NEW DELHI: The daring 2001 attack on Indian Parliament was the signature that announced the arrival of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), founded by Maulana Masood Azhar, who was one of the three terrorists released as part of the 1999 Kandahar hijack prisoner swap. JeM, with a single masterstroke of hitting the seat of world's largest democracy, established its terror credentials overnight not only in India but across the world.
Jaish owes its early origins to Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islami (HuJI), a militant outfit active in Kashmir, which subscribes to the same Deobandi ideology that drives the Taliban. It also inflicted a major embarrassment on the NDA government by extorting the release of its leader Azhar and Omar Sheikh, the London School of Economics-trained jehadi who lured and killed American journalist Daniel Pearl.
HuJI later split due to differences, and it was its breakaway group Harkat ul Ansar that used the cloak of Al-Faran to execute the 1995 kidnapping of six foreign tourists in Jammu & Kashmir. The six included two British tourists, Keith Mangan and Paul Wells; two Americans, John Childs and Donald Hutchings; a German, Dirk Hasert; and a Norwegian, Hans Christian Ostro. A note put out just a day after the abductions had said, "Accept our demands or face dire consequences". The central demand of 'Al-Faran' was the release of Pakistan-born Maulana Masood Azhar, arrested by the J&K Police in 1994, and 20 others.
Childs managed to escape and was subsequently rescued. However, Ostro was not so lucky and his headless body was discovered in Pahalgam in August 1995 with the words 'Al Faran' carved across his chest. There is still no information on the other four hostages.
As US and other nations rushed to ban Harkat-ul-Ansar, the jehadi grouop swiftly rebranded itself as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM). There was no change in goal or tactic, securing the release of Masood Azhar by taking hostages. It stepped up its modus operandi to hijack Indian Airlines flight IC-814 soon after it took off from Kathmandu on December 24, 1999. The hijacked plane was diverted to Kandahar leading to o a week-long hostage situation in which Taliban, then in control of Afghanistan, sided with the hijackers.
A swap deal was worked out to meet the hijackers' demands; Maulana Masood Azhar, along with two aides Omar Sheikh (linked to the Daniel Pearl murder case) and Mushtaq Zargar, was taken to Kandahar and freed in exchange for all the passengers.
Azhar, who was feted in Pakistan with Kalashnikovs being fired to celebrate his freedom, did not wait long before floating another terror outfit, the JeM. In its first spectacular act in Kashmir, JeM carried out a fidayeen (suicide) attack on the Badami Bagh cantonment in Srinagar in 2000. Emboldened, now it was Jaish's turn to target the national Capital. What followed was an audacious attack on Parliament House by a five-member fidayeen squad. Though all the five terrorists were killed, the attack went down in history as the most daring bid yet to hit the seat of democracy.
Though the Parliament attack earned him recognition in Pakistan, the subsequent overreach by JeM in issuing threats to the US and targeting the Pakistan dictator General Pervez Musharraf , led to a clampdown by the Pakistani government. The JeM soon fell out of favour with the ISI, as LeT consolidated its position as the most trusted aide of ISI to plot attacks against India.
Jaish's single masterstroke caught global attention
This article
Jaish's single masterstroke caught global attention
can be opened in url
http://newscolophony.blogspot.com/2013/02/jaish-single-masterstroke-caught-global.html
Jaish's single masterstroke caught global attention
