See also: www.southasiaanalysis.org
In a despatch dated September 17,2009,from Washington, the Agence France Press (AFP) has reported as follows:"One drone attack Monday ( September 14,2009) is believed to have killed the leader of the Islamic Jihad Union, Najmiddin Kamolitdinovich Jalolov, an Uzbek native implicated in terrorist plots and attacks in Germany and Uzbekistan.
Officials said they are almost certain he was killed, though a DNA test hasn't yet been performed. A drone attack on Sept. 7 appeared to have killed another prominent Islamic militant, Ilyas Kashmiri, who had been briefly detained in Pakistan for alleged involvement in a 2003 assassination attempt against then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. There is less certainty about his death, however." Both the Drone strikes are reported to have taken place in North Waziristan in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan (FATA). Further details are not yet available.
2. In the past there were conflicting versions of the organisational affiliation of Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri. While some reports described him as the Amir of the Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) branch of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), other reports described him as the head of a splinter group of the HUJI of Pakistan headed by its Amir Qari Saifullah Akhtar, which had split from it and was operating independently in Jammu & Kashmir of India from sanctuaries in the POK.
3. Ilyas Kashmiri was among those arrested by the Pakistani authorities in January,2004, in connection with the investigation into the two unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi in December,2003. While some of the others arrested, including some junior Air Force officers, were prosecuted and convicted, Ilyas Kashmiri himself was released for want of evidence of his involvement. It was claimed by sections of the Pakistani media at that time that Ilyas was released on the intervention of Syed Salauddin, the Amir of the Hizbul Mujahideen and the head of the United Jihad Council for Kashmir, who reportedly managed to convince the Police that Ilyas had nothing to do with the two attempts to kill Musharraf.
4. Ilyas was subsequently reported to have closed down the camp of his set-up in the POK and shifted to North Waziristan from where he was operating in the non-tribal belt of Pakistan. In a despatch of May 24,2009, Amir Mir, the well-informed Pakistani journalist, who writes for the "News" and other papers said: "Commander Ilyas Kashmiri was recently named in a charge sheet filed by the Islamabad police in the November 2008 gruesome murder of Major General (retd) Amir Faisal Alvi, the former General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the elite Special Services Group (SSG). The 12-page charge sheet submitted by the Rawalpindi police in an anti-terrorism court on May 12, 2009 stated that the former SSG commanding officer was killed to avenge the role he had played in the fight against Taliban linked militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
The charge-sheet prepared by the Koral police station states that those involved and already arrested in the murder included Major (retd) Haroon Rasheed, a resident of Azad Kashmir; Mohammad Nawaz Khan of Peshawar and Ashfaq Ahmed of Okara. The charge sheet says the murder of Major General Amir Faisal Alvi was carried out on the instructions of Commander Ilyas Kashmiri who had provided funds and weapons.
The charge sheet pointed out that Ilyas Kashmiri had already been named by the intelligence agencies for involvement in the October 2008 kidnapping for ransom of Satish Anand, a Karachi-based renowned film producer and distributor and the real uncle of Juhi Chawla, a well known Bollywood actress.
After Satish Anand was recovered in the last week of April 2009 and the kidnappers arrested, it transpired during interrogations that one of them - Major Haroon Rasheed alias Abu Khattab – was a former Pakistani Army officer and involved in the murder of General Alvi. According to the murder charge sheet, the three accused – Haroon, Ashfaq and Nawaz followed Alvi when he left his residence in Bharia Town in Rawalpindi for his private office in Islamabad and killed him and his driver near the PWD Colony. Once considered close to General Pervez Musharraf, Amir Faisal Alvi was the first General Officer Commanding of the elite Special Services Group, and had also commanded the elite Group as a Brigadier. The first Pakistani Major General to have captained the Armed Forces Skydiving Team (AFST) as a GOC, Faisal Alvi was forcibly retired from the Army on disciplinary grounds ‘for conduct unbecoming’ by then Army Chief General Musharraf in August 2005."
5. Ilyas Kashmiri reportedly had his own training camp in the Razmak area of North (?) Waziristan and was collaborating with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
6.The name of Jalolov, 37 years old, had figured in 2007 as a suspected ringleader of a plot to attack several targets in Germany, and in 2006 as a suspected ring leader of plots targeting hotels catering to Western visitors in Central Asia. None of these attacks materialised, though. U.S. officials alleged he was an organizer of the 2004 terrorist attacks in Uzbekistan that killed at least 47 people. In this connection, reference is invited to my article of September 6,2007, titled "Global Jihad: Uzbeks To The Fore".
7.Human intelligence of good quality from Pakistan's tribal belt continues to flow to the US intelligence agencies despite action taken by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to identify and execute suspected agents of the US who have been feeding intelligence to the US forces. Such executions, confined mostly to members of the Pashtun community, have not come in the way of successful strikes by the CIA-operated Drone (pilotless) planes on targets in the two Waziristans.
8. The success rate of the Drone strikes has gone up after Punjabi jihadis belonging to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) moved to the Pashtun belt from their traditional sanctuaries in Pakistan's Punjab province and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir to help Al Qaeda, the TTP, the Afghan Taliban, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), a splinter group from the IMU, in their operations in Pakistani and Afghan territories. This would indicate that the US intelligence has had better luck in penetrating Punjabi jihadi organisations than in penetrating Pashtun organisations, Al Qaeda and its associates.
9. Rashid Rauf, a Mirpuri from the UK, who was wanted by the British authorities in connection with their investigation of a plot to blow up a number of US-bound planes, was reported to have been killed in a Drone strike last year. He was related by marriage to Maulana Masood Azhar, the Amir of the JEM, and was associated with the JEM, which has been operating in the Swat Valley along with the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM). (18-9-09)
The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai.
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