Читать книгу The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began - Adrian Levy - Страница 17

The name chosen for the operation was Ghar, the Urdu word for ‘home’. It reminded everyone of the objective – getting Masood Azhar back to Pakistan. And from the moment of its conception in January 1995, one candidate emerged as the man to handle it.

His Pakistani handlers called him, flippantly, ‘the Kashmiri’. But in his native Kashmir, where their name meant nothing, he had many others. His parents had named him Javid Ahmed Bhat. School friends dubbed him ‘Dabrani’, after his village, Dabran, a few miles outside Kashmir’s unruly southern town of Anantnag, an hour and a half’s drive from Srinagar.

Javid was a stocky boy who lived in a two-storey brick house near the village’s communal wash-house – a stone-lined pond where everyone cleaned their linen – and close to the ramshackle store, with its cardboard boxes of five-paisa chews, so congealed that you had to eat them with the wrappers on.

The Bhats were an educated family, Mr Bhat having been a quality-control officer in the district’s agriculture department. Javid had done well enough to qualify for the government college in Anantnag, where he studied engineering. It always seemed to his neighbours that he would be somebody, one of the few who would escape the village, with its spinach-green houses and stone-and-mud lanes that tracked the saffron field. Dabran sat in a quiet copse of walnut and chinar (an oriental plane tree), surrounded by terraces of paddy. In high summer the village was dappled in light, and in winter it was frozen to the bone. In the daylight hours Dabran bustled along, while at night, like most villages in the valley, it coiled up like a fern, its residents locking shutters and barricading doors against the regular Indian security-force patrols that clattered through conducting cordon-and-search operations. Ostensibly, they were trying to catch militants, but they had become vengeful, with windows being smashed and possessions thrown into the mud, doors stoved in, sons and fathers taken away to an uncertain fate, women and girls hauled into dark places where bored soldiers, a long way from home, assaulted them.

As a child, Javid had lived for the spring, when he could finally prise open his bedroom shutters and oil his cricket bat, hand-carved from cheap Kashmiri poplar by an uncle. A pace bowler and a robust batsman, a thinker and a leader, it was no surprise to anyone in Dabran that this boy who others loved to be with had a loyal following by the time he was sixteen. He was a dependable friend, but also a worry to his family.

At college he joined the J&K Students Liberation Front (SLF), the youth wing of the azadi or ‘freedom’ movement that had taken root in campuses across Kashmir as a reaction to India’s clumsy rigging of the state elections in 1987. For Javid, the SLF was also a vent for his fear and anger at all that he had seen his neighbours and family endure. He quickly moved up the ranks of the organisation, acquiring another name, Saifullah, to shade his political activities, while his alter ego pushed forward silently, attaining a BSc in engineering.

As the screws tightened around the valley with the introduction of Governor’s Rule in December 1989, the SLF debated how to respond. Like students the world over, they were at the forefront of street protests, but some among their ranks wanted to take up arms and fight. ‘Is it worth marching any more?’ Javid had asked one day at a meeting convened to arrange a demonstration. He had been reading about radical German students who had taken up arms and formed the Red Army Faction in 1970. His intervention stopped all of them in their tracks. ‘Holding placards won’t stop the bloodshed. We are at war,’ he continued. In April 1990, with calls for Kashmir’s tahreek, or armed struggle, gaining momentum and being fuelled from over the border by Brigadier Badam and the ISI, Javid became part of a breakaway SLF bloc that took the plunge following the arrest of several student activists. India would only withdraw, so the argument went, if Kashmiris were willing to make it too costly for them to stay. Javid’s group abducted the Vice Chancellor of Kashmir University and his elderly assistant while they were on their way to Friday prayers. They also snatched the general manager of Hindustan Machine Tools from downtown Srinagar. Their aim was to use the captured men to bargain the release of the jailed activists. A line had been crossed.

The Indian government refused to negotiate, throwing the SLF into a panic. What were they to do now? For days there was a standoff, until reports emerged that the Vice Chancellor and his assistant were to be freed anyway, at Padshahi Bagh, a beauty spot close to Anantnag town. The news was greeted with widespread joy, but as the two hostages clambered through the short grass, heading for freedom, they were shot in the back by unseen gunmen. The third hostage was cruelly killed too, his body dumped in the Srinagar neighbourhood of Batamaloo.

Many in the valley were shocked by these executions. Ordinary Kashmiris and regular SLF members rose up in disgust, pointing out that Indians were always pleased to see Kashmiris killing each other, as it saved them the trouble. Such actions only benefited the oppressor, said the mainstream SLF leadership, denouncing the breakaway faction that Javid had joined. Although he was unconnected to the abductions and killings, he refused to criticise those who had carried them out. ‘They are not darshit gar [terrorists], they are mujahids,’ he told his friends. ‘Don’t shy away. We have to meet this terror head-on. Remember the massacres of Gawakadal, Sopore and Handwara.’ The bloody events would mark the beginning of Javid’s withdrawal from mainstream Kashmiri society, and while some in the SLF went underground, he sought out more militant comrades. If India was to be beaten, then all the old ways, of soft-edged politicking and mystical faith, had to be replaced by a razor-sharp Islamic identity. The only way to purge India from the valley was through tahreek, Javid declared. He signed up with the Ikhwan Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of religiously conservative Kashmiri mujahids who had been sizing up the massing Indian security forces. As he took up arms, he was a long way from the schoolboy Javid Ahmed Bhat, or the jaunty cricket player Dabrani. But in his own mind he was not yet far enough.

In the summer of 1990, on the run from the Indian security forces after the Brotherhood had been bloodied in an encounter in Anantnag, Javid unexpectedly stopped by to see his family in Dabran, shinning in through the kitchen window. ‘No need to worry,’ he said, at which his mother and father froze in fear. For Kashmiri parents, said Mr Bhat, these four words meant just one thing: their child was going ‘over there’.

‘We knew then that he was heading for Pakistan. He kissed us and he was gone. Then we heard absolutely nothing.’ For months, hundreds of young men across the valley had been disappearing over the LoC, heading for training camps. But terrible reports soon seeped home of boys, too young and inexperienced to evade the hardened Indian border forces, being cut down the minute they crossed back over into Kashmir. Those who made it further into the valley were also being culled, as India stepped up to the growing militancy. After a while Javid’s parents started mourning, hoping someone would be kind enough to bring his body home to be buried in the village cemetery, a shady spot near a line of knock-kneed chinars. But no news came. ‘To be honest, there were times when I would have claimed any body – just so we could say it’s done,’ said his tearful mother.

In Javid’s absence, the pocket handkerchief of scrub that made up Dabran cemetery rapidly filled with ‘martyrs’. One third were boys of Javid’s age, friends with whom he had played cricket in the summer holidays, killed by the Indian Army while serving one tahreek organisation or another, some of them home-grown, some funded from across the LoC. Another third were boys who had had no connection to the militancy whatsoever, but were killed just for coming from Dabran, which for many in the Indian security forces was crime enough, given the village’s links to Javid and other up-and-coming figures in the azadi movement. The remaining third were unknowns, mostly gunned down by the Rashtriya Rifles (RR), a new specialist counter-insurgency force raised by India’s army chief in May 1990, whose ruthlessness would change the face of the conflict beyond recognition.

Made up of soldiers seconded from other parts of the Indian Army and paid extra, the original six battalions of the RR – motto Dridhta aur Virta, meaning ‘Strength and Bravery’ – had been created as a counter to Brigadier Badam’s ISI operation. But soon the RR, which would have forty thousand men in Kashmir, the largest dedicated counter-insurgency force in the world, was as renowned for its reckless lack of precision as for its ingenuity and valour. In Dabran and other villages across the valley, the bodies of those it had killed, who it described as ‘foreign militants’, were dumped at the local police post, without justification or documents. Most were Kashmiri civilians who had been abducted by the RR and summarily executed, but no one was brave enough to take it to task. Instead, Dabran’s cemetery became a place to bury the evidence, and for collective mourning. Everyone in the village had someone ‘over there’, so the Dabranis clubbed together to pay for the last rites and the burial shrouds of these unclaimed corpses, hoping the same civility would be accorded their kin, should their bodies be found on Pakistani soil.

One day early in 1995, six years into the insurgency, while snow settled on the single track through Dabran, a stranger banged at Mr and Mrs Bhat’s front door. His face was obscured by an unkempt beard and a pakul, the flat woolly cap favoured by the Afghan mujahideen, and the couple were terrified until he spoke. Then Mrs Bhat fell to her knees. It was Javid, the son who in her mind’s eye she had buried. After the hugging and kissing, and the pouring of namkeen (salt tea) from the thermos, Javid cleared his throat. ‘I am not Javid any more,’ he told them, adding that he did not have long to explain. He was with some men with guns, on their way to carry out an important mission. Right now they were stationed outside as lookouts.

‘Where have you been?’ asked his father, wanting a souvenir of his son, a fragment to fill the void of waiting. In Pakistan, Javid told him. And Afghanistan. Sipping his tea, he explained that while serving in the Muslim Brotherhood he had come across a mujahid who had mesmerised him, an implacable, smooth-skinned man nicknamed Supahi al-Yemeni, or ‘the Warrior from Yemen’, who rarely broke into a sweat. Supahi had said that he bottled up his fear. The proof was that in an engagement with the enemy he always remained standing even under heavy fire, trading bullets until his Kalashnikov glowed in the dark. Everyone had been a little afraid of Supahi’s self-control and recklessness, which were daunting qualities for young Kashmiri recruits so raw they still dropped their weapons and tripped over guide ropes at night. But Javid had been drawn in as Supahi told him of his experiences as a veteran of many wars. Believing that in Javid he had found a like-minded soul, Supahi convinced him to undergo specialist training. In the summer of 1990 they had taken a bus to Uri, a town in western Kashmir, then climbed high up to the LoC and crossed over with a few dozen other boys, following a toe-tingling midnight scramble so close to Indian Army camps they could hear the soldiers guffaw. When they finally reached the other side they were exhilarated, calling out ‘Naraay takbir, Allahu akbar!’ (Cry out loud, God is great) before sliding down the snowy slopes on their trouser bottoms, like boys in the park. Eventually, as the temperature dropped further, Javid had arrived in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, his face tinged with blue.

Small tent villages run by religious organisations encircled Muzaffarabad, the capital of what all Kashmiris dreamily eulogised as ‘Azad’, or Free Kashmir, the region over the LoC that was administered by Pakistan. Now it had the appearance of a refugee camp and the smell of a rubbish dump. Uniformed instructors, who everyone murmured with respect were members of the ISI or from the Pakistan military, taught Javid how to strip down a Kalashnikov and assemble a rocket launcher. Once a week he ate slivers of fatty mutton; the rest of the time it was cold bread, rice and daal scoffed down while squatting on the ground. They dug latrines day and night, but raw sewage flowed everywhere, and wild dogs converged to pick at the garbage left rotting in the open. However, for the first time in his life, surrounded by pious and like-minded youths, Javid felt alive, and over the weeks he spent there the camp was deluged with new recruits from his side of the Line of Control.

‘Somehow, between prayers, and from one week to the next, thousands of boys came over,’ Javid told his father as he sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the living room of his childhood home in Dabran, a flock cushion wedged behind his back and a Chinese rug thrown over his legs. ‘Within a month there were barely enough weapons to go around, only one Kalashnikov for every seven volunteers.’ They counted out bullets, sharing the few they had equally between them all. Soon there were no live-fire exercises at all. Although Pakistan had planned this secret Kashmiri revolution, it had been taken aback by the speed with which it had spread, and the demand for arms and training. What had started as a dribble of fighters had become a torrent, with one group of 1,800 young men rumoured to have crossed over the LoC in a single day. Wedding caterers from Rawalpindi had to be brought in to cook for the ISI’s massing Kashmir militia. ‘No one teaches you how to prepare for a revolution,’ Javid told his father. ‘Which books should we read? It was chaos.’

While Pakistan tried to come to grips with the forces it had set in motion, Javid moved up the ranks. Many boys were sent back over into Indian Kashmir after just a few weeks of basic guerrilla-warfare training, but Javid, with his BSc in engineering, was picked out. Supahi suggested he accompany him over another mountainous border, this time the ranges that divided Pakistan and Afghanistan. Working their way between boulders on ponies bowed by the weight of bursting saddlebags carrying munitions and banknotes, they eventually reached Camp Yawar, the jihad factory of the Holy Warriors where Saifullah, the warrior former student from the Binori Town madrassa in Karachi, had trained thousands, the place where Masood Azhar had endured his night-time humiliation. By the time Javid arrived it was capable of housing up to 1,800 recruits, and with strictly assessed diploma courses and a postgraduate programme, Yawar had evolved into a college of war. Here, Javid told his father, were serious-minded revolutionaries. His first lesson had been to accept that he was no longer a Kashmiri, but an Islamic fighter who would respond to any call to perform holy jihad, the world over. ‘First Kashmir, then Palestine,’ he recounted. Mr Bhat stared back at his son, fearing that he understood all too well what this meant.

Yawar’s core curriculum was based around three pillars: Haj Habi Tablighi (religious indoctrination), Tarbiyat (training) and Jihad (the holy fight). Two kinds of courses were offered: the basic one-month guerrilla-warfare starter (the one Masood had failed in 1988), and a three-month specialist course that included modules in explosives, encrypted communications and counter-intelligence. From this second course, students graduated as fully-fledged jundullahs, or soldiers of Allah. The best would be picked out for further training as commanders, learning how to manage men as well as weapons, and how to plot and execute operations. Javid completed this final course, becoming an ordnance specialist, handling explosives for the first time and also learning to create highly volatile home-made incendiaries by mixing textile fixatives with petroleum jelly. He was taught how to manufacture mines, IEDs and booby traps, and shown how to transform a battery-powered doorbell into a remote detonator.

In April 1992, Javid was ready. He was appointed district commander for Anantnag, part of the Holy Warriors’ high command structure in south Kashmir, and was launched back across the Line of Control into India, repeating his first treacherous mountain journey in reverse. His base would be a newly-established Holy Warriors camp in the remote forests east of Anantnag, where he and his father had once hunted musk deer.

From now on, Javid Ahmed Bhat of Dabran took on another identity: ‘Sikander’, the Persian name for Alexander the Great. He chose it because he believed it befitted a mujahid with an understanding of justice, capable of compassion as well as bravery. And the Kashmir operation he had been sent to mastermind began well, as he mounted audacious operations against Indian patrols while recruiting hundreds to the cause, like-minded boys he had searched out from among former neighbours and friends, who were sent over the LoC to be trained and armed by the ISI. However, it was not long before there were breakaway factions. Everyone in Kashmir had an opinion about everything, and even these splinter groups split again to form new cells. Too many Kashmiris wanted to be king, Sikander complained to his closest comrades. Far away in Pakistan, Brigadier Badam realised this too, as he surveyed the rapidly disintegrating ranks of militants. He knew they would have to be consolidated if the insurgency was to begin to bite.

In the autumn of 1993 Sikander was one of the Holy Warriors’ senior Kashmir commanders who received a message that their group was being subsumed into the unified ISI-backed outfit Harkat ul-Ansar, the Movement of the Victorious. A new chief of military operations was coming to the valley to whip everyone into shape: the Afghani. Sikander told his father that initially he had been worried. While he was an important commander in south Kashmir, in the eyes of Islamabad he was but a small cog. He needed to prove himself all over again.

Things had gone well. From the moment they met in January 1994, the Afghani could see that Sikander was brave and committed. He also came with the blessing of Langrial, the Afghani’s old comrade, who had sized up the bright young Kashmiri at Camp Yawar and crossed the LoC with him in 1992. Langrial and Sikander had even conducted a few successful operations together in Kashmir. The Afghani was quick to appoint Sikander his lieutenant.

Shortly after the Afghani’s arrival, however, news broke that Langrial had been caught. Sikander was among the first to volunteer to bring about Langrial’s freedom. He was a central figure in the brazen thirty-hour firefight in Elahi Bagh in Srinagar on 16 January, from which he and the Afghani only narrowly escaped alive. Sikander was there too when the Afghani abducted Major Bhupinder Singh, the Indian Army officer who was supposed to be exchanged for Langrial. And Sikander was also present when that plan foundered, and the Major was executed. He told his father that his role in this killing had ‘saddened him’. He was more than happy to kill Indian troops in battle, but the cold-blooded execution of an unarmed man breached his moral code.

However, in February 1994, when the Afghani learned that Masood Azhar was coming to south Kashmir on a mission to get the ISI’s Kashmir operation back on track, it seemed only natural that Sikander should be put in charge of all security arrangements. He selected the remote village of Matigund, high above Anantnag, as the place where Masood would deliver his first address, an event that the ISI hoped would draw a line under the Langrial affair.

However, the visit had gone disastrously wrong, with Masood and the Afghani being captured. As District Commander of Anantnag, Sikander felt he had failed both the Movement’s Chief of Military Operations and its General Secretary, who were both now in Indian hands. He had been charged with their security, and he should have been there to protect them. But, like a schoolboy, he had fallen off his motorcycle on the way to the majlis, and therefore had not been in the room to voice his concerns at the ill-advised plan for Masood to give the Friday sermon at Anantnag. Sikander imagined he was now a laughing stock. He felt as if he had to restore his reputation and exact revenge.

Immediately after the arrests, Sikander began blasting the first Indian patrol he found, strafing, bombing, hurling grenades and risking the lives of all those around him. This led to mass round-ups and crackdowns, in Dabran and elsewhere, although when Masood heard about it later, he was impressed, writing ‘Commander Sikander attacked the Indian Army for fifteen consecutive days.’

In his mind, Sikander had to rectify the mess, but those around him were alarmed by his actions. Eventually he was disarmed by his fellow Brothers and forced to take refuge in a safe house in remote Lovloo village, high up in the Pir Panjal mountains, until he cooled off. ‘I was brought down to earth,’ he told his parents.

In the early summer of 1994, plans arrived from Pakistan for an audacious plan, backed by the ISI, to free Masood, the Afghani and Langrial. Sikander was to run it, and he received instructions that he was to conduct another kidnapping. As he related this story to his parents Sikander seemed uneasy with it, and skimmed over some events. All he would say was that he had been told to seek out foreigners, rather than well-connected Indian nationals or army officers. Western hostages could be used to exert pressure on the Indian government to release the prisoners, he had been advised.

Sikander had hastily put together a kidnap party that in June 1994 seized two British hostages, Kim Housego, who was only sixteen, and a thirty-six-year-old video producer, David Mackie, both of whom had been trekking with their families in the hills above Pahalgam. They were held in the Pir Panjal mountains for seventeen anxious days, while Sikander’s group attempted to negotiate with the Indian authorities.

He finished this story abruptly, his father recalled, claiming that it had ended well for the hostages and badly for him. Although he had put together enough supplies and armed protection to hold out in the mountains for months, influential voices on the other side of the Line of Control had ordered him to end the operation. The government of Benazir Bhutto in Islamabad had come under intense international pressure after Kim Housego’s father, a former British journalist based in New Delhi, launched a noisy public campaign to save his son, claiming that the group holding him had links to the Pakistani establishment. Soon after, with the Pakistani Prime Minister demanding that the hostages be freed, Sikander had been forced to hand the two Britons over to Kashmiri journalists at Anantnag. He had vowed never to get tangled up with foreigners again. ‘It wasn’t like transporting bullets or rice,’ he told his father. Human cargo was prickly and temperamental. Hostages required kilos of meat to eat, and were capable of shredding their captors’ nerves. Furious foreign governments were difficult for Pakistan to ignore. All of Sikander’s men had been ‘deeply affected’ by the operation, finding the stress of living in close physical proximity to their unpredictable Western charges far more taxing than fighting in the woods and villages.

Now, in January 1995, after various other abortive plots to secure Masood’s freedom had been proposed, a new order had come from over the Line of Control. A few days previously, a courier known as ‘Zameen’ had arrived from Muzaffarabad with news that a high-level delegation was on its way from Pakistan, bringing instructions, approved by the ISI, that would lead to Masood and the Afghani being freed. Sikander said that all he knew was the code-name: Operation Ghar.

Draining his tea, Sikander kissed his family goodbye. ‘The end is not yet written,’ he told them as he pulled his pakul down over his head before vanishing into an indigo night speckled with snow. If Mr Bhat had known that this would be the last time he would ever see his son, he would have asked Javid what he meant.

Sikander headed for the Heevan Hotel, a three-storey wood-and-tin building on the banks of the Lidder River in Pahalgam, the nearest thing the trekking town had to luxury. It was a journey of just thirty-five miles, but it took Sikander a couple of days, as he was a wanted man and had to travel by foot and pony, sticking to the remote mountain ridges, frequently doubling back on himself to ensure no one was following. Popular with wealthy Indian honeymooners and executives, and the odd Western trekker doing India-lite, the Heevan, the police suspected, had become a refuge for senior commanders in the Movement, with several members of staff under scrutiny for having contacts with the insurgent group. The police knew that Sikander had stayed there on several occasions. He did not mingle with the paying guests, who enjoyed large, comfortable mustard-yellow bedrooms with TV, air-conditioning and hot showers. Instead, the mujahid from Dabran slipped in through a kitchen door around the back, and occupied a disused storeroom in the attic, with a view of the blackness of the pine forest behind and up to the glistening Pir Panjal and the raucous Lidder River gurgling down below, clearing his head.

There word reached Sikander from Zameen, the ISI messenger. Operation Ghar was to involve yet another kidnapping. Sikander told two confidants that, even worse, Zameen had said his targets would once again be foreigners, so as to heap pain on India by internationalising the Kashmir crisis, drawing Western embassies into the fray. Why do this again, Sikander had asked, but Zameen was a messenger and had no idea. All he had been told was that Sikander was ordered to capture European or American specialists working on infrastructure projects in the region, people of consequence from powerful corporations that would work hard to get them released. To avoid a repeat of the embarrassing climbdown of the previous year, the Movement was to create a front organisation to carry out the kidnappings, making it harder for the Indian security forces to anticipate their tactics and easier for Pakistan to disguise its involvement. More significantly, the captives were not to be concealed in the Pir Panjal. Instead, they would be spirited over the LoC into Pakistan, a treacherous journey of more than a hundred miles, mostly by foot, sometimes by pony, a marathon of mountain passes and peaks that, if successfully traversed, would surely secure the release of Masood and his jailed colleagues.

Three weeks later, at the end of February 1995, Sikander heard from Zameen again. Most of the kidnap team had crossed the LoC. Right now they were camped in the snow-covered forests past Uri, the last Indian-administered town on the old Muzaffarabad road. The party consisted of twenty-four ‘brothers’, as the mujahids referred to one another. They had been organised into an outfit called ‘al Faran’, a name randomly chosen by someone in Islamabad that had vague Islamic connotations, being a mountain in Saudi Arabia. Some of the team were Punjabis from Bahawalpur, Masood’s hometown; others were drawn from the madrassas of Karachi; more than a dozen were Pashtuns from either side of the Afghan border. All were war veterans, and among them was ‘the Turk’, whose real name was Abdul Hamid, a mujahid of Turkish ancestry who had fought just about everywhere. Sikander knew him, and was immediately worried.

The Turk had a reputation as a kal kharab, a crazy guy. He had been flitting back and forth between Kashmir and Pakistan for a couple of years, and Sikander had seen him in action on many occasions. There was no denying he was a brave and experienced mujahid, having also survived battles in Sudan and Somalia, even fighting with the Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed, and rumoured to have been part of the detachment of foreign Islamic shock troops involved in the so-called ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident of October 1993, a badge of honour in the world of jihad. Two US helicopters had been brought down after rocket-propelled grenades were fired into their tails, triggering the notorious battle in which nineteen American soldiers died and many hundreds of Islamic militiamen were killed or wounded. He was also said to have been in Bosnia and the Caucasus, setting ambushes for Russian troops (who he had also slain in large numbers in Afghanistan for much of the 1980s).

Sikander knew that the Turk would be difficult to lead, and even harder to follow. Coupled with his legendary temper was a deep religiosity, a spirituality that comforted simple fighting men, although his commanders had found it often swamped his strategic vision.

There was some good news. Sikander’s role was to make sure that Operation Ghar was supported in every way possible once the team had entered his theatre of south Kashmir, but he was not expected to travel with the al Faran brothers day-to-day, so handling the Turk would fall to al Faran’s Pakistani field commander, Mohammed Hassan Shafiq. An alumnus of the Darul Uloom madrassa in Khanewal, Punjab, another offshoot of Masood’s grand madrassa in Karachi, Shafiq had trained at Camp Yawar at the same time as Masood, graduating with honours, and had joined the Holy Warriors as a senior commander with the nom de guerre Abu Jindal, roughly translated from the Arabic as ‘the Killer’. Since early 1994 he had been fighting in Kashmir with the Movement, regularly crossing the LoC with newly trained fighters, weapons and explosives. Sikander knew him as cool on the battlefield and ruthless in his dealings with the enemy. Abu Jindal, Sikander was certain, was equipped to keep a lid on his deputy. He was renowned for his battlefield vision, even if the Turk’s eyes were often cloaked by a crimson rage.

There was something else about the kidnap team that pleased Sikander. Some of its members were Kashmiris, who had been included for their local knowledge, contacts and allegiances to local insurgent groups who might be called on to assist the operation. It was also important to make sure al Faran had a genuine azadi element to it, so the Indian government could not turn the kidnappings into a political issue, blaming Pakistan for interfering on Indian soil.

The most senior Kashmiri was Qari Zarar, an old hand from Doda, a district in Jammu, the southern half of the state. Zarar had been recruited primarily for his mountaineering skills. He could read a track like no one else, but his nerve had been called into question. Sikander worried about him. The Pashtuns had an expression, which translated as ‘last man standing’, that referred to a man’s courage under fire. Whenever a Soviet helicopter gunship had roared overhead in Afghanistan during the 1980s, its auto cannon spitting out three thousand rounds a minute, the first person to hit the deck would be thrown out of the unit, and the last would be made the leader. Although he had not fought in Afghanistan, Zarar was thought of as having ‘a mouthful of dirt’. Beside him would be a sixteen-year-old novice, also from Doda, a teenage gujjar boy who Zarar called beta, or son. This boy was rumoured to be so green he barely knew how to shoulder a rifle. But he did have hidden uses, Sikander was advised, including a thorough knowledge of the secret shepherds’ routes through the high Pir Panjal and into the deadly Warwan.

Sikander could not quite put his finger on it, but for some reason he was still filled with anxiety. The team was an awkward mix of men and boys, with different allegiances and priorities, some too weak, in his opinion, to see things through, others too strong-willed and unpredictable for such a delicate operation. Having been in the business of kidnapping several times already, including direct experience of holding Western hostages, this was not the unit Sikander would have chosen. But he was not in overall charge, his authority having been significantly weakened by the loss of the Afghani and Masood, as well as the failure of the Housego and Mackie operation. It was too late to gripe or turn back. But in March 1995, as he awaited the team’s arrival in south Kashmir, busying himself concealing weapons, ammunition and food in the horseshoe of hills above Anantnag, Sikander received some alarming news.

Instead of making their way directly to Anantnag, as had originally been intended, the al Faran party had been forced to divert to the ancient citadel of Charar-i-Sharief, in Badgam district, twenty miles south-west of Srinagar. Heavy snow and rain had hampered their passage down from the LoC, and when they reached the valley they encountered heavier Indian patrols than had been expected. Unable to push on, they had decided to consolidate at Charar-i-Sharief, a wooden medieval settlement, closely stacked on a knife-edge of a hillside, which was known to strongly support the militancy. As far as the Indian security forces were concerned, the town was a vipers’ pit of enemy gunmen at the best of times, and in March 1995 thawing militants from many different groups were known to have converged there, holing up in and around Charar’s main attraction, a wooden mausoleum and prayer hall that had been erected in ancient times because of a story that the flying coffin of Sheikh Noor-ud-din Wali, a famous rishi, or saint, who had attracted a vast following in the fourteenth century, had descended from the heavens and chosen Charar as its final resting place.

The arrival in Kashmir of the remains of Noor-ud-din had had an enormous impact on the region, gradually transforming it from Hinduism to Islam. Noor-ud-din, who had spent his last years living in a cave, surviving, it was said, on only one cup of water a day, had even been chosen as Kashmir’s patron saint, a decision that had infused the region with its unique flavour of Sufism. This holiest of shrines had become a place of pilgrimage for devotees from across the subcontinent. Relics of the Sheikh’s life and death were guarded inside a complex decorated with chandeliers and ancient Persian rugs, and surrounded by a maze of inns and food halls, markets and boarding houses – a Kashmiri Lourdes, flocked to by hundreds of thousands of worshippers of all faiths, especially the sick. More importantly to the insurgents, all approaches to the shrine could be observed, making it the perfect redoubt, with the added advantage that the reverence it inspired made the Indian security forces tiptoe around its boundaries.

When the brothers of al Faran arrived seeking refuge in Charar-i-Sharief in March 1995, they discovered they were not the first. Ahead of them was a group of Kashmiri and Pakistani insurgents under the command of Haroon Ahmed, a mercenary from Peshawar. Known to his men as ‘Mast Gul’, or simply ‘the Major’, he had come over to boost the Kashmiri insurgency, working for Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), the largest of the indigenous Kashmiri militant groups, which had also been lavished with cash and weapons by the ISI. Now Mast Gul had stockpiled munitions in the holy of holies. ‘I had hoped to lure India into a direct attack,’ he said later, ‘bringing about a battle in this holiest of cities that would make the entire ummah [Muslim world] rise up in hatred.’

The Indian security forces were aware of this plan, and instead laid siege to the town. The brothers of al Faran found themselves stuck in the middle. Although the Movement (Pakistani) and HM (Kashmiri) were rivals, they shared a common enemy in India, and both had a loyalty to the Kashmiri freedom movement and the ISI. So when Mast Gul told them, ‘You will fight with us,’ Abu Jindal’s boys could not refuse him.

The Movement had intended for the Operation Ghar party to arrive in Anantnag quietly and well-rested. But at Charar-i-Sharief they were press-ganged into another man’s operation. In Anantnag, Sikander became frantic on hearing this news. It was already mid-March. The hostages should have been seized by now, yet every morning he read in the papers of the siege hardening.

The frozen spring thawed into early summer, and still there was no let-up. Sikander was about to send word that a new team should be sent from Pakistan, when in the early hours of 10 May 1995, two explosions rocked Noor-ud-din’s shrine. He saw the footage for himself, broadcast live by local and international TV channels that had gathered on a neighbouring hillside to watch events. It showed how the ancient wooden edifice crackled and smoked before flames licked through it, panicking the Indian security forces that ringed it, who tried to douse the flames, at the same time keeping a lookout for Mast Gul and his men. But the HM fighters never emerged, and the soldiers failed to extinguish the fire. By dusk the security forces were surveying a dismal scene: more than two thousand ancient homes destroyed, along with the shrine itself. The footage was broadcast everywhere.

A powerful story spun its way across continents that the Indian Army had deliberately torched the shrine in order to smoke out the HM cell. This was vehemently denied by India, which insisted that the militants holed up inside had done the deed themselves. However, given their track record in Kashmir, the Indian security forces were now plausibly framed. Almost as demoralising, Mast Gul and most of his men had slipped away through the choking smoke. Abu Jindal, the leader of the al Faran kidnap party, had not been so lucky. He had been captured, and a third of his men killed. Even before commencing Operation Ghar, the brothers were leaderless and down to sixteen.

Two weeks later Mast Gul emerged triumphant, staging an impromptu press conference on 26 May from a new hideout, in which a senior HM commander presented him with a 100,000-rupee reward for his ‘heroic deeds’ in escaping the siege at which ‘India had brazenly levelled one of Islam’s most historic sites’. Only later did he confess to supporters in Peshawar that it had in fact been his boys who struck the match. ‘I did what India could not,’ he said, recounting how they had poured thick black lines of gunpowder around Noor-ud-din’s shrine before setting it alight.

Sikander’s bile rose as he read about Mast Gul’s speech. He knew he had to come up with a salvage plan. Operation Ghar was now three months behind schedule, and had lost sight of its original targets: the foreign engineers. By the time the depleted kidnap team made it to the rendezvous point near Anantnag, it would be June. They would be fractious, exhausted and rudderless. Sikander took a decision. They needed to settle on easier prey, he told his comrades, forgetting all of his previous reservations. The summer trekking paths around Pahalgam would soon be attracting a trickle of foreign tourists. He had done this once before, he told his men. Through gritted teeth, he said it would be as easy as picking walnuts.