by Adrian Levy
The three graduates from Binori Town had undergone basic training, supervised by military instructors borrowed from the Pakistan armed forces and the ISI, and paid for by the CIA, before being sent through the Khyber Pass to do battle with the Red Army. Stories of the Companions’ bravery in Khost and Kandahar were read aloud at Binori Town after Friday prayers, entrancing many students, including Masood Azhar.
By the time Masood was fifteen, in 1983, one of the three Binori Town graduates had been martyred in Afghanistan, another had vanished, presumed dead, while the third had become a famed warrior with the nom de guerre ‘Saifullah’, or Sword of Islam. Reports of his continuing exploits spurred on a second generation of graduates from his old alma mater, who streamed up from Karachi to the Afghan border by bus, lorry and cart. Some of them joined Harkat ul-Mujahideen – the Order of Holy Warriors – a movement of Afghanistan-bound mujahids that had been established by Binori Town scholar Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil.
With his belly-quivering rhetoric, Maulana Khalil rang the bell for jihad so loudly that thousands volunteered for battle from the Karachi mosque complex; with Master Alvi’s help, many more came from madrassas across the southern Punjab. Soon Maulana Khalil and Master Alvi’s efforts had drawn the attention of the ISI, which noted that the Holy Warriors were making a significant contribution to their Afghan operation. According to the indiscreet Alvi himself, the ISI began to finance the Order. A former student claimed that cash stuffed inside jute rice sacks was delivered to the main canteen at Binori Town mosque. Convalescent centres for wounded fighters were opened nearby. Some of the ISI money was used to extend the large network of affiliated madrassas all over Pakistan, especially in the lawless tribal areas of the north-west, where Pashtun tribesmen liked to say they had been ‘born to fight’. Money aside, the system was soon self-sustaining. Those who survived Afghanistan, coming back to Karachi as ghazis, or returning war heroes, gave inspiring speeches to students during lessons and at Friday prayers, priming the next generation for a holy jihad, while Binori Town was guaranteed a steady stream of willing new pupils from across Pakistan, most of whom arrived as six-year-olds who were then steeped in a deeply conservative curriculum tinged by the ethos of the Dark Ages.
Among the thousands of students, Masood Azhar stood out. He quickly gained a reputation for his oratory prowess and religious fervour. Maulana Khalil, who visited Binori Town regularly, came to hear of him. ‘He thought I had talents that needed growing,’ Masood later reflected solemnly, when, at the tender age of twenty-five, he put pen to paper and wrote down his life story for other students to read. ‘Had this not been my path since I was a child?’
By the time Masood reached ninth grade, Maulana Khalil announced that he would be sent ‘for jihad’ with other students from his class. Masood was unnerved. He had always been an ‘indoors’ child, preferring the company of his mother and siblings to the tough neighbourhood boys who played cricket in the street. Since becoming a teenager he had been desk-bound, and had grown used to the creature comforts of Binori Town, preferring a rickshaw to walking, and growing fat on plates of tender nihari, the spicy meat stew that many Pakistanis regard as their national dish. The prospect of roughing it in a desert training camp in Afghanistan horrified him, he wrote candidly. He managed to wriggle out of the trip, writing later that ‘I could not participate physically because of my studies. [Instead] I sent a few of my relatives including one of my brothers for jihad.’
However, when Masood graduated in 1988, aged twenty, Khalil again offered him a place at a mujahideen training camp. This time Masood could not refuse, and a few weeks later found himself at a Holy Warriors base in Yawar Kili, a sprawling mud-brick compound in the bronze desert outside the southern Afghan border town of Khost. Camp Yawar, with its subterranean classrooms, dormitories and bomb shelters carved from the bedrock, came as a severe shock to a young cleric more accustomed to air-conditioned prayer halls. Swarming with brawny recruits, who scrambled on their hands and knees under nets and peppered distant targets with bullets, it was run by Saifullah, the Binori Town graduate turned mujahid, whose abilities were by now legendary. Although he was pleased to meet a warrior about whom he had heard so much, Masood, exhausted by his three-day journey by pickup and pony and overwhelmed by the 50°C heat, confided to his private journal that he was ‘appalled’ by what greeted him.
Overweight and short of breath, Masood failed to make it through the forty-day basic training. But as the young man had been sent with the personal blessing of Maulana Khalil, Saifullah could not return him to Karachi uninitiated in battle, so he dispatched him to the front line anyway. Needing to relieve himself in the middle of the night, Masood emerged from the dugout where his unit was sleeping and forgot, in the darkness, to utter a password to the guards. Believing that Soviet-backed Afghan forces were mounting an ambush, they opened fire, and Masood received a bullet wound to the leg. Saifullah was horrified, and arranged for Masood to be stretchered back to Karachi immediately, accompanied by one of his most trusted lieutenants. The calamitous story was reported to the ISI, whose agents still recall reading it incredulously. For a lesser recruit, this incident would have signalled an ignoble exit from the world of jihad. But Master Alvi was too important a figure in the Deobandi movement for his son to be cast aside. After recuperating, Masood was asked to become editor of Sadai Mujahid (Voice of the Mujahid), the Holy Warriors’ weekly magazine and recruiting officer.
Masood enthusiastically embraced his new position. It gave him a chance to spread his message to a far wider audience, and he let his imagination run wild, creating in one edition a fantastical story of how a young mujahid named Masood, who was filled with a passion for jihad, had been cut down by a Russian sniper, but bravely struggled back to his trench. ‘This left a lasting impact on me and caused a revolution in my heart and mind,’ Masood wrote, imagining himself as the semi-fictional character in the narrative. ‘That’s why I resolved with Allah to spread the message of jihad (besides waging practical jihad at every opportunity).’
Available for five rupees outside mosques and bookshops throughout Pakistan, Masood’s magazine became a smash, selling tens of thousands of copies every Friday. In its pages he wove a spell around the battle being fought in the dusty mountains of Afghanistan, concluding later, in an unpublished memoir, that his words had been responsible for ‘the spread of the jihad task on a vast scale’. A speaking tour followed, visiting ‘maktabs, masjids, streets and bazaars of Karachi … without ever taking a holiday’. Soon Masood was in demand all over Sindh and the Punjab, too, where he was introduced, often with his father Master Alvi at his side, as a war veteran who ‘ignited fire in the hearts of the people’.
Wherever he went, the Russian sniper story preceded him, and after a while he began using it to explain his pronounced limp. Despite his youth, the twenty-one-year-old Masood was now addressed with the epithet ‘Hazrat’, the respected one. But by 1989, with the conflict in Afghanistan on the wane, and Soviet forces retreating from Kabul, Masood was at a loose end. Many battle-hardened Afghani jihadis and their Pakistani counterparts had begun spilling over the border into Peshawar and Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s south-western Balochistan province. Tens of thousands more set up home in Karachi’s outer suburbs. For a time it looked as if the Holy Warriors would stagnate completely – until a spook with a new project emerged from the woodwork.
Privately he was known as ‘Brigadier Badam’ because of the almond milk he drank like whisky, in shots from small glasses, having given up alcohol during the dry years of the Afghan mujahideen. An ISI veteran with more than thirty years’ service, the Brigadier had been one of those responsible for distributing the CIA’s cash for the past decade, US dollars that had been flown into Islamabad, stacked up on wooden pallets. The Brigadier, who is now retired, although he continues to dabble in politics and religion, knew back then how to get the most from his money. One day it would be a truckload of Kalashnikovs for a tribal elder who was
running out of steam, and the next a wad of banknotes for an unruly mujahideen commander complaining about the carnivorous Soviet front. He had become an expert in unconventional warfare, and knew how to build and maintain a private army. He also had some ideas about how to redeploy the Holy Warriors, sending them to fight for a new cause that would benefit the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Ever since the Soviets had begun withdrawing from Afghanistan, with refugees flooding into Peshawar, fearful of what would replace the Red Army, Pakistan had been secretly preparing, in the words of General Zia-ul-Haq, the country’s most recent military dictator, to ‘make something of Kashmir’. Now the eyes of the army and the ISI had been drawn by the fortuitous events taking place on the other side of the LoC. The local insurgency had just exploded there, with hundreds of thousands of people rising up in the Muslim-dominated valley. ‘Pakistan’s security agencies, the army and the ISI, would never pass up an opportunity to make India, the perennial enemy, bleed,’ Badam said.
In the Brigadier’s mind was an idea to send battle-hardened veterans from the Afghan war over the border into Indian-administered Kashmir to boost the insurgency. Almost as soon as it had come into being following Partition in 1947, Pakistan had felt that it had got the dirty end of the stick. The new Islamic republic was awkwardly formed of two halves: West Pakistan, the area west of India that is the Pakistan of today, and East Pakistan, the region east of India that is now Bangladesh. Maps of the subcontinent resembled two green Muslim batwings encircling a great saffron-coloured Hindu heart. A deep sense of insecurity settled over the divided country, an unfading paranoia about the bigger, wealthier and better-armed India that sat in the middle.
In its hurry to leave the subcontinent, Britain had left such haphazard borders that the two new countries began fighting over territory immediately. One of the most contested areas was East Pakistan, where a sizeable proportion of the population wanted independence, and the Himalayan principality of Jammu and Kashmir, whose Hindu monarch had sided with India against the wishes of his Muslim subjects. The deal that Maharaja Hari Singh had signed with India’s last Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, had resulted in the mountain kingdom being divided up like spoils: a small portion of western Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan going to Pakistan, while Hindu-dominated Jammu, the Muslim Kashmir Valley and tiny, Buddhist Ladakh remained with India. Later, Pakistan had gifted bits and pieces to China, which went on to seize another slice from India. Ever since, India had continued to claim all of Kashmir while holding just over 40 per cent of it, while Pakistan, administrating just under 40 per cent, wanted it too, but publicly insisted that every Kashmiri had the right to decide his or her own destiny,
The two countries had fought many times over these disputed territories. The most serious conflagration came in December 1971, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had ordered an assault on East Pakistan, which had ended after barely two weeks, with the Pakistan Army forced into a humiliating surrender at Dhaka racecourse. Pakistan had never recovered from what it regarded as a deeply shameful moment in its young history, and ever since, its military leaders and the ISI had been searching for the right lever to pull so as to reassert themselves. Now, in 1989, with the war in Afghanistan coming to a close, tens of thousands of pumped-up Muslim guerrillas at a loose end and Kashmir boiling up of its own accord, it was obvious to Brigadier Badam (and many others he served with) that their moment had come.
According to a journal written by Masood and later seized by Pakistani federal investigators, the Brigadier approached Maulana Khalil in Karachi with a proposal. The ISI was prepared to offer $25,000 a month to the Holy Warriors to find fighters to wage war in Kashmir, a sum that could rise dramatically if Maulana Khalil achieved anything like his success in Afghanistan. The Brigadier added, Masood recalled, that there was money to spend because for years the ISI had been siphoning off American cash intended for Afghanistan and putting it into a contingency fund to aid rebellion in Kashmir. To date, Pakistan’s activities there had been restricted to reaching out to the leaders of Kashmir’s indigenous freedom struggle, clandestine meetings often being staged in Saudi Arabia, where participants met under the cover of going on Haj.
There had been the odd ISI-sponsored incident in Kashmir, like the time in 1983 when India had played the West Indies in a one-day cricket international at the Sher-i-Kashmir stadium in Srinagar, and spectators were paid to shout abuse and hurl eggs at the Indian players. A series of bomb blasts across the Kashmir Valley, paid for by the ISI, had led to riots and government buildings being put to the torch. Some places, such as the southern town of Anantnag, at times became ungovernable. But the Kashmiri groups, Badam complained, had a habit of going their own way, preferring to mount their own campaigns, calling for freedom and independence from everyone, rather than incorporation into Pakistan. In the eyes of the Holy Warriors, whose ranks were now bloated with war-hungry Pashtuns and dutiful Punjabis, the Kashmiris – infused with their mountain ways and Sufi-inspired traditions – were insufficiently bloodthirsty. ‘The Kashmiris were just too moderate,’ Masood Azhar wrote in the Voice of the Mujahid, ‘to mount the kind of total war that was needed if India was to be unseated.’
What Kashmir needed to tip it over the edge, according to Brigadier Badam, was a fully-fledged infiltration across the LoC. India’s superior military might meant Pakistan was unlikely to win a conventional war. So, rather than sending its own soldiers to die, Pakistan would manage the action from the sidelines, officially distancing itself, claiming that the upwelling of violence over the border was a spontaneous Holy War, a ‘jihad for freedom’. It was a neat plan that Badam had borrowed from his recent experience of working with the Americans in Aghanistan. As Masood later wrote, it would be ‘a steady stream of volunteers crossing over’. The Holy Warriors was just the kind of organisation the ISI needed to see the plan through, a tried and tested group of Islamist fighters loyal to an ISI-friendly emir, or leader (Maulana Khalil), with an established recruitment base (Binori Town, the Pashtun heartlands and the southern Punjab), a well-oiled training infrastructure (Saifullah’s Camp Yawar) and a mouthpiece to rally its followers (the Voice of the Mujahid). The candle on this cake was Masood Azhar, someone capable of getting the youth hot and bothered.
After Maulana Khalil agreed terms, the military operation escalated rapidly, Badam recalled, with young men from places like Bahawalpur and Peshawar, trained by Saifullah and armed by the ISI, infiltrated into Indian Kashmir at high altitude in cells of six to eight, their passage masked by artillery bombardment from regular Pakistan Army units stationed along the LoC. Once they were on Indian soil, Kashmiri guides helped bed them in before they mounted hit-and-run operations across the valley.
India was taken aback by the sudden rise in violence. The tipping point came in December 1989, when militants kidnapped Rubaiya Sayeed, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of India’s Home Minister, threatening to kill her unless India released five leading Kashmiri fighters from jail. Within five days the New Delhi government capitulated, and Rubaiya was saved. Believing the security situation in Kashmir was running out of control, India suspended local government, imposing Governor’s Rule and New Delhi’s writ on the citizens of Kashmir. The man they sent in to stamp out the unrest was Jagmohan Malhotra, a confidant of the Gandhi dynasty who had served in Kashmir before.
On his first day, 19 January 1990, Governor Malhotra ordered a curfew across the valley, while the Indian security forces mounted a crackdown, local parlance for mass house-to-house searches. In the lanes and alleys of Srinagar’s old town, usually a whirl of rug merchants, horse-drawn carts and young boys scurrying about with trays of tea and freshly baked bread, everything was brought to a standstill as residents were strip-searched, soldiers battering down ancient wooden shopfronts, toppling wagons of dried fruit, searching for explosives and weapons, arresting residents without warrants or warnings, making the summer capital seethe.
On Malhotra’s second day, Indian securi
ty forces opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, defying the curfew to spill out over Gawakadal, a rickety bridge over the Jhelum River in downtown Srinagar. New Delhi eventually conceded that twenty-eight people had been killed, and promised an inquiry that was never convened. However, international human rights groups claimed that the true death tally was almost double that, and survivors gave harrowing accounts of how they had clung to life by hauling corpses over themselves as police officers walked through the scene of the slaughter, finishing off anyone who was still breathing.
The following month, as New Delhi reacted to the mounting violence in the Kashmir Valley by dissolving the state assembly, Brigadier Badam in Pakistan implemented the second part of his plan, a vivid, week-by-week description of India’s heavy-handed response to the Pakistan-backed putsch, written by Masood in his Voice of the Mujahid. He wanted to ensure that people across the Muslim world read about Kashmir’s pain. Masood wrote up a storm, describing how in March 1990 ‘forty unarmed Kashmiris were shot by Indian forces as hundreds of thousands marched for independence’. In May, after militants assassinated Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq, a moderate religious leader, Masood recorded vividly how Indian forces shot dead a hundred mourners at his funeral.
By October 1990 Jagmohan Malhotra was gone, replaced as governor by Girish Saxena, a former head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the equivalent of the ISI. Five years earlier, Saxena had orchestrated a plan designed to smash an insurgency and pro-freedom movement in the Indian Punjab, the brutally effective ‘Operation Blue Star’ that left an estimated 1,500 civilians dead. Under his rule the bloodletting in Kashmir increased. After the army was sent in to quell a riot in the market town of Handwara, fifty miles north-west of Srinagar, 350 ancient houses and shops were burned down. Fifteen charred bodies were pulled from the ruins.