Читать книгу The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began - Adrian Levy - Страница 13

On 1 May 2011, a Prowler electronic-warfare aircraft, taking off from the USS Carl Vinson, jammed Pakistan’s radar systems, silence spreading like emulsion over the Islamic republic. At fifty-six minutes past midnight on the morning of 2 May, two American stealth Hawks, ferrying a team of US Navy Seals, hovered over a walled compound in the spick-and-span garrison town of Abbottabad, seventy-two miles north of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

Over the next few minutes, Operation Neptune Spear came to a head, achieving, with only a dozen shots fired, what John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor would call the ‘defining moment’ in the war against terrorism.

Winkled out of his hiding place by cruising satellites capable of measuring the length of a man’s shadow from six hundred miles up, while down on the ground a medical-aid camp established to counter polio in Abbottabad had been subverted to sniff out residents’ DNA, the elusive Osama bin Laden had finally been tracked down, a decade after 9/11. As he reached across his bed for his AK-47 he was shot dead, ‘decapitating the head of the snake that is al Qaeda’, according to Brennan.

One chapter in a story of our times had come to an end.

Sixteen years earlier, in the heights of the Indian Himalayas, where the mountains gather in a half-hitch to encompass the troubled valley of Kashmir, a crime was committed whose nature and cruelty presaged the age of terror Osama would go on to marshal.

In July 1995, high in the mountains of Kashmir, six Western trekkers – two Britons, two Americans, a German and a Norwegian – were seized by a group of Islamic guerrillas who demanded the release of twenty-one named militants imprisoned in Indian jails in exchange for their lives. At the head of the list was Masood Azhar, a portly cleric from Pakistan.

Masood Azhar’s early career mirrored that of Osama. Growing up in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province in the seventies and eighties, Masood, the spoiled favourite son of a wealthy landowner, had lacked for nothing – much like the privileged young Osama, whose well-connected family made its fortune constructing palaces for Saudi royals. Educated in an Islamist hothouse in the frenetic port city of Karachi, in Pakistan’s deep south, Masood graduated to become the mouthpiece for a guerrilla outfit that would, like Osama, gravitate to Afghanistan to fight the occupying Soviet Red Army to a standstill.

When Moscow retreated from Kabul in 1989, Masood and his unemployed fighters had converged on northern Africa, looking for new causes. They found Osama there too, well before ‘the Sheikh’ had been flagged up on Western watchlists. Together, Masood, a stubby firebrand, whose hypnotic patter had already propelled thousands into battle, and Osama, the lean and pensive fugitive whose deep war chest had bought matériel and men, began to direct Afghanistan veterans in a new fight against the West.

They struck first in broken Somalia in 1993, where America was bogged down in a peacekeeping mission, Masood and Osama arming Islamists with rocket-propelled grenades that brought down two US Black Hawks in the battle for Mogadishu, leaving nineteen American soldiers dead and seventy-three wounded in a bloody débâcle. Masood was soon travelling again, this time to Britain, where he raised more funds and recruited jihadi sleepers who would wait the best part of a decade before attaining notoriety in both the West and the East.

However, in 1994, while Osama was consolidating his front in Sudan and Yemen, buying a commercial airliner and shipping weapons and gold around the world, Masood became temporarily unstuck while sowing the seeds of insurrection in Kashmir. Slipping into India on false papers, hoping to galvanise a flagging local Muslim insurgency, he was captured by the Indian Army. It was this event that led to the kidnappings of July 1995.

The fate of Masood, and the bloodshed and intrigue that engulfed the six Western trekkers, would shape much of the epoch that followed. In the mountains of Kashmir that summer, Masood’s gunmen experimented with the tactics and rhetoric of Islamic terror, unveiling to the world extreme acts and justifications that would soon become all too familiar.

Finding and squeezing Western pressure points, testing foreign governments’ sensibilities and resolve, this hostage-taking would enable Masood and his men to refine their methods before they combined forces with Osama’s al Qaeda, soon assisted by the black-turbanned Taliban when they came to power in Afghanistan in 1996.

It would only be a short leap from the kidnappings in Kashmir to suicidal assaults in Srinagar, New York, Washington and London, in which many thousands would die or be injured. Three months after 9/11, India accused Masood of being behind a brazen raid on its parliament in New Delhi, an assault that was broadcast across the subcontinent, just as the Twin Towers had fallen before a live TV audience around the world.

In 2002, Masood’s bodyguard and one of his British recruits adapted tactics honed during the Kashmir kidnapping to abduct Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and to film his horrific beheading. Masood himself, like Osama, slipped from public view, becoming a shadowy éminence grise. In 2004 he welcomed several British Pakistanis back to the land of their forefathers, and in the terrorist training camps of north-west Pakistan he helped them plan for the mayhem they would unleash in London in July 2005, when four near-simultaneous suicide bombs went off in the heart of the heaving capital, killing fifty-two and injuring more than seven hundred.

In 2006, another of Masood’s British protégés manipulated jihadi recruits from the West to mount a complex plot to bring down multiple airliners over the Atlantic with liquid bombs smuggled aboard in soft-drinks bottles. Many more plots in India, the US and the UK were narrowly thwarted, saving untold lives. By the time Osama bin Laden was run to ground in Abbottabad, many others from al Qaeda’s top table had perished too. Apart from Masood Azhar.

He continues to thrive, flitting today between Pakistan’s borders and his old home in Punjab. Four of the tourists seized in Kashmir in the summer of 1995, whose abduction foretold a new age of terror, simply vanished. Their bodies were never found, and their case was forgotten. Until now.

When the book was first published it provoked a storm in India, with the government challenged by national newspapers and cable news networks to respond, New Delhi giving the New York Times a date by when it would. That day came and went. However, lawyers in Kashmir representing the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), an organisation representing some of the estimated 8,000 Valley dwellers who are said to have vanished after being taken into the custody of the Indian security forces, picked up the baton. The organisation filed a petition with the Indian government’s Human Rights Commission in the spring of 2012, alleging that the army and government had deliberately misled the investigation into the kidnappings and withheld information. They also suggested that a criminal network had been formed between the kidnappers and government militiamen that worked together to keep the hostages hidden from view. They demanded the case file be made public and that senior policeman be called in for questioning. On April 17, the commission agreed to review the seventeen-year-old case, triggering headlines around the world, from Fox News in the US to the BBC in London.

By July, the police had declined to react to the judge’s request to produce the Al Faran file, with the Inspector General warned by the commission that action would be taken against him. Finally, on August 13, five months after the case was listed, the J&K police Crime Branch submitted its official response. They claimed that the master file, containing key evidence, ‘went to ashes due to a fire incident’. The case is ongoing but the army and intelligence services are immune from investigation and will escape the probe.

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK AND ADRIAN LEVY

London, April 2013