Valley146;s LeT Network

It was July 1999 and Bhootu was then known in local militant jargon as Brare Kanee or 8216;attics of cats8217; for its strategic location. There is no road link to this hamlet high up in the Chittarnar forests, making it inaccessible to the security forces and a safe hideout for the militants. The militants hid here for years till the army finally set up a camp here in 2002.

The villagers remember seeing the Lashkar men leave that evening to trek across the peak and cross over to Arin valley. 8220;They would come and go routinely. Nobody would dare ask any questions,8221; says Reshi. In the dead of the night, Suleman led Lashkar8217;s first suicide attack. Three militants sneaked into the vast and highly fortified Border Security Force camp at Madar, next to Bandipore town. They scaled the eastern wall of the camp, entered the residential compound and killed six BSF men, including DIG S.K. Chakravarty and two other officers. The militants holed themselves up inside a family quarter. The government had to call the National Security Guards and paratroopers of the army. The commando operation took 30 hours before Suleman and his two accomplices were killed.

That attack on July 13, 1999 changed the rules of the game and fixed the spotlight on the Lashkar. It marked the departure from the 8216;hit-and-run8217; strategy adopted by Kashmiri militants for years. The group has since remained in the spotlight. Nine years, four months and 13 days later, when terror struck Mumbai, the Lashkar had only changed the stage and the scale of its attack. Its aspiration to widen its influence outside the borders of Jammu and Kashmir is not new8212;the attack on Red Fort on December 22, 2000, when two militants stormed the fort in Delhi, was eulogised with details by Lashkar8217;s Al-Dawa magazine in its February 2001 issue. Mumbai might have got the Lashkar global attention but Kashmir will always define its identity. And whatever contours New Delhi8217;s diplomatic strategy takes, it cannot overlook the Lashkar8217;s involvement in Kashmir. The group has been surprisingly silent during the last several months in Kashmir and did not even target the assembly polls spread over five weeks.

Tied to Kashmir

The story of the Lashkar8217;s birth and rise shows how it focussed on Kashmir though its founder Hafiz Mohammad Saeed did talk of extending the war across India while addressing a rally in 1999, raising the issue of Hyderabad and Junagarh.

Saeed was born on June 5, 1950, at Sargodha in Punjab province of Pakistan, but his roots are in Jammu and Kashmir. His family originally belonged to a Gujjar tribe in Poonch district of Jammu province and his father Kamal-ud-Din moved to Haryana for work. During Partition, 36 members of his family were killed in the course of their journey to Sargodha. The family finally chose Janubi in Mianwali district as their home in Pakistan.

In her recent essay, 8216;I Shall be Waiting for You at the Door of Paradise: the Pakistani Martyrs of the Lashkar-e-Toiba8217;, Mariam Abou Zahab, an expert on Pakistan at Paris8217;s Centre d8217;Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, says that Saeed8217;s 8220;personal history is highly relevant for understanding his world view8221;.

When Saeed founded Lashkar in 1987, its entire top brass came from non-Kashmiri speaking belts on either side of the divided Jammu and Kashmir and were essentially Gujjars and Mirpuris. According to sources, Mohammad Ashraf of Mirpur, Tahir-ul-Islam of Rawalakote, Mohammad Ibrahim of Poonch and Molvi Ubaidullah of Sadluti district in PoK have been key members in the Lashkar hierarchy.

And although Lashkar8217;s recruits generally came from rural Punjab in Pakistan, sources say its base has been traditionally strong in areas in Pakistan where migrants from Jammu settled after Partition. With Saeed8217;s roots in Surankote, Lashkar had set up its network in the hilly districts of Rajouri, Poonch and Doda in 1995, establishing its foothold in non-Kashmiri-speaking Muslim populations across Jammu. In a way, Lashkar provided a platform for militants from across the linguistic and cultural divide on either side of the LoC, thus widening the reach of militancy beyond the scope of Kashmiri militant groups. The majority of Gujjar and other non-Kashmiri-speaking Muslim tribes in J038;K have otherwise been traditionally pro-India.

Lashkar claims to have begun its Kashmir mission on January 25, 1990. But according to the J038;K Police8217;s records, the earliest known Lashkar group arrived in the Valley in August 1992 but remained confined to the mountains of north Kashmir. For years, Lashkar worked to create a network across Kashmir. The group8217;s first Pakistani commander Abu Hafs was killed in Baramulla in 1993.

Police say the Lashkar took help from the Harkat-ul-Ansar HuA, another jihadi group which had already established itself in Kashmir, to enter Srinagar. In April, 1999, the J038;K police arrested 22 Lashkar men from Srinagar. The police say Lashkar8217;s first local militant Altaf Bhat was arrested in Srinagar on January 1, 1999 while its first Pakistani militant Abdul Khaliq alias Abu Hamza was killed in an encounter at Treesu, Ganderbal. The Kargil war of 1999 shifted the entire focus of the police and security agencies away from the Lashkar.

Striking after Kargil

And as soon as the Kargil war ended, Lashkar introduced its suicide attacks with a sneak-in strike at the BSF camp in Bandipore on July 13, 1999. Lashkar had publicly claimed the involvement of its cadres in the Kargil incursions and later termed the Bandipore fidayeen attack as its expression of 8220;displeasure over Pakistan8217;s withdrawal from Kargil under United States pressure8221;. On November 3, Lashkar targeted the Army8217;s 15 Corps headquarters and killed Defence PRO Major Purshottam.

The attack put the Lashkar under serious scrutiny. The J038;K Police claim that Ishfaq alias Abu Mavia of Pakistan, the first-ever operations chief of the Lashkar in the Valley and responsible for the Bandipore attack, was killed on December 28, 1999, on the outskirts of Srinagar.

The Chittisingpora massacre

In March 2000, the J038;K Police accused the Lashkar of carrying out the Chittisingpora massacre, in which 36 members of the Sikh community were lined up and killed in a nocturnal raid. The massacre had coincided with the visit of the then US president Bill Clinton to New Delhi. Five days after the massacre, the police and army picked up villagers, dubbed them as Lashkar militants responsible for the Chittisinghpora massacres and killed them in a fake encounter. The fake encounter was exposed, thus putting a question mark on the identity of the perpetrators of Chittisinghpora massacre.

When Hizbul Mujahideen, the biggest indigenous Kashmiri militant group, declared a ceasefire in August 2000 and sat down for talks with New Delhi, Lashkar did not agree and continued its activities unhindered. So by the time the Hizb-Centre talks failed and the ceasefire was withdrawn within a fortnight, the Lashkar had already occupied the centre-stage of Kashmir8217;s militant movement. The Lashkar carried out 45 suicide attacks across J038;K in 2000.

By now, the entire focus of Kashmir8217;s counter-insurgency grid was on the Lashkar but its suicide attacks were manifesting a different dynamics. On March 26, 2001, Lashkar militants struck at a CRPF camp in Srinagar8217;s high security Wazir Bagh neighbourhood. While the encounter was going on, a group of local youths shouted pro-Lashkar slogans a few hundred yards away. Encouraged by this demonstration, Lashkar started drawing its militants from Kashmir. At one point, when police broke a Srinagar module of Lashkar and nabbed its spokesman, he was found to be a research scholar at Kashmir University. By 2003, the Lashkar had established its command-and-control centre in the Bandipore jungles, where its new leader Bilal alias Salahudin was hiding.

By 2004, Lashkar had set up a new front called the Al Mansuriyan to conduct attacks. And when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was addressing a rally in Srinagar on November, 17, 2004, two Lashkar men appeared on a nearby hillock and started firing. The police encircled the militants and later killed them but the attack was a big embarrassment for the security forces. On January, 7, 2005, Lashkar conducted a major suicide attack at the Income Tax office in Srinagar. They returned eight days later and wreaked havoc when they sneaked into the Regional Passport office. On November 11, 2005, the police arrested a militant during an encounter at Srinagar8217;s Lal Chowk. Fear of death had gripped Ajaz Ahmad Bhat, a 20-year-old orphan from Mansoorabad, Faisalbad, freezing his body8212;unusual for a fidayeen. He survived to tell his story.

The next big suicide attack was conducted on May 21, 2006, when Lashkar attacked the then Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad8217;s public rally at Sher-e-Kashmir Park in Srinagar. Azad escaped but the Inspector General of Police and another officer were seriously injured. By now, security agencies, especially the police, had substantially managed to prevent militant entry into Srinagar by merging human intelligence with cellphone intercepts. The last major suicide attack in Srinagar took place in October 2007 when two Lashkar militants, Abu Zahid and Abu Hasham of Pakistan, were killed after they sneaked into a hotel on Srinagar8217;s Boulevard road.

Out of Kashmir?

The substantial decline in Lashkar8217;s activities in Kashmir has two major reasons: one, the police and other security agencies have laid an elaborate intelligence network to prevent their easy movement; two, their infiltration from across the LoC had become substantially difficult after former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf launched a crackdown in January 2002.

Why has Lashkar desisted from intervening during the assembly elections in Kashmir despite enough presence and fire power while it carried out a sensational strike in Mumbai? Security agencies in the Valley say they have no answers to that but insist the Lashkar8217;s primary interest is here8212;on ground zero of the Indo-Pak conflict8212;and sooner or later, it will return.