Al Qaeda's Role in the 2008 Mumbai Attacks
Background to Attacks and the Al Qaeda Link
India has encountered terrorist attacks from Islamic militants in the past, and it has seen the commando style raids, referred to as fidayeen in Arabic, of Lashkar-E-Taiba. Lashkar-E-Taiba or Tayyaba, the “Army of the Pure,” was blamed for the December 13, 2001, attack on India’s Parliament, where a team of five gunmen snuck through VIP security fencing in a vehicle displaying Parliament and Home Security tags and shot at various security personnel and set off RDX explosives before being killed by security forces. Twelve were killed in the attack, including the five militants. On July 11, 2006, a series of bombs killed at least 209 people on Mumbai’ s mass-commuter Suburban Railway; police later accused Lashkar-E-Taiba and the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) for the bombing. Another series of explosions occurred in the northeastern state of Assam weeks before the Mumbai attacks in early November, 2008, killing 80 people, an act widely believed to have been coordinated by Lashkar E-Taiba and Jaish-E-Muhammad.
India and Pakistan
A sordid and entangled history of Hindu-Muslim relations, reaching a nadir with the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 that left over 2,000 Muslim minorities dead, leaves open the incurring debate among Indians and Pakistanis, with the gulf lying in the disputed Kashmir region, India ’s only Muslim-majority province. Situations have tensed in India since these series of bombings and insurrections after 9/11, relegating a greater part of the blame on what journalist Jason Cowley calls the “failing state of Pakistan.” The most problematic for Pakistan to control is the host of Kashmir militancy tanzeems such as Lashkar-E-Taiba who for decades have been “raised, nurtured, assisted, and trained by the ISI,”(Rebasa et al, 7) a wavering third-wing intelligence bureau of Pakistani’s government that Pakistan has admitted contains many rogue elements since its incursion in the Taliban regime in the 1980s.
The ISI's Role
The ISI’s shifting in alliances in regards to disputes surrounding the Kashmir conflicts have positioned the agency for these relative associations with “non-state actors” of political violence, usually Islamic militancy groups operating from areas such as Muzaffarabad and the Mansehra district. (Petrou, 28) It is a distinction in a developing and nuclear-armed country that sees the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, according to Michael Petrou, as “the most Islamist-friendly Muslim intelligence service in the world,” and has linked its training of the LeT commandos and internecine relations, including Al-Qaeda cells, to the attacks on Mumbai.
Al Qaeda and Pakistani's ISI
According to intelligence gathered by foreign correspondence reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad, Al Qaeda influenced a shifting of commands in the ISI under Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, a Bangladesh-based Islamist militancy group. A “low-profile” plan to attack minor sites in the Kashmir region was formulated by the ISI to support the Kashmiri cause, which, according to Shazad, was normal in spite of the peace process with India. When a low-level section head, Zakiur Rahman, affiliated with Harkat militancy, was chosen to oversee the plan his connections to Al Qaeda “tailored some changes,” as Shazad writes:
Instead of Kashmir, they planned to attack Mumbai, using their existent local networks, with Westerners and the Jewish community center as targets....Zakiur and the ISI’s forward section in Karachi, completely disconnected from the top brass, approved the plan under which more than 10 men took Mumbai hostage for three days and successfully established a reign of terror.
Pakistan's Response
Pakistan’s government denied ISI’s involvement in the incident a month following the attacks, despite evidence produced by India to the contrary, but relinquished to admitting in February of 2009 that the attacks had been mostly planned in Pakistan. Pakistan also arrested key three figures with connections to the Mumbai attacks, including Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, founder of Lashkar-E-Taiba, who was placed on house arrest but released in early June, 2009, due to lack of sufficient evidence. New Delhi’s court in India, however, ordered the arrest of over 22 Pakistani-national suspects in connection to the Mumbai attacks weeks following Saaed’s release, including Mohammed Saeed and the former ISI section head Zakiur Rahman. On July 19, 2009, a dossier from Pakistan on the Mumbai attacks was released to the media; within the document Pakistan admits Lashkar-E-Taiba’s involvement in the attacks and names Zakiur Rahman as chief conspirator.
Al Qaeda's Response
Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a top-ranking Al Qaeda commander, similarly joined in the alleged complicity with a statement and video released in February, 2009, to the BBC. The 20-minute video offers a warning to India to pull out of Pakistan or risk more “Mumbai-style attacks.” He went on to explain that the “Mujahideen” will “target [India’s] economic centers and raze them to the ground.” It was Al-Qaeda’s orchestration, according to experts, that definitively “fine-tuned” Lashkar-E-Taiba’s impact on the Western world and “struck a blow at India’s ruling class” by specifically targeting “sanctuaries for the privileged and affluent.” Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid explains that “it was certainly the most sophisticated kind of attack that we have seen in India so far....There were multiple targets and this was a suicide squad, all the attackers were clearly prepared to die.” Rashid spoke hours after the attack was over and smoke still plumed from Taj Mahal Hotel, a dramatic reminder that the LeT’s targets under Al Qaeda were as much symbolic as they were strategical.
Selected Sources:
Cowely, Jason, “Here was a Peculiar Grace.” New Statesman (January 26, 2009). 14.
Gohel, MJ & Sajjan. "Were the Mumbai Attacks Inspired by Al Qaeda?" December 1, 2008. http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/30/gohel.mumbai/index.html
Government of India, Mumbai Terrorist Attacks - Dossier of Evidence, 2009
Petrou, M. "Trail of Terror." Maclean's, December 29, 2008, 28
Rabasa et al. Lessons of Mumbai. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2009. 7
Shahzad, Syed Saleem. "Al Qaeda 'hijack' led to Mumbai attack." December 2, 2008. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JL02Df05.html
Mumbai Train Station
|
India Map
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Politics & Society
Latest Articles