Читать книгу The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began - Adrian Levy - Страница 15

TWO A Father’s Woes

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For most of his working life, Master Allah Baksh Sabir Alvi had been a teacher of religious studies at a government school in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, lecturing indifferent boys in what had once been the influential capital of a Rajputana princely state, a glittering city lorded over by a Muslim nawab and his entourage. Nowadays Bahawalpur was a chaotic sprawl of back-street mosques, low-lying mud-brick compounds and potholed roads, on the banks of the Sutlej River. Deep in the heart of the scorched southern Punjab, it was encircled by fields of cotton, sugarcane and corn, and these days it was ruled by a small circle of feudal landowners or zamindars, industrialists and entrepreneurs, who squeezed all they could out of the impoverished majority.

The only thing everyone had was faith. Here and there, down traffic-choked streets and back alleys, was a multitude of mosques and madrassas (religious schools). When Master Alvi was growing up there had been a few dozen madrassas in the city, and perhaps only two hundred throughout Pakistan. By the time he retired there were twenty thousand across the country, some consisting only of breeze-block classrooms, others gathered around the marble apron of grand mosques. Like most people in Bahawalpur, whether by profession or dint of the especially charged atmosphere of religiosity, Master Alvi spent his days praying, reading and discussing the Koran.

Most Bahawalpuris were conservative Sunni Muslims, their faith shaped by Deobandism, an austere revivalist sect that had emanated more than a hundred years earlier from Deoband, a town over the border in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Many living in Bahawalpur today originated there, but were forced to flee India at Partition in 1947. Millions of Muslims had abandoned their ancestral homes in the central plains of India and its former princely states as stories spread that the new India would welcome only Hindus. Families were torn apart, villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands massacred, former friends and neighbours killing each other, sending thousands of trains speeding east and west, carrying a tide of people to an uncertain future. In the years that followed, while India flourished, life in the new nation of Pakistan became ever harder. Supporters there of Deoband became increasingly sectarian, their tone and demeanour echoing that of the oasis-dwelling Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, who championed a return to the medieval life described in the Koran.

Master Alvi and his circle were as literal-minded as you could get. Known among more liberal neighbours as the ‘no-doubters’, they were certain about everything, especially matters ecumenical. Alvi and his followers believed that every form and facet of Islam that was not of the Deobandi-infused Sunni school was contemptible. These opinions were passed down through the family like a gold watch. But while the Alvis sought security and comfort in an age that no longer existed, the world outside Bahawalpur was changing fast. And in the summer of 1995, Master Alvi confided in his friends that for the first time since Partition, nothing seemed certain.

He had read how Islam was under attack in many places around the world. In former Yugoslavia, Serbs were massacring Bosnian Muslims in a genocidal onslaught. In the Caucasus, Russia had launched a war against Chechen Muslims, leaving many thousands dead. Most distressing, as it was nearer and involved a people he regarded as his closest brothers and sisters, was the Muslim uprising over the border in Indian Kashmir, which was being put down by hundreds of thousands of Indian security forces, turning the Kashmir Valley, once regarded as a jewel, into one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world.

Master Alvi had more personal worries concerning Kashmir, too. The ‘rock’ of Kausar Colony, as he was known to his neighbours in the comparatively well-to-do community where he lived, by whom he was regarded as a matchmaker, troubleshooter, arbitrator, religious pundit and general go-between, a man who was trusted, loathed and envied in equal measure (like all big religious fish in small barrels), Alvi had a serious problem that needed fixing. One of his sons, his favourite, Masood Azhar, the third boy of eleven children, had gone missing in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Although Master Alvi still thought of him as his ‘golden child’, Masood was actually twenty-seven, short-sighted and a squat five foot two inches tall. Sporting an oversized pair of aviator shades and a luxuriant beard, Masood had, much to his father’s delight, embraced the family business of ‘no doubting’ with great enthusiasm, becoming the scourge of all kufrs, or unbelievers, including Muslims who did not adhere to the Deobandi way, such as Shias, whom he once described in a pamphlet as ‘cockroaches’. Masood was not handsome or charming – his siblings teased him for being a ‘little fatty’, according to a relative. One brother joked, in an aside that was passed around Kausar Colony, that with his head swathed in an Arab keffiyeh and his body robed in a white cotton shawl over traditional white kurta pyjamas, Masood looked like a ‘fundamentalist pupae’. But when he opened his mouth, something happened. Elaborate bursts of English, Urdu, Persian and Arabic flew out, arpeggios of assertions that, despite his somewhat high-pitched delivery, stopped people in their tracks.

Masood had the gift of the gab, something that had first been noticed at the age of four, when he recited lengthy tracts of the Koran at the local maktab (Islamic elementary school). After winning prizes for public speaking, he had caught the eye of a relative who taught at Darul Uloom Islamia Binori Town, a wealthy mosque and madrassa a short bus ride from downtown Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, five hundred miles south of Bahawalpur, on the Arabian Sea. One of the largest religious seminaries in Pakistan, Binori Town was widely recognised as among the world’s most influential centres of Deobandi ideology.

To Deobandis, Binori Town, with its vast, sprawling campus, dusky pink towers, delicate, white-topped minarets and grand gateway, was Paris. Since its foundation in the 1950s by the religious scholar Yusuf Binori, members of every faction of the biggest Sunni religious-political party in Pakistan, the Assembly of Islamic Clergy, had vied to study there. Having one’s son among its 3,500 students was considered a blessing that would markedly raise one’s standing in the community.

In 1981, a year after twelve-year-old Masood had been enrolled and Master Alvi had received the necessary plaudits, the madrassa began taking its students down a new path, one that would transform the course of Masood’s life. Exciting dispatches had begun arriving from Afghanistan, sent by three recent Binori Town graduates who, styling themselves ‘The Companions of the Afghan People’, had headed up to Peshawar, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, a gateway to neighbouring Afghanistan, where they had joined the mujahideen fighting against the Soviet Red Army that had occupied Kabul eighteen months previously. This anti-Soviet campaign was being secretly funded by the US government through the CIA, and run on the ground by its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency was a secretive organisation, with enormous resources, whose skilled agents, never publicly identified, were universally feared for spying on, abducting, torturing and executing Pakistanis, as well as ruthlessly meddling in the affairs of the country’s neighbours. Now in Afghanistan, knee-deep in America’s battle to temper Moscow’s regional ambitions, the ISI made sure that it got a grip on the recruitment and training of those Pakistanis who went there to fight, as well as on the Afghani tribes being trained to mount resistance.

The three graduates from Binori Town had undergone basic training, supervised by military instructors borrowed from the Pakistan armed forces and the ISI, and paid for by the CIA, before being sent through the Khyber Pass to do battle with the Red Army. Stories of the Companions’ bravery in Khost and Kandahar were read aloud at Binori Town after Friday prayers, entrancing many students, including Masood Azhar.

By the time Masood was fifteen, in 1983, one of the three Binori Town graduates had been martyred in Afghanistan, another had vanished, presumed dead, while the third had become a famed warrior with the nom de guerre ‘Saifullah’, or Sword of Islam. Reports of his continuing exploits spurred on a second generation of graduates from his old alma mater, who streamed up from Karachi to the Afghan border by bus, lorry and cart. Some of them joined Harkat ul-Mujahideen – the Order of Holy Warriors – a movement of Afghanistan-bound mujahids that had been established by Binori Town scholar Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil.

With his belly-quivering rhetoric, Maulana Khalil rang the bell for jihad so loudly that thousands volunteered for battle from the Karachi mosque complex; with Master Alvi’s help, many more came from madrassas across the southern Punjab. Soon Maulana Khalil and Master Alvi’s efforts had drawn the attention of the ISI, which noted that the Holy Warriors were making a significant contribution to their Afghan operation. According to the indiscreet Alvi himself, the ISI began to finance the Order. A former student claimed that cash stuffed inside jute rice sacks was delivered to the main canteen at Binori Town mosque. Convalescent centres for wounded fighters were opened nearby. Some of the ISI money was used to extend the large network of affiliated madrassas all over Pakistan, especially in the lawless tribal areas of the north-west, where Pashtun tribesmen liked to say they had been ‘born to fight’. Money aside, the system was soon self-sustaining. Those who survived Afghanistan, coming back to Karachi as ghazis, or returning war heroes, gave inspiring speeches to students during lessons and at Friday prayers, priming the next generation for a holy jihad, while Binori Town was guaranteed a steady stream of willing new pupils from across Pakistan, most of whom arrived as six-year-olds who were then steeped in a deeply conservative curriculum tinged by the ethos of the Dark Ages.

Among the thousands of students, Masood Azhar stood out. He quickly gained a reputation for his oratory prowess and religious fervour. Maulana Khalil, who visited Binori Town regularly, came to hear of him. ‘He thought I had talents that needed growing,’ Masood later reflected solemnly, when, at the tender age of twenty-five, he put pen to paper and wrote down his life story for other students to read. ‘Had this not been my path since I was a child?’

By the time Masood reached ninth grade, Maulana Khalil announced that he would be sent ‘for jihad’ with other students from his class. Masood was unnerved. He had always been an ‘indoors’ child, preferring the company of his mother and siblings to the tough neighbourhood boys who played cricket in the street. Since becoming a teenager he had been desk-bound, and had grown used to the creature comforts of Binori Town, preferring a rickshaw to walking, and growing fat on plates of tender nihari, the spicy meat stew that many Pakistanis regard as their national dish. The prospect of roughing it in a desert training camp in Afghanistan horrified him, he wrote candidly. He managed to wriggle out of the trip, writing later that ‘I could not participate physically because of my studies. [Instead] I sent a few of my relatives including one of my brothers for jihad.’

However, when Masood graduated in 1988, aged twenty, Khalil again offered him a place at a mujahideen training camp. This time Masood could not refuse, and a few weeks later found himself at a Holy Warriors base in Yawar Kili, a sprawling mud-brick compound in the bronze desert outside the southern Afghan border town of Khost. Camp Yawar, with its subterranean classrooms, dormitories and bomb shelters carved from the bedrock, came as a severe shock to a young cleric more accustomed to air-conditioned prayer halls. Swarming with brawny recruits, who scrambled on their hands and knees under nets and peppered distant targets with bullets, it was run by Saifullah, the Binori Town graduate turned mujahid, whose abilities were by now legendary. Although he was pleased to meet a warrior about whom he had heard so much, Masood, exhausted by his three-day journey by pickup and pony and overwhelmed by the 50°C heat, confided to his private journal that he was ‘appalled’ by what greeted him.

Overweight and short of breath, Masood failed to make it through the forty-day basic training. But as the young man had been sent with the personal blessing of Maulana Khalil, Saifullah could not return him to Karachi uninitiated in battle, so he dispatched him to the front line anyway. Needing to relieve himself in the middle of the night, Masood emerged from the dugout where his unit was sleeping and forgot, in the darkness, to utter a password to the guards. Believing that Soviet-backed Afghan forces were mounting an ambush, they opened fire, and Masood received a bullet wound to the leg. Saifullah was horrified, and arranged for Masood to be stretchered back to Karachi immediately, accompanied by one of his most trusted lieutenants. The calamitous story was reported to the ISI, whose agents still recall reading it incredulously. For a lesser recruit, this incident would have signalled an ignoble exit from the world of jihad. But Master Alvi was too important a figure in the Deobandi movement for his son to be cast aside. After recuperating, Masood was asked to become editor of Sadai Mujahid (Voice of the Mujahid), the Holy Warriors’ weekly magazine and recruiting officer.

Masood enthusiastically embraced his new position. It gave him a chance to spread his message to a far wider audience, and he let his imagination run wild, creating in one edition a fantastical story of how a young mujahid named Masood, who was filled with a passion for jihad, had been cut down by a Russian sniper, but bravely struggled back to his trench. ‘This left a lasting impact on me and caused a revolution in my heart and mind,’ Masood wrote, imagining himself as the semi-fictional character in the narrative. ‘That’s why I resolved with Allah to spread the message of jihad (besides waging practical jihad at every opportunity).’

Available for five rupees outside mosques and bookshops throughout Pakistan, Masood’s magazine became a smash, selling tens of thousands of copies every Friday. In its pages he wove a spell around the battle being fought in the dusty mountains of Afghanistan, concluding later, in an unpublished memoir, that his words had been responsible for ‘the spread of the jihad task on a vast scale’. A speaking tour followed, visiting ‘maktabs, masjids, streets and bazaars of Karachi … without ever taking a holiday’. Soon Masood was in demand all over Sindh and the Punjab, too, where he was introduced, often with his father Master Alvi at his side, as a war veteran who ‘ignited fire in the hearts of the people’.

Wherever he went, the Russian sniper story preceded him, and after a while he began using it to explain his pronounced limp. Despite his youth, the twenty-one-year-old Masood was now addressed with the epithet ‘Hazrat’, the respected one. But by 1989, with the conflict in Afghanistan on the wane, and Soviet forces retreating from Kabul, Masood was at a loose end. Many battle-hardened Afghani jihadis and their Pakistani counterparts had begun spilling over the border into Peshawar and Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s south-western Balochistan province. Tens of thousands more set up home in Karachi’s outer suburbs. For a time it looked as if the Holy Warriors would stagnate completely – until a spook with a new project emerged from the woodwork.

Privately he was known as ‘Brigadier Badam’ because of the almond milk he drank like whisky, in shots from small glasses, having given up alcohol during the dry years of the Afghan mujahideen. An ISI veteran with more than thirty years’ service, the Brigadier had been one of those responsible for distributing the CIA’s cash for the past decade, US dollars that had been flown into Islamabad, stacked up on wooden pallets. The Brigadier, who is now retired, although he continues to dabble in politics and religion, knew back then how to get the most from his money. One day it would be a truckload of Kalashnikovs for a tribal elder who was running out of steam, and the next a wad of banknotes for an unruly mujahideen commander complaining about the carnivorous Soviet front. He had become an expert in unconventional warfare, and knew how to build and maintain a private army. He also had some ideas about how to redeploy the Holy Warriors, sending them to fight for a new cause that would benefit the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Ever since the Soviets had begun withdrawing from Afghanistan, with refugees flooding into Peshawar, fearful of what would replace the Red Army, Pakistan had been secretly preparing, in the words of General Zia-ul-Haq, the country’s most recent military dictator, to ‘make something of Kashmir’. Now the eyes of the army and the ISI had been drawn by the fortuitous events taking place on the other side of the LoC. The local insurgency had just exploded there, with hundreds of thousands of people rising up in the Muslim-dominated valley. ‘Pakistan’s security agencies, the army and the ISI, would never pass up an opportunity to make India, the perennial enemy, bleed,’ Badam said.

In the Brigadier’s mind was an idea to send battle-hardened veterans from the Afghan war over the border into Indian-administered Kashmir to boost the insurgency. Almost as soon as it had come into being following Partition in 1947, Pakistan had felt that it had got the dirty end of the stick. The new Islamic republic was awkwardly formed of two halves: West Pakistan, the area west of India that is the Pakistan of today, and East Pakistan, the region east of India that is now Bangladesh. Maps of the subcontinent resembled two green Muslim batwings encircling a great saffron-coloured Hindu heart. A deep sense of insecurity settled over the divided country, an unfading paranoia about the bigger, wealthier and better-armed India that sat in the middle.

In its hurry to leave the subcontinent, Britain had left such haphazard borders that the two new countries began fighting over territory immediately. One of the most contested areas was East Pakistan, where a sizeable proportion of the population wanted independence, and the Himalayan principality of Jammu and Kashmir, whose Hindu monarch had sided with India against the wishes of his Muslim subjects. The deal that Maharaja Hari Singh had signed with India’s last Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, had resulted in the mountain kingdom being divided up like spoils: a small portion of western Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan going to Pakistan, while Hindu-dominated Jammu, the Muslim Kashmir Valley and tiny, Buddhist Ladakh remained with India. Later, Pakistan had gifted bits and pieces to China, which went on to seize another slice from India. Ever since, India had continued to claim all of Kashmir while holding just over 40 per cent of it, while Pakistan, administrating just under 40 per cent, wanted it too, but publicly insisted that every Kashmiri had the right to decide his or her own destiny,

The two countries had fought many times over these disputed territories. The most serious conflagration came in December 1971, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had ordered an assault on East Pakistan, which had ended after barely two weeks, with the Pakistan Army forced into a humiliating surrender at Dhaka racecourse. Pakistan had never recovered from what it regarded as a deeply shameful moment in its young history, and ever since, its military leaders and the ISI had been searching for the right lever to pull so as to reassert themselves. Now, in 1989, with the war in Afghanistan coming to a close, tens of thousands of pumped-up Muslim guerrillas at a loose end and Kashmir boiling up of its own accord, it was obvious to Brigadier Badam (and many others he served with) that their moment had come.

According to a journal written by Masood and later seized by Pakistani federal investigators, the Brigadier approached Maulana Khalil in Karachi with a proposal. The ISI was prepared to offer $25,000 a month to the Holy Warriors to find fighters to wage war in Kashmir, a sum that could rise dramatically if Maulana Khalil achieved anything like his success in Afghanistan. The Brigadier added, Masood recalled, that there was money to spend because for years the ISI had been siphoning off American cash intended for Afghanistan and putting it into a contingency fund to aid rebellion in Kashmir. To date, Pakistan’s activities there had been restricted to reaching out to the leaders of Kashmir’s indigenous freedom struggle, clandestine meetings often being staged in Saudi Arabia, where participants met under the cover of going on Haj.

There had been the odd ISI-sponsored incident in Kashmir, like the time in 1983 when India had played the West Indies in a one-day cricket international at the Sher-i-Kashmir stadium in Srinagar, and spectators were paid to shout abuse and hurl eggs at the Indian players. A series of bomb blasts across the Kashmir Valley, paid for by the ISI, had led to riots and government buildings being put to the torch. Some places, such as the southern town of Anantnag, at times became ungovernable. But the Kashmiri groups, Badam complained, had a habit of going their own way, preferring to mount their own campaigns, calling for freedom and independence from everyone, rather than incorporation into Pakistan. In the eyes of the Holy Warriors, whose ranks were now bloated with war-hungry Pashtuns and dutiful Punjabis, the Kashmiris – infused with their mountain ways and Sufi-inspired traditions – were insufficiently bloodthirsty. ‘The Kashmiris were just too moderate,’ Masood Azhar wrote in the Voice of the Mujahid, ‘to mount the kind of total war that was needed if India was to be unseated.’

What Kashmir needed to tip it over the edge, according to Brigadier Badam, was a fully-fledged infiltration across the LoC. India’s superior military might meant Pakistan was unlikely to win a conventional war. So, rather than sending its own soldiers to die, Pakistan would manage the action from the sidelines, officially distancing itself, claiming that the upwelling of violence over the border was a spontaneous Holy War, a ‘jihad for freedom’. It was a neat plan that Badam had borrowed from his recent experience of working with the Americans in Aghanistan. As Masood later wrote, it would be ‘a steady stream of volunteers crossing over’. The Holy Warriors was just the kind of organisation the ISI needed to see the plan through, a tried and tested group of Islamist fighters loyal to an ISI-friendly emir, or leader (Maulana Khalil), with an established recruitment base (Binori Town, the Pashtun heartlands and the southern Punjab), a well-oiled training infrastructure (Saifullah’s Camp Yawar) and a mouthpiece to rally its followers (the Voice of the Mujahid). The candle on this cake was Masood Azhar, someone capable of getting the youth hot and bothered.

After Maulana Khalil agreed terms, the military operation escalated rapidly, Badam recalled, with young men from places like Bahawalpur and Peshawar, trained by Saifullah and armed by the ISI, infiltrated into Indian Kashmir at high altitude in cells of six to eight, their passage masked by artillery bombardment from regular Pakistan Army units stationed along the LoC. Once they were on Indian soil, Kashmiri guides helped bed them in before they mounted hit-and-run operations across the valley.

India was taken aback by the sudden rise in violence. The tipping point came in December 1989, when militants kidnapped Rubaiya Sayeed, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of India’s Home Minister, threatening to kill her unless India released five leading Kashmiri fighters from jail. Within five days the New Delhi government capitulated, and Rubaiya was saved. Believing the security situation in Kashmir was running out of control, India suspended local government, imposing Governor’s Rule and New Delhi’s writ on the citizens of Kashmir. The man they sent in to stamp out the unrest was Jagmohan Malhotra, a confidant of the Gandhi dynasty who had served in Kashmir before.

On his first day, 19 January 1990, Governor Malhotra ordered a curfew across the valley, while the Indian security forces mounted a crackdown, local parlance for mass house-to-house searches. In the lanes and alleys of Srinagar’s old town, usually a whirl of rug merchants, horse-drawn carts and young boys scurrying about with trays of tea and freshly baked bread, everything was brought to a standstill as residents were strip-searched, soldiers battering down ancient wooden shopfronts, toppling wagons of dried fruit, searching for explosives and weapons, arresting residents without warrants or warnings, making the summer capital seethe.

On Malhotra’s second day, Indian security forces opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, defying the curfew to spill out over Gawakadal, a rickety bridge over the Jhelum River in downtown Srinagar. New Delhi eventually conceded that twenty-eight people had been killed, and promised an inquiry that was never convened. However, international human rights groups claimed that the true death tally was almost double that, and survivors gave harrowing accounts of how they had clung to life by hauling corpses over themselves as police officers walked through the scene of the slaughter, finishing off anyone who was still breathing.

The following month, as New Delhi reacted to the mounting violence in the Kashmir Valley by dissolving the state assembly, Brigadier Badam in Pakistan implemented the second part of his plan, a vivid, week-by-week description of India’s heavy-handed response to the Pakistan-backed putsch, written by Masood in his Voice of the Mujahid. He wanted to ensure that people across the Muslim world read about Kashmir’s pain. Masood wrote up a storm, describing how in March 1990 ‘forty unarmed Kashmiris were shot by Indian forces as hundreds of thousands marched for independence’. In May, after militants assassinated Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq, a moderate religious leader, Masood recorded vividly how Indian forces shot dead a hundred mourners at his funeral.

By October 1990 Jagmohan Malhotra was gone, replaced as governor by Girish Saxena, a former head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the equivalent of the ISI. Five years earlier, Saxena had orchestrated a plan designed to smash an insurgency and pro-freedom movement in the Indian Punjab, the brutally effective ‘Operation Blue Star’ that left an estimated 1,500 civilians dead. Under his rule the bloodletting in Kashmir increased. After the army was sent in to quell a riot in the market town of Handwara, fifty miles north-west of Srinagar, 350 ancient houses and shops were burned down. Fifteen charred bodies were pulled from the ruins.

By now there was a multitude of Indian security forces operating in the Kashmir Valley, ranging from regular army to newly created reserve forces, paramilitary police as well as regular police, Special Branch, CID and a range of armed units attached to the intelligence agencies RAW and the Intelligence Branch (IB). The Handwara incident was blamed on the Border Security Force (BSF), a paramilitary outfit raised after the war between India and Pakistan in 1965. By 1990 more than a third of its 240,000 strength was deployed in Kashmir on counter-insurgency operations.

It was not just the paramilitaries who were excessive. ‘Are they animals?’ Masood demanded in February 1991, after reporting on events in Kunan Poshpora, a village close to the LoC where at least twenty-three women were raped, an attack blamed on the 4th Rajputana Rifles, an army unit that had the distinction of winning two Victoria Crosses during the Second World War. It wasn’t as if these incidents were few and far between, Masood reported. Two months after Kunan Poshpora he wrote up ‘a Kashmir family story’ from Malangam. It told how seven members of one Kashmiri family were shot dead, before their corpses were tied to military vehicles and towed down from the mountains by the BSF (116th Battalion). When their remains were later handed to police, the deaths were recorded as due to their having been ‘caught in the crossfire’, although the only shots fired had been Indian. Masood wrote about the ‘crossfire’ excuse again in June 1991, after Indian security forces killed seventeen unarmed civilians, all of whom supposedly died inadvertently, during a gun battle in Srinagar’s Chotta Bazaar.

Blood and more blood. With Maulana Khalil’s recruits striking indiscriminately across the valley, the indigenous militants fighting too, and a reeling India responding chaotically, Masood revelled in the region’s descent into savage war, with his focus firmly fixed on atrocities committed by the Indian side. In January 1993, soldiers gunned down more than fifty unarmed civilians in Sopore, a rebellious town surrounded by apple orchards in north Kashmir, where insurgents had killed two Indian paramilitaries. Afterwards Sopore was set on fire, with most of its wooden buildings being destroyed and an unknown number of residents burned to death. Amnesty International sent a delegation to Kashmir. In Pakistan, Masood drew his readers’ attention to a subsequent report that documented ‘706 cases of custodial killings’ by Indian forces. ‘Disappearances, routine torture of detainees so brutal that it frequently results in death, rape of women during search operations, and extrajudicial executions of unarmed civilians, often falsely labelled as having been the result of “encounters” or as having occurred in “cross-fire”’ was how Amnesty expressed it. A few days after the delegation departed, Hriday Wanchoo, a vocal Kashmiri human rights campaigner, was abducted and shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Srinagar.

As far as Brigadier Badam and the ISI were concerned, their proxy war in Kashmir was going better than expected. India was on the back foot, and unrest was spreading daily through the valley. But according to Masood’s account, seized by Pakistan federal investigators, the Brigadier was concerned about the burgeoning number of militant groups operating in the Kashmiri theatre over which the Pakistanis had no control.

In a dizzying process of jihadi mitosis, there were now more than a hundred Islamic front organisations – the Prophet’s This and the Army of That, the Fight-for-Something-or-Other and the Battle-of-Some-Such, nominal names for notional outfits whose members on average had a battlefield life expectancy of less than six months. India did not bother to detail each of these groups’ inconsequential allegiances, since to them the only good jihadi was a dead one. But Brigadier Badam could see that a large number of the smaller outfits were home-grown Kashmiri groups, which felt no allegiance to the ISI, while even Pakistan’s purpose-made militias were increasingly difficult to control from afar. He was also aware that a significant amount of the Holy Warriors’ monthly Kashmir stipend was now unaccounted for. Worse still, some of the pro-independence Kashmiri groups were gaining the upper hand around the valley, going against the ISI’s plan to turn the Kashmiri freedom struggle into a campaign for Kashmir to become part of Pakistan.

In early 1993, Brigadier Badam returned to the Binori Town mosque to meet Maulana Khalil again. According to two others who were present, and also to Masood’s impounded journal, the Brigadier said he wanted to consolidate the military campaign. He came with both a stick and a carrot, producing evidence that the Holy Warriors had stolen ISI cash, but adding that he was prepared to overlook this misdemeanour, and even to ‘expand the monthly stipend to $60,000’, in exchange for a radical restructuring. To streamline matters and push India over the edge, the ISI wanted to construct one overarching jihadi outfit from its three largest existing fronts. The Holy Warriors would be central, and Masood, still only twenty-five, would leapfrog the established order by being made – to the consternation of many in the room – General Secretary of the new-look group that was optimistically named Harkat ul-Ansar, the Movement of the Victorious.

The military success of this unified front would rest on the shoulders of one man, Sajjad Khan, who had been chosen to be the Movement’s chief of military operations. A hoary military tactician from the Afghan–Pakistan border who had made his name battling the Soviets, he was better known by his nom de guerre, ‘the Afghani’. He was such an important ISI asset that rather than risk infiltrating him over the heavily patrolled LoC, Brigadier Badam suggested he cross into India through the porous border with Bangladesh. After losing its precious eastern territory in 1971, Pakistan’s security agencies had forged strong links with Bangladeshi jihadi groups that now promised to oversee all arrangements for the Afghani’s safe passage. General Secretary Masood Azhar was tasked with accompanying the Afghani, giving him a personal send-off.

They flew together to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, in December 1993. It was an embarrassing reunion for Masood, since the Afghani had seen him at his lowest, having arranged for him to be evacuated from Camp Yawar back in 1988 after the notorious friendly-fire incident. He knew the truth behind Masood’s ‘battlefield limp’. But, ever dutiful, the Afghani said nothing of this during the journey to Bangladesh, and Masood reflected in his journal that after handing his charge over to another Binori Town old boy in Dhaka, he returned to Karachi ‘filled with enthusiasm for the new Kashmir operation’.

The Afghani reached the Kashmir Valley in the first week of 1994, after travelling west through Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal before crossing India’s northern plains towards the western Himalayas. Now he headed for Anantnag, the largest town in south Kashmir, a militant stronghold where India’s writ was as worn as an old ten-rupee note. He recovered from his epic journey in a safe house that the Movement of the Victorious had established in Chhatargul, an isolated village of stone cottages and cedars tucked into the dark green folds of the Pir Panjal mountains, one hour’s journey east of Anantnag, a windswept landscape of pines and glacial debris populated mostly by gujjar herders, Pakistani and Kashmiri militants. At night this eyrie was engulfed in blackness, bar the occasional flare of a kerosene lamp. Here, life had barely changed in hundreds of years. And despite the spread of Islam, the inhabitants of these outlying areas remained wary of the mystical spirits said to roam the forests at night. The stillness was punctuated only by the sound of wild animals, black bears and deer, rustling through the undergrowth, or the mournful tolling of goat bells.

From here, using his contacts in the established ISI-backed militant groups and local herders as guides, the Afghani pressed on further east into no man’s land, where the snow lay thick on the ground. Travelling mostly at night to avoid attention, heavily armed and wreathed in multiple layers of scarves, he familiarised himself with the landscape, the language and the local customs, seeking out recruits, friendly hamlets and safe locations for munitions drops. Over cups of sweet black tea sipped beside smoky hearths, nervous villagers whispered how hard life was under Indian occupation, the men sitting cross-legged around the Afghani while their wives and children watched from behind a kitchen curtain, holding their headscarves tight, one end clenched between their teeth. The Afghani learned that these days the Indian security forces largely policed these upper reaches of Kashmir from the air, and that the poverty-stricken inhabitants, who survived on government rations in winter and on pulses and whatever vegetables they could coax into life from the thin mountain soil in summer, could easily be persuaded to side with the insurgency.

Soon he reached Lovloo village, high up beyond the Daksum road. This hamlet was a wild frontier, whose inhabitants reeked of wood smoke in winter and whose palms were stained with walnut juice from harvesting in the late summer. They rarely left the safety of their stone villages and farms. From here it was more than two hours’ walk to a doctor, an hour to the nearest school. There was no electricity and no proper road, but this route was the back door into the Warwan, a remote stretch on the other side of the Pir Panjal range whose name means ‘green valley’, a place so remote that no one held control. In the summer the Warwan lived up to its name, a lush, perfectly formed thirty-mile-long glacial valley, with tiny settlements huddled along its flanks. But the Warwan was a soulless place in winter, most passes in and out being blocked by snow, its steep slopes trapping its few intrepid inhabitants for up to six months of the year. It was the perfect location for Pakistani and Kashmiri militants to lie low, and in recent times it had seen a steady increase in the numbers of foreign militants too.

Slowly, the Afghani seeded cells along the route to the Warwan, trudging through the snow for hours at a time to reach the remotest settlements, knocking on ancient wooden doors to find frightened families huddled around meagre fires. He made his way as far as Pahalgam, the famed trekking station, favoured by Western trekkers, sealing allegiances as he went with promises of weapons and money from Pakistan, deals that were settled over huge mounds of steaming rice and pickled vegetables, laid out on cloths rolled out over the floor, all the time gathering together a ragtag army to join the Movement’s ranks. Some were veteran Kashmiri fighters who had been exchanging fire with the Indians long before 1989, and had a wealth of knowledge about their opponents’ tactics and firepower. Others were Pashtun mujahids, recently arrived from over the LoC, trigger-happy and pumped up, their wild, unwashed hair and beards swathed under dun-coloured scarves. Then there were the boys and men from Punjab and Karachi, Master Alvi and Maulana Khalil’s madrassa protégés, religiously conservative, militarily inexperienced but immersed in this new jihad, their uniforms, new tan-and-blue kurta pyjamas that the Kashmiris called ‘khan dress’, making them stand out from the locals, who back then preferred jeans and trainers. Finally, to get them through the mountains safely and to ensure there was sufficient food and a refuge at the end of the day, the Afghani recruited a network of helpers from Kashmir’s tough mountain tribes, the gujjars, dards and bakarwals. These herders and hunters had no interest in jihad, although many had grown to despise Indian brutality, but they knew these mountains better than anyone. Universally feared by suspicious villagers, it was said their rejection by the mainstream meant they would do anything for money.

However, one crucial brother was missing. Key to the Afghani’s military plan had been his chosen deputy, a Pakistani field commander called Nasrullah Mansoor Langrial, a gutsy fighter who had been running rings around the Indians in Kashmir for the past year, setting bombs and booby traps, mounting hit-and-run operations on Indian bases and patrols. Nasrullah and the Afghani were men of the same breed, the former being a farmer’s son from the Punjabi village of Langrial, a community of impoverished and religious jati tribesmen. Like many Pakistani families, Nasrullah’s parents made so little from the fields they rented from the local zamindar landlord that they had sent their son to a nearby Deobandi madrassa, where he was educated for free and inculcated with the merits of jihad. He had proven an eager pupil, and after graduating he had headed for Camp Yawar. There, in the deserts of Khost, the gangly youth Nasrullah had been transformed into the mujahid Langrial. With his lion’s beard, smiling face and tall, lean frame, he led from the front, eschewing marriage and home comforts for a life of jihad. It had been the same story with the Afghani, and the two men had fought together on many occasions, Langrial attaining the name in jihadi circles of ‘Darwesh’, the smiling and happy narrator of a hadith. But now, in January 1994, a courier came to the Afghani with news. Langrial had been caught in an ambush in Kashmir, and was being held by the Indian security forces.

The Afghani reeled. He told his comrades that they must risk everything to free his brother in jihad. He immediately diverged from the ISI plan and entered Srinagar, where he launched a reckless and savage frontal attack on security forces in the Elahi Bagh quarter of the city, the firefight (on 16 January 1994) lasting thirty hours. The Afghani had hoped to take prisoners to trade for Langrial, but he was lucky to escape with his own life. Three days later he tried again, this time kidnapping an Indian major, Bhupinder Singh, but the authorities refused to negotiate. In his fury, the Afghani executed the Indian officer and then went into hiding, leaving the Movement’s embryonic cells to melt into the dense pine forests.

When Brigadier Badam heard the news from Indian Kashmir, he was furious, Masood would later write. He immediately sent for Maulana Khalil in Karachi, and warned him that this was not the streamlined operation the ISI had paid for. ‘A number of messages were sent to the chief commanders in Kashmir to join hands. We did not, however, receive any confirmation of our orders,’ wrote Masood. Someone senior from the Movement would have to travel to Kashmir to get the Afghani back on course. The obvious choice was General Secretary Masood Azhar, who in recent times had been travelling widely, acting as Maulana Khalil’s roving ambassador and chief fund-raiser abroad, armed with a range of doctored passports provided by the ISI. Whatever his private thoughts about going to India, Masood hid them, writing vaingloriously in his journal: ‘It was my duty in the organisation to maintain unity among the mujahideen, and it was felt necessary that I needed to be there to fulfill this job. Heads had to be brought together, prayers must be said.’

But although Masood’s message rang clear in the ears of fighting men like the Afghani, the editor of the Voice of the Mujahid was not a fighting man. Once before he had demonstrated his lack of judgement in a live-fire situation, and this would be his first foray back onto the battlefield.

In late January 1994, as Masood said his farewells, his father, Master Alvi, worried that his son was not ready to grab jihad by the throat. ‘Was he not better leading from Karachi?’ Master Alvi wrote in a desperate letter to one of Masood’s brothers, later seized by Pakistani investigators. The ISI was too busy concocting a cover story to listen. Masood was now Wali Adam Issa, a Portuguese businessman. The Movement’s contacts in Britain had obtained a stolen Portuguese passport through the maulvi of a mosque in east London, and the ISI had had it stamped with Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi visas. Everyone was convinced that this mission was well within Masood’s capabilities, as he had already travelled widely around Europe and the Horn of Africa, even assisting another merging jihad general in Sudan, Osama bin Laden, the son of a Saudi construction tycoon, who had fled there from Afghanistan.

Masood Azhar arrived in New Delhi on 29 January, via Dhaka, on a Biman Bangladesh fight, in a newly tailored Western suit, his beard trimmed, he would write, ‘to resemble those worn by captains of industry’ he had seen in the pages of Time. He had clipped his fingernails and remembered to shower and use anti-perspirant, but the Indian immigration official still stared him down. Within minutes, his new nylon shirt was soaked with sweat. He didn’t look Portuguese, the officer observed. Masood would later write that he had wondered if the man ‘could smell Bahawalpur’ on him. Luckily, he had practised his response. He was originally from Gujrat, in Pakistan’s Punjab, but had left for Portugal some years before. The officer looked down at his screen. He scrutinised the passport again, and waved Masood through.

Masood headed for the five-star Ashoka Hotel in Chanakyapuri, the kind of hushed, moneyed place that asked no questions as long as the bills were paid. Delighted, he unpacked his bag and called his contact, a Kashmiri carpet exporter. This man was an old hand. He brought Masood some hot bread and nihari, made that morning at Karim’s in Old New Delhi. ‘Eat,’ he told him, according to Masood’s written recollections. ‘Relax. No need to hurry. The Kashmir plan is running a little late.’

Masood the tourist. His first stop was naturally the town of Deoband, a three-hour journey east in Uttar Pradesh state. Afterwards, he browsed Old New Delhi’s Islamist bookshops and visited roadside shrines to long-dead maulanas. He went shopping in New Delhi’s Connaught Place, buying boiled sweets, woollen socks, a bottle of talcum and a small brass bell that he thought would be useful when he came to convene his first majlis, or council meeting, with the mujahids of Kashmir. What did you buy for fighting men, he wondered. He found a place selling compasses, and bought a dozen as presents for the field commanders.

Finally, on 9 February, after twelve days of shopping, eating and waiting, they were ready for him. Wearing his comfortable kurta pyjama suit and skullcap as if he were a returning haji, Masood flew to Srinagar. As soon as he arrived he was thrown into a panic by the lines of khaki-clad security men, and he began shaking as a Kashmiri policeman with a clipboard approached him, having spotted the Portuguese passenger on the flight manifest. ‘Foreigner registration,’ the officer demanded, taking down Masood’s details. He felt horribly exposed, but emerged from the airport unscathed.

During the taxi ride into the city the sheer scale of the Indian military presence became clear to Masood for the first time. The sight of Kashmiris with their pony carts cowering beside the road as vast army convoys thundered past made him shake with fear. Thinking back over all those speeches and newspaper articles he had written, it dawned on him that the reality was far worse than he had imagined: he had ‘never seen more miserable-looking people anywhere in the world’. Srinagar in February was dark, dank and freezing, the dirty brown ice sludge on the roads splattering the people on the pavements. Locals hung around braziers filled with burning rubbish while Indian soldiers looked on enviously, shivering at their positions, dressed in balaclavas, winter-issue coats and oversized galoshes. Most shops had their shutters rolled down, and parts of Dal Lake were frozen over. There was not a tourist to be seen. Shuddering, as he wrote later, Masood searched for the Qasmia madrassa in downtown Srinagar, following the instructions he had memorised. That evening, safely indoors, as he sat beneath a quilt warming his hands on a Kashmiri kangri or charcoal burner, the Afghani slipped in.

They would leave at first light, the fighter announced, heading south for Anantnag. The leaders of the three militant groups that had merged to form the Movement would be waiting for them in the forest near the isolated village of Matigund, a difficult journey east of Anantnag along unmetalled mountain roads, a four-hour drive from here, possibly six, depending on the snow and the Indian security presence. ‘Before we left, one of the local Kashmiri mujahids gave me his pheran [Kashmiri cloak] to wear,’ Masood wrote later. ‘The Afghani also got two hens, which he kept in the boot of the car.’ Since they were going into the hills, the Afghani explained, they might have to fend for themselves. Only then did it occur to Masood that he ‘might have to fight’.

At Matigund, Masood, by now exhausted, was greeted with salt tea and unleavened lavash by ‘Brother Raees’, a Kashmiri militant who explained that he was right-hand man to Sikander, the Movement’s local District Commander. Sikander had proved himself a trustworthy lieutenant to the Afghani, but he was not present: ‘He had skidded on the ice on a mountain road and crashed his motorbike.’ He would attempt to reach them some time the next day.

Fifteen mujahids were waiting in the village house that had been commandeered for the majlis. Bearded and wearing an assortment of khaki uniforms and tribal dress, they were led by Abu Ghazi, a veteran tactician and weapons expert who had previously been based at Camp Yawar in Khost. He was now chief trainer at the Movement’s main camp in Kashmir, concealed a stiff one-and-a-half-hour walk east, far beyond the point where the electricity pylons and telephone lines ended. Sixty recruits were currently there, Ghazi said as he gratefully accepted a wad of cash that Masood had brought from his ISI benefactors. ‘We saluted them warm-heartedly and soon a majlis-i-jihad [jihad council] was in full swing,’ Masood wrote.

The men, who had been fighting for their survival in the pine forests, were greedy for news, and they pressed forward as Masood began to speak. ‘What an exhilarating scene it was!’ he noted. ‘In front of me and around, were faces shining with the spirit of jihad. Decorating the chests of these young men were magazines and grenades, and within them burned high the flame of courage and bravery. They cradled their Kalashnikovs in their laps like babies. Some of them had rocket launchers as well as carbines that they had seized from the Indian Army.’

Mesmerised by the surrounding weaponry and the proximity of men at his beck and call, Masood spoke uninterrupted for several hours, explaining why they needed to come together while all around him held a respectful silence. Out in the surrounding forest, he was informed, militants acting as lookouts also listened in via their radio sets. ‘Their presence was vital where they were, and so they had to content themselves by listening to us over the airwaves.’ At 2 a.m. Masood was politely interrupted. The brothers had not eaten all day. ‘Our historic meeting ended when one of our companions informed us that the dinner is served (one of the two hens).’ Dishes of gravy and chicken were set down beside a pile of cold girda, a striated Kashmiri flat bread. Afterwards, as the fighting men stretched out, Masood got up. ‘I quietly took up one of the Kalashnikovs and started downstairs, to join the mujahideen on guard. Halfway down, in the darkness, I felt the weapon in my hands … It was cocked, and the bullet was in the chamber. A feeling of ecstasy descended upon me. My joy knew no bounds as I held the loaded gun in my hands.’ There were no older siblings to make fun of the ‘little fatty’ now.

Outside, the night sky seemed overburdened with stars. You rarely saw them in polluted Karachi. ‘It was the wee hours, a cool breeze was blowing,’ wrote Masood, imagining himself as a fighter. ‘Praise be to God who granted me an opportunity to perform guard-duty on the front of Kashmir.’ Here, on the front line of a holy jihad in Kashmir, he could finally expunge those stinging memories of his embarrassing departure from the battlefield at Khost.

At daybreak, the Afghani sprang a radical plan. Since there was still no sign of Commander Sikander, Masood should deliver the Friday sermon at the Jamia mosque in Anantnag. This was a unique opportunity, and it would be a defiant act, demonstrating to the Indians, who would hear about it later, that the Movement was capable of bringing its General Secretary to the heart of south Kashmir under their noses. Masood was unsure, but the Afghani reassured him, saying the town’s people had risked much by supporting the Movement, and he needed to give something back.

Reluctantly, Masood agreed. Leaving the guards behind, he, the Afghani and Sikander’s deputy Raees walked down to the car. But half an hour into the journey the vehicle spluttered and died. Masood panicked. Miles from anywhere, they set off on foot until they spied a village, where they commandeered an auto-rickshaw. ‘Raees got seated with the driver while I and the Afghani settled in the back,’ Masood wrote. Just before they reached Anantnag, the rickshaw driver noticed a BSF truck driving at speed behind them. ‘Army!’ he yelled. But it was too late. They were totally encircled.

Raees was ordered to run for it, his weapon clanking beneath his pheran. ‘As the soldier tried to search him he threw one man down, let off a grenade and made it to the woods,’ recalled Masood, who remained frozen to the spot, aghast at the sight of the Indian paramilitaries running towards him, firing off their weapons in all directions. For a few moments the Afghani sat calmly, holding Masood’s hand, until they were hauled into the snow, chained and thrown into separate trucks. ‘The Indian soldiers were beside themselves with joy,’ Masood wrote. ‘We were blindfolded, our hands tied behind our backs. A crowd soon gathered there, and I could hear them cheering “Jai Hind! Bharat mata ki jai! [Hail India! Victory to Mother India!]” We had no choice but to pray.’

Khundroo Army Camp, protected by 2nd Rashtriya Rifles and located close to the headquarters of the Indian Army’s 21 Field Commandos, was a twenty-minute drive south of Anantnag. The signboard by the gate proclaimed ‘If Paradise is on Earth it is here, it is here’, but those who lived nearby thought of it differently. Like every other army, paramilitary and police camp in the valley, Khundroo had its interrogation centre, that consumed the daily intake of the detained, holding them for weeks or months without reference to the courts. Far away from the prying eyes of international human rights delegations, the Geneva Convention did not apply here, and the Afghani knew many comrades who had emerged from here and camps like it lame, broken and shamed. Masood had written countless column inches about prisoners who had been tortured or killed in detention centres, hung upside down, whipped, burned with blowtorches, electrocuted, near-drowned, their wounds rubbed with chilli, many of them vanishing altogether. He had never expected to find himself inside such a place, and he was terrified.

When an officer accompanied by plain-clothed agent arrived to begin their questioning, Masood shrank back and let the Afghani take the lead. ‘It was indeed a spectacular scene,’ Masood recalled later, emboldened by the passage of time. ‘His eyes were sparkling dangerously.’ The Afghani announced that he had a confession to make, but only in front of a senior officer. Someone found ‘an old Colonel with the red dot on his forehead, which the filthy Hindus consider to be blessed’.

‘Congratulations!’ announced the Afghani without fear. ‘Today you have gained great success. I am the commander of the Movement.’ The Indian soldiers exchanged glances. ‘But this scholar accompanying me has nothing whatsoever to do with the mujahideen. He is a visitor to this country. I kidnapped him. In all likelihood his prayers were answered when you arrested me, otherwise I would have held him until I got a ransom.’

According to his own later account, Masood swivelled to look at the Afghani before the penny dropped: ‘In every era there have lived pious slaves of Allah who have chosen to drink the cup of death in order to save their fellow brothers.’ For the next two days the Afghani was ‘tortured horribly’, but revealed nothing. Yet somehow ‘the Indian Army discovered a hole in the story’.

In fact, according to the Indian interrogation transcripts, when Masood’s turn came he broke down within thirty minutes and blurted out the truth: he had not been kidnapped at all. The Afghani was furious, and this time could not bring himself to forgive Masood. Now, after twelve days in Khundroo, both of them would face long prison sentences. Many months later, when Masood and the Afghani were reunited in Ward One of Tihar jail in New Delhi, where India housed the men it regarded as its most feared terrorists, the commander refused even to acknowledge his General Secretary. ‘Here, for the first time we developed differences,’ Masood later wrote circumspectly. ‘After four months the situation changed; he came to me and asked me to forget everything, as it was harming the freedom movement.’ The Afghani kept silent about their time together in Kashmir, even after Masood began telling other prisoners his life story, concocting a new explanation for his pronounced limp, which he now said was the work of Indian interrogators.

It was quiet in Kausar Colony, Bahawalpur. Two of Masood’s brothers were away in Afghanistan, fighting alongside the emerging Taliban. A sister, Rabiya Bibi, would soon join them, doing welfare work for this force of dour students led by Mullah Omar that would soon capture Afghanistan, while another brother was running the Movement’s Bahawalpur recruiting office.

Master Alvi should have been happy. Most of his family were doing holy work. Apart from Masood. He was desperate to secure the release of his golden child. He travelled to Karachi to see Maulana Khalil, and together they had gone to pay their respects to Brigadier Badam of the ISI. ‘Do what the Afghani did when Langrial was taken,’ the Brigadier told them. ‘Kidnap someone important, preferably foreign. Make it an embarrassment for India. It’s the only sure way to get him back.’ Master Alvi was unsure. What did he know about kidnapping, let alone foreigners? But he was certain of one thing. The Movement owed his son.

The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began

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