SOUTH ASIA INTELLIGENCE REVIEW
Weekly Assessments & Briefings
Volume 3, No. 14, October 18, 2004

 

PAKISTAN

Fidayeen: The Chickens Come Home to Roost
Kanchan Lakshman
Research Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management; Assistant Editor, Faultlines: Writings on Conflict & Resolution

There is tragic irony here: fidayeen (suicide cadres) have for years been mobilized, ideologically motivated and trained in Pakistan for export in the neighbourhood - particularly to Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) in India, and to Afghanistan - as well as further afield, to South East Asia, Iraq, Chechnya, and the many other and multiplying loci of Islamist extremist terror. J&K had witnessed the first suicide attacks in 1999, and since then there has been a steady stream of fidayeen operations. Supported by the national political ethos that actively encouraged and sponsored jehad and shahadat, these suicidés had, however, till recently excluded their home ground in Pakistan from the scope of their 'holy war'. But, even as fidayeen attacks decline sharply in J&K, Pakistan appears to be emerging as a favoured target. Thus, while J&K witnessed six fidayeen attacks so far in the current year, with a total of 29 fatalities, 86 people have been killed in at least seven fidayeen attacks within Pakistan.

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Massoud Ansari writing in the Karachi-based Newsline in June 2004 had noted that a "clandestine call for potential 'fidayeen' - suicide bombers - is circulating across Pakistan and dozens of youth have answered its summons." Since 2002, there have been at least 11 suicide attacks in Pakistan. Suicide attacks during the current year include:

October 10: A suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shia mosque in the Mochi Gate area of Lahore, killing at least five people, including two children.

October 1: At least 31 people are killed and 75 others sustain injuries in a suicide bombing at a Shia mosque at Sialkot in the Punjab province during the Friday prayers.

July 30: Seven persons, including the attacker, are killed in a suicide bomb attack on the car of the then Prime Minister-designate, Shaukat Aziz, at Fateh Jang.

June 3: A suspected Uzbek operative of the Al Qaeda and a soldier of the Shawal Scouts are killed in a suspected suicide attack, while two soldiers sustain injuries at a check-post in the North Waziristan agency, close to the Afghanistan border.

May 31: At least 24 worshippers are killed and 34 others sustain injuries during an attack which occurred while evening prayers were in progress at a Shia mosque situated on the MA Jinnah Road in Karachi.

May 7: At least 15 Shia worshippers and a suspected suicide bomber died and over 200 persons sustained injuries when a powerful bomb exploded at Hyderi Mosque, situated within the premises of the seminary Sindh Madrasa-tul-Islam, in the Mithadar area of Karachi.

February 28: A suicide bomber is killed and four worshippers sustain injuries in an attack on a mosque in the Satellite Town area of Rawalpindi.

The current wave of suicide attacks, according to many Pakistani analysts, needs to be viewed within the context of Pakistan's alliance with the US and Al Qaeda's reach within that country. A cursory look at the pattern of Fidayeen attacks in Pakistan indicate that they possess several Al Qaeda traits, such as the use of a suicide bomber, the targeting of Western civilians, the absence of immediate claims of responsibility and the quantity of high explosives utilised. A scrutiny of the pattern also reveals that the targets have been varied: foreigners, Christians, Shias, prominent individuals within the current regime, including General Musharraf himself.

Foreigners in Pakistan have been among the early targets of the fidayeen. Five people, including the suicide bomber and the wife of an American diplomat, died during a suicide attack on the Protestant International Church in Islamabad on March 17, 2002. On May 8, 2002, nine French engineers and five Pakistanis, including the suspected suicide bomber, were killed during an attack that targeted the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. More recently, three Chinese engineers were killed and eleven persons injured in a suspected suicide attack at the Gwadar Port on May 3, 2004.

High-profile targets of the fidayeen have included, among others, President Musharraf, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. On December 25, 2003, at least 18 persons were killed and 40 others sustained injuries during a second assassination attempt in less than two weeks on President Musharraf in the Jhanda Chichi area of Rawalpindi (the first attempt, using explosive devices on a bridge on the President's route, had occurred on December 14). And on July 30, 2004, seven persons, including the attacker, were killed in a suicide bomb attack on the then Prime Minister-designate Aziz's cavalcade, in Fateh Jang town of the Punjab province.

The increasing deployment of fidayeen and the legitimization of suicide attacks is disturbing at another level as well. There have been reports that Al Qaeda operatives have infiltrated into Pakistani security agencies. For instance, a constable of the Karachi Police is alleged to have been the suicide bomber in the May 7, 2004-attack in which 15 members of the Shia community died at the Haideri mosque in Karachi. Earlier, a local intelligence official, Muhammad Naeem, was arrested in Islamabad on January 11, 2004, for allegedly tipping off the two suicide bombers who tried to crash their explosive laden vehicles into President Musharraf's convoy at Rawalpindi on December 25, 2003. Such penetration of security agencies is evidently insidious and adds to the overwhelming burden of the beleaguered enforcement agencies in Pakistan. The Karachi Police, for instance, is reported to have more than 7,000 policemen engaged in unsanctioned security duties at 2,223 mosques/ imambargahs, 869 Madrassas, 103 foreign missions, 31 food chains, 205 vital installations, 84 temples, 213 churches/hotels, 99 multinational companies and 277 petrol pumps, besides individual security duty. An already harried security apparatus, according to current indications, is finding it hard to confront the fidayeen, as has been the case in other theatres of Islamist extremist violence.

Massoud Ansari discloses that, while several networks of potential suicide bombers have been neutralised in a series of raids, officials admit that they are ill-equipped, in terms of infrastructure, expertise and training and that "there are so many cells that it is difficult to eliminate all of them."

Unsurprisingly, some signs of desperation are emerging within the regime structure. At a meeting with Muslim clerics at Rawalpindi on October 15, 2004, President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz urged the Mullahs to consider issuing a decree that suicide attacks on mosques and imambargahs were 'un-Islamic'. After the meeting, the Coordination Secretary of the Ithad-e-Tanzimat-e-Madars-e-Dinya, Qari Hanif Jalandhry, said "the mullahs made it clear to the President and the Prime Minister that they would only consider it," because they would have to consult scholars authorised to issue such decrees. However, Minister of State for Religious Affairs, Dr. Amir Liaqat Hussain, told a private television channel that the clerics had 'pledged' they would issue a decree declaring suicide attacks on Shia and Sunni mosques 'un-Islamic'.

The problem may not, however, go away quite as easily. The authority of mullahs endorsing the state's dictates is easily rejected by the more radical community - as has been the case in most theatres of Islamist extremism, including Saudi Arabia - and the processes of recruitment and training of suicide cadres has survived many such fatwas by clerics contemptuously dismissed as serving a corrupt state.

The outlawed Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) is widely believed to be the first group to have introduced suicide attacks in Pakistan. The advent of suicide attacks in Pakistan also coincides with the US attacks on Afghanistan and the subsequent flight of many Taliban/Al Qaeda cadres to Pakistan. And arguably the most lethal attack thus far in J&K was carried out by the JeM, when its cadres targeted the State Legislative Assembly complex in Srinagar with an explosives laden vehicle killing 36 persons and wounding 24 others, on October 1, 2001. It is significant, however, that suicide operations in J&K were first initiated by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), and it is this group that has been responsible for the largest number of such attacks in the Indian State. The LeT's loyalties to the ISI and the military regime apparently still survive in sufficient measure to prevent them from attacking targets within Pakistan.

Official sources have noted that a majority of the fidayeen hail from the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan, as also cities like Karachi. Most of them are young males, usually aged between 16 to 20 years. Thus, the suicide bombing at the US Consulate in Karachi was allegedly carried out by a 17-year old youth, and Asif Zaheer, who blew himself up near the Sheraton Hotel, was reportedly 19.

While the concept of front-line female suicide cadres is still in the realm of the unusual, the Karachi Police were placed on a high security alert in July 2004 after intelligence reports that two suicide-bomber sisters, aged between 18 and 20 years, were planning to launch strikes on Government targets. The specific threat was identified after an arrested cadre of the outlawed Sunni group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Gul Hasan, confessed that he had motivated his two cousins to become suicide bombers. Hasan, who is alleged to have prepared the suicide bombers who attacked the Hyderi mosque on May 7 and another mosque in Karachi on May 31, had reportedly disclosed during interrogation that the LeJ had brainwashed a few girls to explode themselves in women's areas of Shia mosques wearing a veil or school uniform and carrying handbags. Elsewhere, authorities in NWFP were pursuing the widow of an Uzbek Islamist terrorist in May 2004, after an intelligence report suggested that she was training women suicide bombers. Intelligence had indicated that Aziza, the widow of Obaidullah, who was a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, would launch attacks in Pakistan in May.

There has been considerable concern in the West with regard to the rising wave of suicide attacks, especially in the context of the cadres' motivation levels and the global Pakistani footprint of terror. Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, an online intelligence and news service, indicated in September 2004 that President Musharraf, apparently under American pressure, has instructed security agencies to focus on jehadi suicide volunteers - this time due to a memo asserting that such cadres would be used to carry weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and detailing various options for such attacks. It is certainly plausible that jehadi groups linked to bin Laden would seek to employ mass destruction 'human bombs' - biological, chemical and radiological - in the foreseeable future. To the extent that the ostensibly US-friendly Musharraf regime is losing control over terrorist groups within Pakistan - and, indeed, itself being targeted by them - the danger of a spillover into Western theatres becomes the more acute, particularly in view of the fact that their dominant ideological motivation now comes, not from handlers within Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), but from the Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

 

INDIA

Naxalites: A Compact of Fire
Nihar Nayak
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

"We do not believe that the suffering masses can be liberated through negotiations. Our ultimate goal is to capture power through armed revolution."

Ramakrishna, 'Secretary', People's War Group

The merger of two dangerous left wing extremist outfits, the erstwhile Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People's War (CPI-ML PW, also known as the People's War Group or PWG) poses a threat that goes beyond internal security, and imperils India's Parliamentary Democracy itself. The two Left Wing extremist groups merged to form a new "unified" entity, the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) on September 21 somewhere in the projected Naxalite 'liberated zone', either in Jharkhand or Bihar. The merger of these two groups, long-feared by the state's intelligence agencies who had taken up the obstruction of such a fusion as a priority, contains the potential to change the course of the 'revolutionary movement' not only in India, but also across the South Asian neighbourhood.

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The merger now makes the CPI-Maoist a pan-Indian revolutionary group, and brings the Maoists closer to their objective of 'liberating' their proposed Compact Revolutionary Zone (CRZ), which extends from Nepal through Bihar in the North to Dandakaranya region (forest areas of Central India) and Andhra Pradesh in the South. The intention is to have a continuous stretch of territory under their influence and control, with the ultimate goal of eventually "liberating" the entire zone. Large parts of this territory have already been brought under the extremist influence with only some link-ups now necessary in the remaining pockets to make the CRZ a reality. Once achieved, the CRZ will virtually drive a wedge through the vital areas of the country, and would help crystallize linkages with other Maoist groups operating in South Asia, including the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) and the Communist Party of Bhutan-Maoist (CPB-M).

The merger is the consequences of initiatives that date back five years, when the PWG approached the MCC with a proposal of merger. In fact, since its inception on April 22, 1980, the PWG had been trying to bring all the Left Wing extremist groups in India (numbering around 40) under its umbrella with the objective of overthrowing 'the bureaucrat comprador bourgeois and big landlords classes who control state power in collusion with imperialism' and 'to establish in its place the New Democratic State under the leadership of the proletariat' with the ultimate aim of establishing socialism and communism. The MCC had been its first target and talks had been on since the early 1980's. However, the discussions failed to progress initially as a result of turf wars and differences at the leadership level. Despite ideological commonalities and shared objectives, the pathways to the merger have been full of obstacles, with territorial and leadership clashes giving rise to an internecine conflict that lasted through much of the 1990s, as the two groups struggled for supremacy in different parts of then undivided Bihar, resulting in the death of hundreds of cadres and sympathisers. However, continuous interaction resulted in declining hostility between the two groups over time, and gradually increased operational cooperation and consolidation. The creation of Jharkhand in November 2000 and anti-Maoist operations launched by the administration pushed the MCC and PWG into closer cooperation, and a truce was announced between them three years ago. Significantly, the PWG had earlier merged with the CPI-ML (Party Unity) of Bihar in August 11, 1998.

According to the CPI-Maoist press release issued by Muppala Lakshman Rao alias Ganapathi, the 'General Secretary' of the Party, the unity was aimed at furthering the cause of "revolution" in India. The new party also pledged to work in close collaboration with the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). As part of its strategy, the CPI-Maoist would fiercely oppose the Central Government run by the Congress and its mainstream communist allies, the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the CPI-Marxist. Ganapathi also announced the formation of a 'People's Liberation Guerrilla Army' and extended support to "revolutionary struggles" in Nepal, Peru, the Philippines, Turkey and "other places".

The MCC's current areas of influence extended over Bihar and Jharkhand, with some sway in Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, West Bengal, Uttaranchal and a few pockets of Madhya Pradesh. The PWG's areas of dominance included Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. Both organizations shared their belief in the 'annihilation of class enemies' and in extreme violence as a means to secure organizational goals. However, significant ideological divisions did exist in the past, with the PWG adhering to a Marxist-Leninist 'line', while the MCC embraced Maoism. These differences have now been ironed over, with Maoism prevailing, in the words of PWG Andhra Pradesh State 'Secretary', as "the higher stage of the M-L (Marxist-Leninist) philosophy. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism will be the ideological basis guiding its (CPI-Maoist's) thinking in all spheres of its activities." The new entity has reaffirmed its commitment to the classical Maoist strategy of 'protracted armed struggle' which defines its objectives not in terms of the seizure of lands, crops, or other immediate goals, but the seizure of power. Within this perspective, participation in elections and engagement with the prevailing 'bourgeois democracy' are rejected, and all efforts and attention is firmly focused on 'revolutionary activities' to undermine the state and seize power.

The merger will have serious implications in all States facing the Maoist threat, and will increase the 'firepower' the 'battle ability' and levels of modernization of the two groups. The PWG is estimated to have 3500 armed cadres and around 3000 firearms, including a large number of rifles of AK variety, LMGs, SLRs, carbines, .303s, grenades, revolvers, pistols, and landmines technologies. The PWG also has a technical squad, which manufactures 12-bore guns and its ammunitions, repairs all kinds of weapons and assembles grenades. The MCC is estimated to have cadre strength of between 3000-3500, and around 2500 firearms of similar varieties.

The two guerrilla 'armies' of the PWG and the MCC - the People's Guerrilla Army (PGA) and the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) - have also merged under the September agreement. The new armed force will operate under the name 'People's Liberation Guerrilla Army' (PLGA) after December 2, 2004. The CPI-Maoist would carry on the new "democratic revolution, which would remain directed against imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism." The new party believes that the merger would cause "fear among the ruling classes" and would fulfil "the aspirations of the masses" for a strong revolutionary party that would usher in a "new democratic society" by advancing towards socialism and communism.

Financially, the CPI-Maoist will be the richest and largest revolutionary group in India, with a presence in at least 125 districts in 12 States, with another 24 districts targeted in its current phase of expansion.

The merger could also be seen as a strategic move to escape the ban in Bihar and Tamil Nadu, and the national ban under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, which was recently amended by an Ordinance to incorporate elements of the repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), 2002, as the new party, technically speaking, is not banned. The Governments in these States will have to issue separate orders banning the new entity, giving the CPI-Maoist some time to expand its bases.

The merger assumes more threatening proportions in view of the CPN-M's rampage across Nepal. The CPN-M has long maintained that unless the Maoists of the South Asia region work together to counter India's 'pernicious role', 'final victory' would elude them. Intelligence sources indicate that, if the Maoist insurgents achieve their objective in Nepal, a sudden spurt of cross-border terrorism along the 1,751 kilometre Indo-Nepal border would be a certainty, as the Maoist groups focus on the consolidation of their Compact Revolutionary Zone (CRZ).

The results of the merger are already visible in operations in West Bengal and Jharkhand.

• On October 15, cadres of the CPI-M blew up a Public Works Department (PWD) guesthouse at Kundari under Lesliganj block in Palamau district of Jharkhand.
• On October 14, a landmine blew up at least six Eastern Frontier Rifles personnel inside a forest in the West Midnapore district of West Bengal.
• On October 13, the CPI-Maoist cadres damaged a block office in the West Midnapore district of West Bengal, though there were no reports of any casualties in the incident.

In the meantime, the state response to 'Naxalism' remains incoherent and directionless. As the extremists work to consolidate and expand their power, repeatedly declaring their commitment to 'armed struggle' and their rejection of India's 'bourgeois democracy', the Andhra Pradesh Government - the State has been the location of some of the most serious and ideologically coherent movement for decades now - has put its entire faith in 'negotiations', backed by the Centre, with the Union Ministry of Home Affairs encouraging other Naxalite-affected States to follow the Andhra Pradesh example. Initial reports on the talks between representatives of the PWG / CPI-Maoist and the Andhra Government, however, are far from encouraging. The Naxalites have rejected two basic ground rules that the State Government had put forward: they will not surrender their arms; and will not accept any restriction on bearing arms in the areas of their operation, and the Government has tamely submitted. The Government, incidentally, has already called off all counter-insurgency operations in the State, giving the armed Naxalite cadres a completely free run. Reports suggest frenetic activity to regroup, recruit and train new cadres in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar and Chhattisgarh, as well as significant activity to enter hitherto virgin territories. While the CPI-Maoist's intentions are abundantly clear, neither the Union nor the State Governments appear to have any coherent strategy - other than the delusionary optimism of a directionless process of 'negotiations' - to contain or counter the extremist gameplan.

In the interim, intelligence agencies appear to be pinning their hopes on the possibilities of exploiting or provoking internal dissension within the CPI-Maoist, insisting that the money in the joint kitty is 'too big to share', and that conflict over the division of spoils would eventually undermine the merger and joint operations. Having failed to prevent the merger, it appears that the surviving gamble is to take advantage of residual ideological differences, personality clashes and conflicts of vested interests to undermine effective cooperation within the CPI-Maoist. Given the track record of continuous consolidation within the Left Wing extremist ranks and the continuous and abysmal failure of the state to contain their activities, however, the chances of winning on this throw of the dice are far from optimistic.