At dusk on November 26, Kuber was about four nautical miles off Mumbai. On instructions received via satellite phone from their handlers in Pakistan, the raiders seized the captain, tied his arms and legs, cut his throat, and threw his body belowdecks.12 They cross-decked from the fishing trawler into three military-grade Gemini rigid-hull inflatable boats—a difficult operation at night, out of sight of land, with a three-foot coastal swell running—then abandoned the Kuber and set off toward Mumbai in the inflatables.13
Nightfall in Mumbai
The assault teams landed in two separate locations, near the fishing colony of Badhwar Park and Machhimar Nagar, in the Colaba waterfront area of South Mumbai. Unlike the upscale residential neighborhoods, hotels, and high-rise office complexes that dominate the rest of this area, the landing sites the terrorists chose were dense, complex informal settlements—coastal slums made up of thousands of tiny shacks, fishing huts, and moored boats.14 Local people noticed both landings. In one case the terrorists, who were well groomed and wore neat Western-style clothes, successfully explained themselves as “students”; in the other they intimidated local fishermen (who, like Solanki, probably thought they were smugglers or members of local organized crime groups) by pointing to their weapons. Though the locals saw the team land, none of those who spotted the terrorists reported them to the police—probably because of the lack of police presence (or government services generally) in this part of Mumbai.15 Just as the raiders had slipped out of Pakistan by nesting within the coastal traffic of Karachi, they had now entered India under cover of the normal background clutter of licit and illicit flows in and around the slums and port of Mumbai.
By 8:30 p.m. the full team of ten had landed and split into five pairs. Two of these pairs, guided by GPS, moved on foot to attack their previously assigned objectives. Each of the remaining three pairs hailed one of Mumbai’s black-and-yellow Fiat taxis and blended into the heavy waterfront traffic to move to their targets; two of these placed an improvised explosive device under the seat of their taxi as they left it, having set the device on a timer to explode later, create confusion, and tie up the Indian emergency services.16
From their tactical operations center in a Pakistani safe house in Karachi, a team of attack controllers led by Sajid Mir of LeT, along with Hafiz Mohammed Saeed (the head of Jamaat ud-Dawa), Major Iqbal of ISI, and other Pakistani military and intelligence officers monitored the situation by using cellphones and satellite phones and by tracking Twitter feeds, Internet reports, and Indian and international news broadcasts.17 Using Skype, SMS text messages, and voice calls, the control room fed a continuous stream of updates, instructions, directions, and warnings to the attackers at each stage of the operation, gathered feedback on the Indian response, and choreographed the assault team’s moves so as to keep it from being pinned down by Indian security forces.18 Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the overall planner and tactician of the raid, was also in the ops room; over the past few months he had acquired several Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) telephony accounts (similar to Skype) as well as phone accounts in the United States, Austria, Italy, and India, to maintain connectivity with the raiders.19
Lakhvi had designed the first assaults as diversionary attacks to draw off Indian police and emergency services, forcing them to deal with multiple simultaneous incidents across the city, while the main assault force headed for its true objectives: a Jewish community center and two luxury hotels, all in the waterfront area. Shortly after 9:35 p.m., the first assault pair burst into the Leopold Café, a popular drinking spot for foreign tourists, about two blocks from the Taj Mahal Hotel. The two assaulters threw grenades, and then fired into the crowd, killing eleven and injuring many others before withdrawing into the street. They then moved the short distance to the Taj Mahal Hotel, firing as they went along a crowded alleyway, killing another thirteen civilians en route.20
With chaos descending on the vast city’s waterfront as the Mumbai police responded to the first attack, the other raiders were moving to their targets. Besides the team that was already shooting its way toward the Taj Mahal from the Leopold Café, another pair was headed for the same hotel. One assault pair was moving to the Oberoi Trident Hotel, and one to the Chabad Lubavitch Jewish cultural center at Nariman House. The final pair consisted of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab and the raiding group’s ground commander, Abu Dera Ismail Khan. The two men took a taxi to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the magnificent colonial-era central railway station in downtown Mumbai.
Kasab and Khan slipped into the enormous passenger hall of the great station. After observing the flow of commuters for a time, and noting the positions of the lightly armed police and Railway Protection Force officers in the building, they opened fire into the crowd on Platform 13. Firing long bursts from their AK-47s and throwing hand grenades, they killed 52 people, wounded 108, and created a mass panic. After an attack lasting almost ninety minutes, the two terrorists withdrew from the terminus and headed on foot for the Cama and Albless Hospital, a women’s and children’s hospital two blocks from the station. Arriving, they opened fire, but inflicted no casualties on the hospital’s 180 patients: the nursing staff, hearing the firing and explosions at the railway station, had locked the building’s metal doors and guided their patients into back rooms. The attackers did kill two security guards, Baban Ugre and Bhanoo Devu Narkar, but were forced to flee without getting inside the hospital.21 Though the two terrorists failed to kill any patients, the Cama Hospital attack was a turning point in the raid, because as they fled the scene Kasab and Khan succeeded—through pure luck—in killing the senior Indian counterterrorism police officer in Mumbai.
Hemant Karkare, joint commissioner of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), was a respected, dedicated, and energetic officer who had successfully investigated several terrorist attacks, by both Muslim and Hindu extremists.22 As ATS chief, he would have played a critical role in coordinating the Indian response to the raid. Karkare and three of his officers, responding to the railway station shooting, had moved through the terminus building from the rear as the terrorists fled; they climbed into a Q ualis four-wheel-drive vehicle and pursued Kasab and Khan toward the Cama Hospital. In a lane near the hospital, the police spotted and fired on Kasab, but failed to notice Khan in the shadows. Khan returned fire, killing Karkare and two of his officers. The raiders dumped the bodies onto the roadway, seized the Q ualis, and drove off toward South Mumbai. They fired at police outside a cinema, but then hit a roadblock set up by officers from the Gamdevi police station, on the coast road near Girgaum Chowpatty, one of Mumbai’s most famous public beaches.
The police at the roadblock opened fire. In the ensuing gun battle Khan was killed and Kasab was captured when a heroic police constable, Tukaram Omble, charged him and seized the muzzle of his AK-47, taking a burst of fire in the chest at point-blank range but managing to keep hold of the rifle’s barrel, thereby allowing other police to capture Kasab alive.23 Omble died at the scene, and along with Commissioner Karkare was later awarded the Ashok Chakra, India’s highest award for non-battlefield gallantry. Kasab, now wounded and in police custody, would be the only terrorist to survive the raid.24
The Main Assault
It was 10:45 p.m., and the two assault pairs at the Taj Mahal had joined forces to attack the hotel. The four men charged through the front entrance, shooting staff at the reception desk, then split into pairs and attacked the hotel’s two ground-floor restaurants, killing diners and throwing grenades into the basement. They began seizing hostages, focusing on British and American nationals, and herded them up to the nineteenth floor.
Despite the chaos, Taj Mahal staff managed to move about 250 people to the hotel’s Chambers area, but terrified guests there soon began using cellphones to call and text their relatives, and in so doing they alerted the media. Indian and international television, Twitter, and Internet news sites soon reported that a large number of hotel guests were trapped,
and named their hiding place. Within minutes, the LeT control room in Pakistan, monitoring the media, had passed this information to the assault team in the hotel, who immediately sent a search party to find them.25 Also at about this time an Indian cabinet minister, trying to reassure the public, announced that India’s elite Marine Commando (MARCO) counterterrorism force was en route to the hotel and would arrive in two hours; this information, which the Karachi control room also passed to the raiders on the ground, alerted them that no response units were yet deployed and that they had a clear window of time to consolidate and harden their position.26 The terrorists moved about the hotel, taking many hostages at gunpoint; hundreds of others were trapped in their rooms.
Hearing the gunfire, eight police officers arrived at the hotel just before midnight, but they soon realized they were too lightly armed to confront the terrorists—like most Indian police, they wore plastic-lined riot vests that would stop a hand-thrown rock but not a bullet, had vintage .303 bolt-action rifles with only a few rounds of ammunition, and carried wooden sticks known as lathis. Realizing they were seriously outgunned, the police backed off to wait for the MARCOs. The commandos were delayed by the need for coordination between India’s central government and the Mumbai City and Maharashtra State authorities, a contentious process that took several hours, but they finally arrived at about 2:00 a.m. along with operators from the National Security Guard (NSG), a national-level counterterrorism unit of the Indian police. Two eight-man MARCO squads with an NSG team moved into the hotel, rescuing guests and engaging the terrorists in an intense firefight.27 By 3:00 a.m. the hotel’s historic dome had caught fire from a grenade blast, and a gun battle was raging on the upper floors as the flames spread. Fire trucks arrived, and firefighters attempted to deal with the blaze; they succeeded in rescuing nearly two hundred hotel guests from their rooms using ladders, a heroic effort given that they were dealing with gunfire and grenades as well as smoke and flame. Again, the Karachi control room relayed media reports on the emergency response to the LeT assault teams, allowing them to stay one jump ahead of the Indian counterterrorism operators.28
The Taj Mahal Hotel is on the eastern waterfront of the heavily urbanized South Mumbai peninsula; less than a mile away on the western side of the peninsula, one more LeT pair was attacking the Oberoi Trident, another landmark luxury waterfront hotel. The assault was synchronized with the attack on the Taj Mahal and followed a similar tactical drill: the assault pair burst into the reception area, killed hotel employees at the main desk, then attacked diners in the hotel restaurant before moving to an upper floor, gathering hostages along the way. Disrupted by the loss of Commissioner Karkare and preoccupied by the simultaneous attack at the Taj Mahal, Indian security forces took more than four hours to respond. When the ATS and local police finally moved into the Oberoi compound at 2:25 a.m., they again found themselves outgunned by a well-prepared and forewarned terrorist pair, and had to pull back. At dawn the next morning, MARCO and NSG teams climbed the outside of the building via the fire escape to the top floor, then assaulted down through the hotel, trapping the terrorists in a room on the eighteenth floor. The LeT pair held out throughout that day, all the next night, and into the following afternoon (November 28) before finally being killed at around 3:00 p.m. as they tried to change locations. Meanwhile, police and firefighters had rescued many hotel guests.29
The third main target, the Jewish center at Nariman House, was in one of the most congested and densely populated parts of the Mumbai waterfront. Unlike the two high-rise hotels, the cultural center was a five-story house in a maze of narrow back alleys where there were extremely limited fields of fire and constricted access.30 Also unlike the attackers at the two hotels, the LeT team at Nariman House entered and immediately seized hostages, then engaged in a classic hostage negotiation, holding their ground and awaiting the Indian response. Mumbai police and NSG established a cordon around the building and periodically exchanged gunfire with the terrorists, as well as intermittently trying to negotiate with them for the release of hostages, but again they lacked the firepower to attempt an attack on the house. At about midnight on November 27 the police managed to rescue nine hostages from the first floor of the house. By 8:00 a.m. on the twenty-eighth, however, intercepted communications suggested that the terrorists were killing their hostages, and NSG began an air assault, with operators fast-roping from helicopters onto the roof of the house. As in the hotel attacks, international and local media reported the NSG operation live on television, blogs, and Twitter, allowing the Karachi control room to alert the terrorists in the house in real-time. As a result, NSG took all day to clear the house in an extended room-to-room gun battle; by 9:00 p.m. the building was finally secure, with both terrorists killed. All the remaining hostages, including Israeli rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his pregnant wife, Rivka, were found dead: they had been horrifically tortured before being murdered.31
All this time, the Taj Mahal was still under siege, and there was little let-up in a series of intense firefights on the upper floors of the grand hotel and in the new high-rise tower next to the historic building. The LeT team set fires inside the building, partly to confuse the Indian responders and create cover, partly to increase the visual impact of the attacks from a media standpoint.32 They may also have been trained to light fires to confuse thermal imaging equipment that might have been used to track their moves inside the building.33 The terrorists took about 150 hostages and executed many, but dozens more were rescued by MARCO, firefighters, and NSG. After a false start, by 8:00 a.m. on November 29, Indian security forces were able to confirm that they had cleared the building.34
As the smoke cleared after sixty hours of destructive violence, the great city began to clean up the mess and analysts began piecing together what had happened. In all, 172 people were killed in the attacks, including 16 police, 27 hotel staff, 2 commandos, and 9 out of the 10 LeT terrorists, while another 304 were injured.35 The vast majority of people killed and injured were civilians randomly caught up in the attacks, especially in the railway terminus, where the greatest carnage (52 dead and 108 wounded) took place among commuters trapped in a tight space, unable to escape.36 Property damage from the raid was estimated at over US$18 million—not counting the broader cost to the Indian economy.37
Infesting the Megacity
What do the Mumbai attacks tell us about the future spectrum of threats in coastal cities? Many excellent studies have analyzed the counterterrorism lessons of the raid, but for our purposes it’s worth focusing on aspects that relate to the urbanized, networked, littoral environment, where, as we’ve seen, most people will live in the future, and where most conflict will occur.
The first and clearest observation is that the raiders consciously exploited the urbanized coastal environment of Mumbai and Karachi. Karachi, a chaotic and unruly megacity of 21 million, is Pakistan’s largest city and its busiest transportation hub. The city has experienced extremely rapid urbanization since Partition in 1947, when it grew rapidly with the influx of millions of Muslims from newly independent India, and again in the 1980s, when millions of refugees from Afghanistan and from Pakistan’s tribal areas settled in periurban slums.38 The port of Karachi handles 26 million tons of freight per annum, or 60 percent of the country’s total shipping and cargo movement, giving the harbor and its approaches some of the heaviest coastal shipping traffic in the world.39 The LeT raiders slipped out of Karachi under cover of this dense maritime traffic, infiltrated Indian territory in a fishing vessel among thousands of others, made their way into Mumbai by landing at a busy jetty in a coastal slum, and exploited the crowded, dense environment of the Mumbai waterfront to move without detection on foot and in public transport. Mumbai, a megacity of just over 20 million, is India’s second-largest city, after Delhi, and is one of the most densely populated urban centers on the planet, with almost thirty thousand people per square kilometer.40 Its urbanization has been largely organic and unplanned,
resulting in a complex mix of different types of buildings—slums butting up against high-rise hotels, alleyways next to industrial facilities, and so on. The attackers skillfully exploited the complexity of this urban environment, using slums and alleys to cover their movement between targets.
The second major feature of the attack was that the attackers exploited networks of connectivity within and between the two coastal megacities of Karachi and Mumbai. As I mentioned earlier, it’s possible that Captain Solanki of the Kuber didn’t resist the terrorists because he thought they were smugglers, part of a broader network of contraband trading, drug smuggling, and human trafficking in the sea space around Mumbai, an illicit enterprise in which Solanki himself may have engaged in the past, and which—even if he wasn’t personally involved—would have appeared to him as just part of the normal background environment. The locals who saw the team land might also have believed the terrorists were smugglers or illegal immigrants, while the manager on duty at the Leopold Café initially mistook them for backpackers, part of a busy traffic of low-budget tourists that flows through the area.41 It’s worth noting once again that dark networks—flows of people, money, goods, and information that lie outside the view of law enforcement and government authorities—are, in themselves, neither good nor bad, and their existence creates a venue for a wide range of beneficial, neutral, or (in this case) harmful activities. In this sense, any negative externalities of dark networks are effects of the activities of people in the network, not characteristics of the network itself.
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