.
In Mohmand, he is most famous for seizing a Sufi shrine and renaming it in honor of
the Red Mosque in Islamabad.
- See more at: http://www.chieftain.com/news/1974521-120/mehsud-talibanpakistani-leader#sthash.53pvYUbr.dpuf
'India and Pakistan are running their businesses in the name of Kashmir'
Last updated on: December 29, 2012 03:05 IST
What about the jihad in Kashmir?
Wali-ur Rehman: We believe in brotherhood with Kashmiri Muslims. The people of
Kashmir have been brutally tortured by Indian security forces.

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India and Pakistan are running their businesses in the name of Kashmir. Pakistan
has played havoc with Kashmiris in the name of freedom. We condemn this policy in
the same way as we abhor the brutality of Indian government.
The war that we fight in Kashmir is under the banner of Ghazwa-e-Hind (battle of
Hindustan). Our jihad is not just limited to tribal areas, but it covers the whole of
Pakistan, Kashmir and India.
We will go to Kashmir and will liberate the Kashmiris.
Like our grandparents made sacrifices for liberation of Azad Kashmir we too will
fight for the people of Indian-held Kashmir.
We will also establish an Islamic Shariah in Kashmir. The registered jihad that
Pakistan had started in Kashmir can't liberate it -- and even if does, it cannot
change its system. Only the Taliban can establish Islamic system in Kashmir.

http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-taliban-we-will-liberatekashmiris-from-india-and-pakistan/20121229.htm#5

Mast Gul was earlier considered to be an asset of the Pakistani intelligence

establishment. He shot to prominence following his dramatic escape from the
historic Charar-e-Sharif dargah in Jammu and Kashmir during the May 1995 fighting
between Kashmiri militants and the Indian troops. A resident of the Khwaja Town
area on Pajaggi Road in Peshawar, Mast Gul appeared at a news conference on
February 5, 2014, sitting next to the Peshawar district chief of the TTP, Mufti Hasaan
Swati, who claimed responsibility for Tuesdays suicide attack that left nine people
dead at a Peshawar hotel. Hasaan Swati disclosed that he had tasked Mast Gul,
whom he described as a TTP commander for Peshawar, to plan the suicide bombing.
Originally belonging to the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, Haroon Khan, also known
by his nom de guerre Mast Gul, had established a strong base in the Shrine town of
Charar-e-Sharif in Budgam district of Jammu and Kashmir in the mid-90s. In a bid to
flush them out, the Indian Army had launched an operation, which resulted in a
standoff that lasted for two months, till Jammu and Kashmirs most revered 14th
century Charar-e-Sharif shrine was gutted on May 11, 1995 in a mysterious fire.
While the Indian Army claimed that the militants had triggered blasts that caused
fire, the Kashmiri militants had accused the Indian security forces. Twenty jehadis,

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two army men and five civilians had died in the operation. However, Mast Gul made
good his escape, only to reappear in Pakistan. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror
attacks in the US and the subsequent U-turn taken by the Pakistani establishment
with regard to Kashmir jehad, Mast Gul fell out of favour with his intelligence
handlers. He subsequently joined another jehadi group striving for the liberation of
Jammu & Kashmir - Al Umar Mujahideen (AuM) - led by Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, an
Indian national hailing from Srinagar. Zargar was freed by the Indian government in
2000 along with Maulana Masood Azhar (of Jasih-e-Mohammad) and Sheikh Ahmed
Omar Saeed (US journalist Daniel Pearls convicted killer) following a plane
hijacking.
The stated mission of Al Umar Mujahideen was to reinvigorate armed struggle in
J&K. Mast Gul declared in ensuing statements that his goal was to liberate Jammu
and Kashmir through armed struggle. My own resolve is to liberate Kashmir and
seek its accession to Pakistan as a prelude to make it a part of Islamic caliphate, he
said in an interview. But little was known about his whereabouts since then, amid
conflicting reports that he had joined hands with the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan.
But it has now transpired that the former freedom fighter has already joined hands
with the enemies of the state, like some other assets of intelligence establishment,
like Commander Ilyas Kashmiri.

http://www.kashmirawareness.org/Article/View/25265/mast-gul-freedom-fighterturned-terrorist-attacks-peshawar

61 outfits banned in
Pakistan, Nisar tells Senate
By Mumtaz Alvi
December 19, 2015

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ISLAMABAD: Minister for Interior Ch Nisar Ali Khan told the Senate on Friday
that as many as 61 outfits had been proscribed/banned while another two AlAkhtar Trust and Al-Rashid Trust were enlisted under UNSCR 1267 on
December 1, 2005.
In a written reply to a question by PPPs Senator Sehar Kamran, the minister said that a
detailed report had been requested from the provinces about the question if some of
the banned outfits were still working and carrying out their activities in Pakistan.
The minister informed the House that Jamaatul Daawa (JuD) had been under
observation since December 1, 2005 under IInd Schedule. No outfit had been banned
during 2014 while Daesh, ISIL/IS/ISIS were banned on July 15 this year.
The banned outfits include Lashkhar-e-Jhangvi, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Sepah-e-Muhammad
Pakistan, Sepah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ex-banned organisation
SSP), Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi, al-Qaeda, Daesh/ISIL, ISIS, Khuddamul
Islam, Tehreek-e-Islami, Tehreek-e-Jaafira Pakistan, Millat-e-Islamia Pakistan-ex-SSP,
Khairun Nas International Trust, Islami Tehreek Pakistan (ex-TJP), 313 Brigade, Jamaiatul
Ansar, Jamiatul Furqan, Hizbul Tehrir, Balochistan Liberation Army, Islamic Students
Movement of Pakistan, Laskhar-e-Islam, Ansarul Islam, Haji Namdar Group, Tehrik-iTaliban Pakistan, Balochistan Republican Army, Balochistan Liberation Front, Lashkar-eBalochistan, Balochistan Liberation United Front, Balochistan Musila Difa Tanzeem, Shia
Tulaba Action Committee, Gilgit, Markaz Sabeel Organisation, Gilgit, Tanzeem
Naujuwane Ahle Sunnat, Gilgit, Peoples Amn Committee Liyari, Al Harmain Foundation,

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Rabita Trust, Anjuman-e-Imam, Gilgit-Baltistan, Muslim Students Organisation, GilgitBaltistan, Tanzeem Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, Gilgit-Baltistan, Balochistan Bunyad Parast
Army, Tehreek-e-Nifaze Amman, Tahafuz Hadoodullah, Balochistan Waja Liberation
Army, Baloch Repulication Party Azad, Balochistan United Army, Islami Mujahideen,
Jaish-e-Islam, Balochistan National Liberation Army, Khana-e-Hikmat, Gilgit-Baltistan,
Tehrik-i-Taliban, Swat, Tehrik-i-Taliban Mohmand, Tariq Geedar Group, Abdullah Azam
Brigade, East Turkmenistan Islamic Movement, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Islamic
Jehad Union, Tehrik-i-Taliban Bajaur, Amar bil Maroof wa Nahi anil Munkir (Haji Namdar
Group), Baloch Student Organisation Azad, United Baloch Army and Jeay Sindh
Muttahida Mahaz.
The PPP senator had asked about the names of organisations which were presently
banned in Pakistan and the second part of the question was whether it was a fact that
some of these organisations were still working and carrying out their activities in
Pakistan.
The third part of the question was whether it was also a fact that some of these outfits
were working by new names, if so, the details of such organisations and the new names
by which they were presently working and the last part was the steps being taken by
the government to stop working and activities of these outfits.
Minister of State for Interior Balighur Rehman said any organisation found to be involved
in terrorism and extremism would not be allowed to operate in the country.
He continued that under the National Action Plan (NAP), the ministry and provincial
governments had taken appropriate measures to stop banned outfits from re-emerging
with new names.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/print/86010-Indian-airbase-in-Pathankot-attacked
New list of banned outfits released
IFTIKHAR A. KHAN

PU BL IS H ED N OV 05, 2011 10: 11 PM

http://www.dawn.com/news/671635/new-list-of-banned-outfits-released

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Pakistan's Counterterrorism Challenge

edited by Moeed Yusuf, Georgetown University Press, Washington DC, 2014, pp. 15-46
.

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