Investigation into the Varanasi bombings has led to the Harkat ul-Jihad Islami, accentuating concerns about the emergence of Bangladesh as a base for Islamist terror groups.

WE NOW know who planted the bombs that went off in Varanasi last month, killing 20 persons. But the puppet masters, it turns out, sat in cities hundreds of kilometres away: in Dhaka, Karachi, and Kandahar. Police in Uttar Pradesh have arrested Mohammad Waliullah, a cleric in charge of a small mosque in the town of Phulpur, for having played a central role in the serial bombings. Waliullah, who had served eight months in jail after being arrested in 2001 on suspicion of maintaining links with the Jaish-e-Mohammad, is alleged to have been tasked with providing shelter and transport to three Bangladeshi Harkat ul-Jihad Islami operatives who executed the explosions, known only as Bashiruddin, Mustafiz, and Zakaria.

By Waliullah's account to police and intelligence interrogators, the three terrorists had first been in touch with him years ago, when they had studied together at the Dar ul-Uloom seminary at Deoband. In June 2004, Bashiruddin resumed contact with Waliullah. Waliullah was then taken to Bangladesh for a meeting with a mid-level HuJI commander, Maulana Assadullah. After the meeting, Waliullah was appointed HuJI commander for operations in eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Sources involved in Waliullah's interrogation say he described the terror strikes in Varanasi as vengeance for Hindu fundamentalist violence — in particular, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. HuJI's aims stretch much further than retaliation for communal violence, though. As investigators move ahead on unravelling the recent bombing of the Jama Masjid in New Delhi — for which HuJI is a key suspect — its complex trans-national history has become a subject of renewed interest.

Founded to fight in the United States-funded jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, HuJI was from the outset, a favoured child of Islamists within the Pakistan Army. In 1995, HuJI chief Qari Saifullah Akhtar was arrested on charges of attempting to organise a coup against the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Among the military officers later convicted for the attempted coup was Brigadier Zahir-ul-Islam Abbasi, the Inter Services Intelligence's station chief in New Delhi in 1988.

Akhtar himself, though, was released after a brief term in jail, and helped significantly expand HuJI's operations in Jammu and Kashmir. In order to optimise its effectiveness, HuJI was ordered merged with Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman Khalil's Harkat ul-Mujahideen. However, following its role in the kidnapping and murder of several United States and European nationals, the new organisation was proscribed, and HuJI and the Harkat ul-Mujahideen parted ways once again.

It is important to note, though, that HuJI had begun to develop pan-India networks even at this stage — networks of the kind that helped execute the Varanasi terror strike. On April 13, India released eight Pakistani terrorists at the end of the prison sentences. One, a Sialkot resident Babby Yunus Sayeed, had been arrested after Indian intelligence penetrated a terror cell he had set up in Mumbai, which was attempting to recruit local cadre through the Students Islamic Movement of India.

From 1998 onwards, HuJI found itself embroiled in a series of power struggles. Maulana Nazimuddin Shamzai, the recently assassinated head of the ultra-right Binori town seminary in Karachi, had been a mentor to both Akhtar and Khalil. Both, however, had fallen out over issues of authority and resources. In 1999, after Maulana Azhar Masood returned to Pakistan from an Indian jail as a consequence of the Indian Airlines IC-814 hostages-for-prisoners swap, he set up a new organisation, the Jaish-e-Mohammad.

In the midst of this factional struggle, Akhtar left Karachi and moved to Kandahar, where he forged a close relationship with the Taliban's amir, Mullah Mohammad Omar. However, after the United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, HuJI's cadre were decimated in combat and Akhtar himself was forced to flee to Dubai. Akhtar was arrested in August 2004, and deported to Pakistan, but the fact that he is still to be prosecuted illustrates just how powerful his friends in Pakistan are.

HuJI started to develop a presence in Bangladesh when volunteers from that country began to return home after the Afghan mujahideen took power in April 1992. Little is known about HuJI's operations in Bangladesh, other than that it has at least six training camps running in the hills around the port city of Chittagong, and a string of bases running from the coast to the Myanmar border. Its recruits are thought to include members of the Rohingya community of Myanmar, as well as Muslims from southern Thailand.

As in Pakistan, HuJI sought to influence the course of politics in Bangladesh from an early stage, with some success. HuJI operative Mufti Abdul Hannan, who attempted to assassinate former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in July 2000, is believed to have trained at a HuJI camp in Peshawar. A string of other terror attacks followed, targeting progressive intellectuals, journalists, and politicians. HuJI and its friends in Al Qaeda, it had started to become clear, had found a new home.

From 2001, pressure mounted on Pakistan to cut back its support for jihadi organisations. HuJI began to step in to fill the void left on the western front. In January 2002, for example, HuJI cadre led by one-time mafioso Aftab Ansari organised a terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Kolkata. Pakistani interrogators who later questioned Syed Omar Sheikh, one of the terrorists released in the Indian Airlines flight 184 hostages-for-prisoners swap, later learned he had ordered the Kolkata attack.

Bangladesh proved reluctant to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. Last year, Pakistan's Daily Times observed that Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's regime was "most reluctant to take action against the Islamists as long as they continue to attack Awami League cadres and communists." However, it argued, this opportunistic alliance would prove self-defeating. "A day will come soon enough," it prophesied, "when the state of Bangladesh will come under threat from the Islamic warriors it is now empowering through denial."

Last August, terrorists from two organisations Prime Minister Zia's regime had proscribed — but failed to act against by dismantling their infrastructure or arresting their leadership — carried out 450 simultaneous explosions across Bangladesh. Waking up to the threat to Bangladesh, the government arrested key Jamiat ul-Mujahideen and Jagrata Muslim Janata leaders, and unleashed the police against their operatives. HuJI was finally proscribed — but bar Hannan, not one of its terrorists has so far been arrested.

For India, this lethargy has had serious consequences. Just in January, police arrested two HuJI terrorists from Bangladesh, Saeed-Ul and Sohed-Ul. They were armed with the military grade explosive Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate, or PETN, a sign of the terror group's growing capabilities. A month earlier, the Delhi Police arrested three other HuJI terrorists, Mohammad Ibrahim, Nafiq-ul-Vishwas, and Hilal, who told interrogators they had received special training in ISI-run training camps in the province of Balochistan.

Again, in February, the Delhi Police arrested two HuJI operatives, Anishul Murshlin and Muhibbul Muttakin. Long-time HuJI operatives responsible for a series of terror strikes on communist and Awami League activists in Bangladesh, the twin brothers had been sent in to India to feed explosives to a cell run by the Bangladesh-based Lashkar-e-Taiba commander in charge of its eastern India operations, Nalgonda resident Ghulam Yazdani. The explosives were used in attacks in Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.

What might the future hold out? The linkages between Yazdani and HuJI point to the growing willingness of jihadi organisations to pool resources and cadre. In Pakistan, the Lashkar, which owes allegiance to the Ahl-e-Hadith sect, is a competitor for resources and cadre with HuJI, which is patronised by the Deobandi clerics. For their common cause, though, both now seem willing to cooperate — a fact that may prove of some significance as investigations into the bombing of the Jama Masjid in Delhi proceed ahead.

Interestingly, HuJI also seems to be attempting to expand its reach in Jammu and Kashmir by allying with faction adversaries. On February 22, security forces in the Mahore area of Jammu and Kashmir shot two Pakistani HuJI operatives, code-named Abu Salem and Abu Qasim, along with a Mahore resident who coordinated Jaish operations in the region, Mohammad Zafar. Such pooling of resources, despite the bitter feud between the HuJI and Jaish leadership, is a rational response to the pressures both organisations are facing.

One thing is starting to clear. Despite Pakistan's repeated promises to dismantle terrorist infrastructure, and Bangladesh's half-hearted crackdown against Islamist operating from its soil, the long jihad against India is nowhere near winding down. At an April 18 press conference in Srinagar, Union Home Secretary V.K. Duggal pointed to a mass of evidence that terror "camps were flourishing across the border," and bluntly asserted that "guns have to be met with guns" — a sign of the mounting frustration in New Delhi.

Can India-Pakistan dιtente survive the wave of bombings that have hit major Indian cities since late last year? It must, for the future of South Asia — and yet, each act of terror makes peace just that little bit more elusive.

Courtesy : The Hindu