By M D Nalapat
Organisations controlled by the ISI, such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba are
encouraged to send hardened operatives to Afghanistan. There, they join
the ISIS-linked Wilayat Khorasan.
According
to those tasked with responsibilities involving security, the high
number of “accidents” involving the Air Force, the Navy, Indian Railways
and other institutions vital to national existence have pointed to the
need for a comprehensive examination of every individual involved in
sensitive tasks, rather than just a few. Also, in practice, the few who
get scanned usually come within the radar after they have indulged in
activity of a suspicious nature. However, while processes are being
improved after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took charge in 2014,
officials are hesitant to accept the premise of an increasing number of
sympathisers of ISIS and other ultra-Wahhabi terror groups biding their
time within the governmental machinery, readying themselves to strike
when commanded to do so from controllers in Dubai, Karachi and other
locations, where a substantial number of ISIS supporters function. Even
in the 26/11 carnage of 2008, domestic auxiliaries of the ISI-backed
terrorists were not touched, possibly for fear of a political or other
backlash. This was despite evidence that individuals within India gave
information to ISI handlers about the internal floor plan of the two
hotels in Mumbai that were targeted and also revealed details of the
floor plan and work habits of volunteers at Chabad House, a location in
which members of the Jewish community were specifically targeted.
Exhaustive follow up was not done of suspicious individuals who had
established contact with the Chabad volunteers weeks before the terror
attack in order to get operationally useful information from them and
about them.
Even nine years later, several officials
are reluctant to accept the view of diligent police officers in Bihar
that the ISI is behind the spike in railway accidents, since Prime
Minister Narendra Modi began in 2015 to implement a much tougher line
towards GHQ Rawalpindi than his predecessor. The reason is that such a
finding would necessitate a scan of the thousands of railway and other
staff concerned with maintenance and other functions relating to
passenger safety. For much the same reason, evidence has been brushed
aside that at least a few of the “pilot error” crashes in the Indian Air
Force and the “accidents” occurring in naval vessels were due to
planned acts of sabotage, sometimes carried out in-house by individuals
who had been indoctrinated or otherwise motivated to obey instructions
emanating from GHQ Rawalpindi. Security experts warn that there needs to
be an assessment of not just online patterns and contact lists, but any
spike in spending or travel of all those associated with maintenance
and other sensitive functions in cases where naval vessels or military
aircraft have been lost as a consequence of “accidental malfunction”.
In the US, over the past two years, there
has been an undeclared but comprehensive examination of the online
habits, friend lists, travel done, spending patterns and outside
contacts profile of all—repeat, all—those within the military seen as
being susceptible to recruitment by the ISIS and other ultra-Wahhabi
groups. In India, security experts point to the need for a comprehensive
and systematic trawl of the internet surfing, travel, spending and
social contact patterns of those within both military as well as
civilian organisations, who are involved in tasks essential to security.
In the absence of such a secret but 360-degree examination, information
will remain sketchy on their private travel patterns, internet surfing
and the list of friends outside their parent service. Instead of
focusing on a few core groups, the tradition has been to cast a much
wider surveillance net. Such an expanded base involves even the
painstaking examination of individuals unrelated to security, with the
consequence that those posing an actual danger to the state often slip
under the radar.
For reasons of tactical advantage and
keeping open funding channels, Al Qaeda units and ISIS often claim to
have a hostile relationship with each other, when the reality is that
practically all such ultra-Wahhabi terror groups are linked in a Unified
Field of Terror (UFT). An example is the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), a
terror group openly backed by GHQ Rawalpindi, which set up the Batrasi
camp specially to train fighters to conduct terror operations across
India, with a special focus on Kashmir. The camp is also known to
provide motivational training to intending suicide bombers, who are
thereafter exfiltrated to locations in Kashmir, Xinjiang and parts of
the Middle East. AQIS (Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent) chief Asim
Umar has been in constant (and monitorable) contact with the ISI since
1995, when he left his home district of Moradabad in UP and joined the
Jamia Uloom in Karachi, whose mentor is Masood Azhar, who is under the
protection of China in the UN Security Council. Subsequently, Umar was
transferred to Daul Uloom Haqqani in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, an institution
that boasts terrorists of the notoriety of Sirajudden Haqqani and
Mansour Akhtar. On the instructions of the ISI, Umar has trained and
inducted nearly three dozen Indian nationals into AQIS. The organic link
between AQIS and the ISI was most recently outed in 2015, when US
investigators filed a proceeding against HuM founder Fazlur Rahman
Khalil, revealing details of his contacts with senior officers in the
ISI, all of whom remain unsanctioned by Washington under the Bush-Obama
doctrine of giving a free pass to GHQ Rawalpindi in its terror
operations, a doctrine that is likely to be re-examined, now that Donald
John Trump has been elected the 45th President of the United States.
In 2016, on the instructions of the
self-declared “ISIS Caliph” Abubakr al Baghdadi, Asim Umar called on
Wahhabi groups in India to launch “lone wolf” attacks on officials in
India. According to security experts, AQIS is the preferred platform of
choice of the ISI in its drive to recruit hundreds of volunteers in
India. These could be trained, incentivised and made to carry out acts
of sabotage and violence across India, such as causing railway accidents
and fomenting communal violence through actions that infuriate specific
communities against another. It needs to be reiterated that induction
into ISI-linked modules is not restricted only to Muslims, but include
Hindus and Christians as well. In Nepal for example, almost all key ISI
modules are manned by members of the Hindu community. Hence, such
provocative acts may also get carried out by ISI-linked Hindus in order
to poison communal relations in the manner of the 1930s. GHQ Rawalpindi
has made no secret of its objective to avenge the creation of Bangladesh
by ensuring that bits and pieces of India gain effective independence
from the Union of India, with Kashmir, the Northeast and now Tamil Nadu
and Bengal being focal points of attention in furtherance of this
strategy.
Because of the silence of US authorities
(at least during the Bush-Obama period), the ISI has been open about its
links with ISIS and related groups. Organisations controlled by the
ISI, such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) are encouraged to send hardened
operatives to Afghanistan. There, they join the ISIS-linked Wilayat
Khorasan (WK). There is both an ISI-WK as well as an ISIS-WK in
Afghanistan, the former entirely funded and run from GHQ through the
ISI, especially its S-Wing. Because of ISI-controlled Safe Zones (for
terrorists) in Afghanistan and in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, several Indian
nationals have been directed there by the ISI and thereafter sent back
to India to await further orders. It may be mentioned that both the
narcotics trade and hawala operations in India are run by the ISI, often
acting through agents based in Bangkok, Dubai and Cyprus.
Those involved in security-related tasks
are hopeful that the forthcoming meeting between Prime Minister Narendra
Modi and President Donald Trump will zero in on the links between the
ISI and ISIS, so that this partnership gets weakened and finally broken
up before more damage can be done to either the US or India. In the
meantime, they call for a comprehensive scan of those involved in
sensitive tasks such as safety and maintenance of military and core
civilian assets, so that further unexplained “accidents” on rail, sea
and air may be averted.
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