SUICIDE MILITANCY-I


When death is the weapon, and message

The world and the Valley are looking the most gruesome side of militancy in the face. Muzamil Jaleel looks at suicide missions and their increasing grip over Jammu and Kashmir

They wield a weapon that security agencies have little or no defence to: death. Driven by extreme motivation, their strategy is very simple and very effective. They explode a bomb fitted to their body or just ram an explosive-laden vehicle into their target. The result: maximum casualty and damage.

Suicide militancy started in Kashmir two years ago. Now, security agencies fear the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington will add innovation to the execution of such attacks in Kashmir. ‘‘The threat of death is the only psychological check that prevents militants from taking the risk to go for a spectacular attack on us or on any civilian target. But when the attacker wants to die, how do you stop him?’’ a senior J&K Police officer said. ‘‘We can only reduce the intensity of the attack. We create barricades everywhere and our aim is to check this suicide bomber as much as we can. We can’t do anything more than that.’’

Suicide militancy was initiated in Kashmir by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba soon after the two month-long Kargil war in 1999. However, it has been a common terror tactic employed by Islamist guerrilla groups in the Middle East. In fact, modern suicide militancy as we know it was launched on October, 23, 1983, by the Hizbullah in Lebanon’s capital Beirut. In two separate attacks, their men rammed two explosive-laden vehicles and destroyed the barracks of the US and French army. Around 241 US Marines were killed when a truck with 2,268 kgs of explosives was blasted inside their camp.

In a similar suicide bombing, a vehicle carrying 816 kgs of explosive hit the French military barracks, killing 58 personnel. The attacks had their desired effect: the Americans and French eventually pulled out of Lebanon.

It is this gruesome effectiveness that has seen suicide militancy evolve as an important terror tool. Ehud Sprinzak, dean of the Lauder School of Government, Policy and Diplomacy at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herziliya in Israel wrote in Foreign Policy that ‘‘almost 20 years after its stunning modern debut, suicide terrorism continues to carry the image of the ‘ultimate’ terror weapon’’.

Sprinzak writes that ‘‘this tactic has become a vital part of several terror campaigns, including Hizbullah’s successful operation against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1994-96 Hamas bus bombings and the 1995-99 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) struggle against Turkey besides the formation of the special suicide units by the LTTE called the Black Tigers that added an atrocious dimension to the Sri Lankan civil war’’.

The Jane’s Intelligence Review magazine, in an article titled Suicide terrorism: a global threat, identified ten religious and secular groups across the world: Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad of the Israeli occupied territories, Hizbullah of Lebanon, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Gamaya Islamiya of Egypt, the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, Babar Khalsa International of India, LTTE, PKK and Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

Four secular groups, Natzersit Socialist Party of Syria, Syrian Nationalist party, Lebanese Communist Party and the Baath Party of Lebanon were also engaged in suicide operations in Lebanon alongside the Hizbullah.

IN the Valley, the first major suicide attack was conducted on a Border Security Force camp in Bandipore immediately after India re-captured Tiger hill in Kargil. A DIG of the BSF and two senior officers were killed. Lashkar-e-Toiba, in fact, created a special group which volunteered for suicide missions and named it as Fidayeens (those who make the supreme sacrifice).

But Lashkar denies their Fidayeens are a suicide squad. Reason: Islam strictly prohibits Masood Azhar in 1999, and it announced its presence in the Valley in May 2000 by sending a 17-year-old local resident in explosive- laden car to the main entrance of the Army’s Kashmir Corps (15 Corps) headquarters at Batwara. A class 12 student, Afaq Ahmad Shah belonged to a religious Kashmiri family from Khanyar in downtown Srinagar. His father, a retired school teacher, had affiliations with the Jamat-e-Islami.

Jaish struck again and at the same spot months later on Christmas eve. This time the suicide bomber was a British national, 24-year-old Mohammad Bilal alias Abdullah Bhai from Manchester. These men are members of the Jaish’s ‘‘Khudkush Shaheed Dusta’’ (martyrs squad), according to its fortnightly Urdu magazine.

It is interesting that like in Palestine, suicide militancy in Kashmir too went through what experts call the ‘‘pre-suicide’’ militancy phase. Suicide operations by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Israel during the 1990s were preceded by a wave of knifings in the late 1980s. Sprinzak says the attackers never planned an escape route and were often killed on the spot. ‘‘The knifings did not involve any known organisation and were mostly spontaneous. But they expressed the collective mood among young Palestinians. That created an atmosphere for institutionalised suicide terrorism,’’ claims Sprinzak.

In 1993, six years before suicide militancy was formally witnessed in Kashmir, militants of a small group, Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen, led by a local commander Pareena carried out a wave of daredevil attacks. They would walk into security force bunkers in Srinagar in broad daylight and attack soldiers with sharp knives and snatch their rifles. The tactic momentarily died out, but was later revived, this time by pan-Islamic groups, on a scale that the Valley had never witnessed before.

SUICIDE MILITANCY-II