Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

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