Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
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Inside Jihad<br />
an Indian military base in Srinagar. <strong>The</strong> attack brought the <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i<br />
military regime under tremendous international pressure to act against<br />
the militant organizations. <strong>The</strong> incident, which occurred a few weeks<br />
after 9/11, forced Musharraf to denounce the raid as a ‘terrorist action’.<br />
A few weeks later, JeM struck again, this time extending its<br />
operations inside India. It was just before noon on 13 December<br />
2001 when a group of gunmen wearing military-style fatigues broke<br />
through tight security and burst into the area in front of the Indian<br />
Parliament building. One of the men was wearing explosives strapped<br />
to his body and blew himself up soon after breaking in. <strong>The</strong>re were<br />
about a hundred members of Parliament inside the House as an<br />
intense gun battle between the attackers and security guards raged on<br />
for thirty minutes. 41 <strong>The</strong> Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee,<br />
was being driven towards Parliament at the time of the assault. He<br />
immediately turned back. <strong>The</strong> gun battle left five attackers and seven<br />
guards dead and 15 others injured. A JeM spokesman immediately<br />
claimed responsibility, but its leaders later backtracked, apparently<br />
under government pressure from <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>. <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> placed Azhar<br />
under protective custody but refused to hand him over to India, saying<br />
there was no evidence of his involvement in the Parliament attack. On<br />
12 January, Musharraf banned JeM after the US Department of State<br />
placed them on its list of terrorist groups. But the action did not affect<br />
their activities. Even before the ban, JeM had started operating under<br />
a new banner, Jamaat-e-Furqa. Azhar was released by a court order<br />
a few months after his detention. But the group retaliated against the<br />
ban by launching a series of terrorist attacks across <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> targeting<br />
western nationals, Christians and Shia Muslims. Many of its activists<br />
subsequently became foot soldiers for al-Qaeda operations in <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>.<br />
<strong>The</strong> <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> government had chosen to ignore Azhar’s involvement in<br />
all this: he was detained only for a few months under the Maintenance<br />
of Public Order. Since then he has maintained a low profile.<br />
JeM activists returning from Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban<br />
regime were responsible for a suicide attack on a Christian church<br />
in <strong>Islam</strong>abad’s high-security diplomatic enclave which killed several<br />
people, including two Americans, in March 2002. <strong>The</strong> group was also<br />
responsible for attacks on Shia mosques in different parts of <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se kinds of sectarian attacks inside <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> marked it out as<br />
differing in strategy from other hardline Sunni groups such as Sipah-e-<br />
Sahaba <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> (SSP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), though in reality<br />
their memberships often overlapped. JeM was also involved in a