For the next month Murad’s home was a canvas tent he shared with dozens of aspiring guerrillas in a training camp near Khost. Rising before dawn, the teenagers prayed in the mosque, jogged in the arid hills, then devoted their afternoons to assembling and learning to shoot Kalashnikov assault rifles. In the evenings, the young recruits sat on the floor of the mosque as the camp commanders cited Quranic passages justifying global jihad. “We never saw Osama bin Laden, but we were told about him,” says Murad, a scrawny 19-year-old with jug ears and a wispy beard. “The commanders said he was a great emir, who was fighting for freedom for Muslims around the world.” Murad’s final stop before the front lines was a larger training camp known as Mansehra, set on an isolated hilltop in western Pakistan. He spent six months learning guerrilla tactics and playing brutal combat games; the climax was a course in booby traps, pipe bombs and other explosives, taught, he says, by a former officer in the Pakistani Army.
Today Murad sits in a tumbledown Indian Army camp in the village of Bandipura, within sight of the rugged Himalayan foothills where he lived in underground bunkers while fighting as a mujahedin. Last spring a radio transmission he was sending to comrades was intercepted by an Indian Army colonel in Bandipura, who over the next three months persuaded him to surrender. “One day Murad called me and said, ‘I’m coming down’,” the colonel says. Branded a traitor by his former comrades, knowing that he could be killed by his captors, Murad now dwells in a state of limbo. “He’s happy here because he knows that if he stayed in the mountains, he’d be dead,” insists the colonel, resting a hand on his frightened young prisoner. “He knows I was very close to finding him. I was almost touching his skin.”
An intensely personal conflict, Kashmir is also a front line in the war on global terror. Over the past several years this disputed territory controlled by India has become a bloody battleground for fundamentalist jihadis like Murad–and the freshest example of the kind of havoc that the nexus of Islamic extremism in Southwest Asia has spread around the world.
Just how volatile Kashmir has become was made clear earlier this month, when a four-man suicide squad attacked the State Legislature in the capital, Srinagar, killing 38 people. Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based militant group founded by three Pakistani radicals with close links to the Taliban, initially claimed responsibility for the strike, the deadliest in the 12-year conflict. Two weeks later Indian troops fired mortars and artillery shells at Pakistani positions across the Line of Control that divides Kashmir–the first deadly fire between the two nuclear powers in seven months. With Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf under attack for joining the U.S.-led coalition and under pressure to shore up his Islamic credentials, tensions in the region are likely to remain dangerously high.
The “Talibanization” of the Kashmiri conflict is a relatively recent phenomenon. The roots of the struggle go back to 1947, when the maharajah of Kashmir allowed troops from newly independent India to enter his state and drive out Pakistani invaders; Kashmiri leaders say India reneged on its promise of a plebiscite to determine Kashmir’s future, while India insists that the numerous state elections held since ‘47 are tantamount to a referendum. In the first stage of the armed struggle, the guerrillas were almost entirely indigenous Kashmiris fighting under the banner of secular independence movements. But the Indian Army crippled those groups in the mid-1990s; in their place arose a new crop of combatants, covertly supported by Pakistan, who embraced Islamic fundamentalism and global jihad and sought to annex Indian Kashmir to Pakistan.
This new jihad was sustained by a complex mix of forces and interests. In part, Islamabad was willing to risk the world’s ire by supporting the Taliban because of the training provided to Kashmir militants in Afghanistan. The cause also unified the Pakistani elite, who might otherwise have been disaffected by the country’s social and economic failures. Many of the jihadis have links to Pakistan’s powerful religious parties and schools of Islamic learning, or madrasas.
Among them: the founders of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, or Army of the Pious, infamous for its suicidal infiltrations of Indian Army camps by heavily armed guerrillas (known as fedayeen) disguised in military uniforms. An even bigger fish is Masood Azhar, who first came to prominence as a leader of the militant group Harkat-al-Mujahedin, which was recently banned by the Pakistani government. In 1999 hijackers seized an Indian Airways flight, diverted it to the Afghan city of Kandahar and demanded the release of three militants, including Azhar, from Indian prisons. Flown to Afghanistan, Azhar crossed freely into Pakistan and later helped form Jaish-e-Mohammad. For the past two years Azhar’s headquarters has been the Binuri madrasa in Karachi, a Wahhabi-sect academy where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and Osama bin Laden reportedly first met. After the suicide attack on Kashmir’s State Legislature, he fled into hiding.
Now the militants have embarked on a sometimes brutal campaign to transform Kashmir’s predominantly secular society. Weeks before the World Trade Center attacks, a previously unknown Islamic group calling itself Lashkar-e-Jabbar ordered all women to wear the all-enveloping burqa and threatened to attack those who refused. Shortly afterward three young women in the capital, including a 14-year-old girl, were splashed in the face with acid and disfigured. Over the next few days, thousands of burqas were sold to terrified women in Srinagar. (The threats have since fizzled out.) Many secular independence advocates insist that the fundamentalists don’t represent the heart of the struggle. “The Kashmiris hate India, but they are not for this Talibanization either,” says Hamida Nayeem, a professor at the University of Kashmir and a leading secessionist. “They see the rebels as their guests. Once the goal is reached, they have no role. They cannot be tolerated.”
It may not be so easy to exclude them. At the Indian Army camp in Bandipura the commander, J. K. Sharma, shows off a stack of Jaish-e-Mohammed identity cards and photos he claims were seized from dead Pakistani militants in a recent sweep. He says there are “100 foreign militants” operating in his zone, a cluster of villages 60 kilometers north of Srinagar. The leaders, he says, are almost all Pakistani.
For three years Murad Khan was one of those fighters. After completing his training in Mansehra camp in Pakistan in the summer of 1998, Murad traveled by bus with other guerrillas to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and a launching point for many Islamic militant groups. The mood on the journey was jubilant. “The commanders told us, ‘After Kashmir we will go to liberate Palestine’,” Murad says. In September 1998 he crossed the mountainous border for the first time–Indian Army officers say such infiltrations are often supported by cover fire from the Pakistani Army.
Murad’s assignment was to serve as a guide for “attack” squads around Bandipura, furnishing the fighters–half Pakistanis, half Indian Kashmiris–with weapons and cash and leading them to a network of caves, bunkers and safe houses. Murad claims that local agents provided him with a student ID card and even a phony father and mother, Kashmiris who could vouch for him if he were questioned. But after two years in the field, he grew disillusioned with Al Badr. After fellow guerrillas threw a grenade into a Bandipura market, killing three and injuring 16, he says, “I told the commanders that I disagreed with killing civilians, that we had a purpose and we should not diverge from it.” Soon afterward, he claims, he made up his mind to flee the mountains. (His Indian captors think that homesickness and a long-running personality clash with other Al Badr guerrillas also played a role in his surrender.)
If the United States is serious about chasing down Afghan-trained “terrorists” wherever they are, it will quickly run into struggles like these–local jihads that are influenced by the money, training and personnel coming out of Afghanistan, but which do not lend themselves to easy good-versus-evil distinctions. India wants Washington to lean hard on Pakistan to shut down training camps, end covert government support and ban the militant groups. “As soon as Pakistan cuts off the weapons and the cash to these Islamic groups, the war will finish,” insists a top Indian officer in Bandipura. But the United States is reluctant to alienate a major ally in the counterterrorism war–and doesn’t buy India’s claim that the Kashmir insurgency is strictly a terrorist movement. The Indian Army, which now has about 300,000 troops stationed in Kashmir, is widely hated by the local population, and its animosity has helped keep the indigenous struggle alive.
A recent incident in the remote village of Jagarpura explains why. Two weeks ago Indian soldiers swept through the village searching for fedayeen who had attacked a nearby base; they molested a young woman and then shot dead her husband and father-in-law in their farmhouse when they attempted to intervene. Residents say seven boys have run off to the nearby mountains in the last couple years to join Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, Al Badr and other groups and more would certainly follow. “The Army is a brutal force,” says Abdul Rashid Dar, the brother of the younger victim. “We all have the urge to pick up a gun and fight them.”
As far as Murad Khan’s father is concerned, though, it is a fight that sons like his have no business being part of. At his modest brick house with empty window frames and no electricity, the aging farmer fights back tears as he describes his five-year battle to win back his son. “He called me last year from Kashmir and said he wanted to come home but the commanders wouldn’t let him,” he says bitterly. “He said they told him he had to stay for four years or give his life.” Another of his sons considered joining the jihad, but after learning of Murad’s experience, he changed his mind. Murad would doubtless approve of the choice.
