How terrorists are made?(Story of a terrorist)

How Lashkar funded transnational terror campaign
Praveen Swami

• Oman millionaire, Kerala computer engineer, Pakistani jihadists facilitated attacks from Muscat to Mumbai and Bangalore
• Nawaz’s jihadist engagement began when he was just 18
  Landmarks in Oman were on the terror radar

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI: Back in 2006, the lives of a millionaire Omani businessman and a struggling computer technician from Kerala intersected with the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s battle-hardened jihadists. Even now, six months after the arrest of Ernakulam-born Sarfaraz Nawaz and Muscat entrepreneur Ali Abdul Aziz al-Hooti, investigators in India and Oman are struggling to understand the complex networks that emerged: networks that they are discovering bound together Indian Mujahideen attacks in southern India with the Lashkar’s assault on Mumbai and a series of planned bombings in West Asia.
Nawaz’s jihadist engagement began when he was just 18 years old. He joined the Students Islamic Movement of India in 1995, and was elected to its central committee five years later. His contemporaries included many who later played key roles in building the Indian jihadist movement among them, Safdar Nagori, Peedical Abdul Shibly and Yahya Kamakutty.
Like the overwhelming majority of SIMI members, though, Nawaz chose a life of middle-class respectability. He obtained a computer networking qualification from an institute in Kochi, married and, with the help of relatives, found a job in Oman.
During a visit home in 2006, however, Nawaz heard a sermon that dragged him back into the world he had escaped from. Tadiyantavide Nasir known to his followers as Haji Umar delivered a speech casting jihad as a central imperative of Islam.
Inspired by the speech, Oman authorities have since discovered, Nawaz set about making contacts with jihadists in Muscat. Friends at a local mosque put him in touch with al-Hooti, a successful automobile components dealer, who also owned a string of Internet cafés.
Born to an Indian mother, al-Hooti’s radicalisation had been driven by stories of atrocities against Muslims he heard on visits home to Maharashtra. Before he turned 30, al-Hooti had had twice trained at Lashkar camps in Pakistan and emerged as the organisation’s key point-man in Oman.
Working with Lashkar intelligence operative Mohammad Jassem, also known by the alias Tehsin, al-Hooti used his businesses as camouflage for an elaborate operation that funnelled funds to jihadists in India and volunteers into Pakistan for training.
Ali Asshama, a Maldivian national who along with Bangladesh-based Lashkar commander Faisal Haroun helped set up the Lashkar’s Indian Ocean networks, was among al-Hooti’s wards. Haroun and Assham are thought to have crafted the 2006 landing of assault rifles intended to have been used in a terror attack in Gujarat, as well as an abortive 2007 effort to land eight Lashkar fidayeen off Mumbai.
Early in 2007, al-Hooti and Jassem also arranged to ship Mumbai resident Fahim Arshad Ansari from Dubai to a Lashkar camp in Pakistan through Oman and Iran. Ansari is now being tried on charges of having generated the videotape of Mumbai’s streets which was used to train the Lashkar assault team that carried out the November massacre.Multiple targets
By 2007, Oman authorities say, the pro-western Emirate itself had begun to figure on al-Hooti’s list of targets.
In June that year, al-Hooti held discussions with Lashkar sympathisers in Oman on the prospect of targeting prominent landmarks in Muscat, among them a British Broadcasting Corporation office, the Golden Tulip Hotel, and a spa in the upmarket Nizwa area. No final operational plans were made, but Oman authorities found enough evidence to sentence al-Hooti to life last month.
Meanwhile, Nasir made contact with Nawaz, asking for money to fund a series of bombings in southern India. Nasir also needed cash to send volunteers from Kerala to train with the Lashkar.
Nawaz turned to the Lashkar for logistical help. Between March and May, 2008, the Karnataka police believe, al-Hooti transferred an estimated $2,500 for Nasir’s use to a Kannur-based hawala dealer. Lashkar commander Rehan, one of al-Hooti’s associates, arranged for Nasir’s recruits to train with a jihadist unit operating near the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kupwara district.
From July, though, the plan began to slowly unravel. First, the bombs planted in Bangalore failed to work properly. Then, in October, five of Nasir’s volunteers were caught in an Indian Army ambush. Four were killed; the fifth man, Purathur resident Abdul Jabbar, was arrested. Even as the Andhra Pradesh police closed in on Nasir, al-Hooti and Rehan helped arrange his escape with the help of the Lashkar’s top resident agent in Bangladesh, Mubashir Shahid.Lashkar International
West Asia-based jihadists have long played a role in financing the Lashkar’s operations against India, while the Pakistan-based group, in turn, has been seeking a role in the region.
Saudi Arabia-based Mahmoud Mohammad Ahmad Bahaziq, for example, has been indicted by the United Nations Security Council as a key financier of the Lashkar’s infrastructure in Pakistan. Bahaziq, who like al-Hooti, was born to an Indian mother is believed to have been arrested by Saudi Arabia in 2006. There has been no public word, however, on the status of his trial.
Back in 2004, British troops in Iraq detained top Lashkar commander Danish Ahmad who, using the name Abdul Rehman al-Dakhil, had for many years trained cadre for covert operations against India. Since Danish’s arrest, which was first reported in The Hindu, Lashkar operatives have been involved in operations in Australia, the United States of America and even the Maldives.

The Hindu 28th May 2009

Vaiko warns of bloodbath in Tamil Nadu

CHENNAI: Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam general secretary Vaiko on Wednesday warned that Tamil Nadu would witness a bloodbath even if the slightest harm befell Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam leader V. Prabakaran.
Addressing a meeting here to condemn the killing of Sri Lankan Tamils, the MDMK leader said the mind of the people in Tamil Nadu had become a “volcano.” It was now a long time since they had forgotten the Sriperumpudur incident (assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi), he said.
Prabakaran had a place in the hearts of Tamils the world over and they would not tolerate the slightest harm to him, Mr Vaiko said, adding people in Tamil Nadu also would not have a different attitude.
He said they would not be cowed down by the police and guns. The LTTE and its leader Prabakaran could not be defeated in the war.
Recalling the shoe-throwing incident at the news conference of Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram, he said the self-respect of the Tamils was manifested in the self-immolation of 12 persons. The Sikhs could only hurl a shoe, “but here we have people who can get bombs. The next generation of youth will not be like me,” he later told reporters.
Mr. Vaiko said the sea between India and Sri Lanka could not permanently prevent the Tamil youth from visiting that country with arms. “If the Argentine-born Che Guevara could fight for the Cubans, why not the youth from Tamil Nadu for the Tamils in Sri Lanka, with whom they have an umbilical cord relationship,” he asked.
Mr. Vaiko said “India would not remain one country” if Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa did not stop the war and if India did not urge him to stop the war.

Poisoning the minds of children

“Wherever they went, they had a sword in their hand. Their army went like a storm in all the four directions. Any country that came their way was destroyed. Houses of prayers and universities were destroyed. Libraries were burnt religious books were destroyed. Mothers and sisters were humiliated. Mercy and justice were unknown to them.”

This is what lakhs of children going to RSS-run schools will learn about Islam, at the tender age of nine, from their textbook Gaurav Gatha for class four published by Saraswati Shishu Mandir Prakashan (an RSS-run publishing house).

As visible proof of Muslim atrocities the same book also teaches:

“Delhi’s Qutb Minar is even today famous in his (Qutbuddin Aibak’s) name. This had not been built by him. He could not have been able to build it. It was actually built by emperor Samudragupta. Its real name was Vishnu Stambha…. This Sultan actually got some parts of it demolished and its name was changed.”

While thus demonising the Muslims, strangely it does not occur to the Hindu communalists how apt the above description is of what they themselves have been up to in Gujarat, Pune and Ayodhya in recent years. In Pune, the library of the Bhandarkar Institute was vandalised, in Gujarat mothers and sisters were humiliated and murdered, and in Ayodhya the Babri Masjid was demolished.

In the understanding of the Sangh combine (Parivar or family connotes a decent, humane value and cannot be associated with organisations that promote hatred and murder) led by the RSS, the role of Christians is no better than that of the Muslims.

The RSS-run Vidya Bharati Sansthan, which claims to be engaged in providing to the young generation education in religion, culture and nationalism, has the following to teach children about Christians in book no. 12 of a series published by the Sansthan. Followers of Christianity are portrayed as anti-national and a threat to the integrity of India and it is said:

“It is because of the conspiratorial policies of the followers of this religion that India was partitioned. Even today Christian missionaries are engaged in fostering anti–national tendencies in Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal, Bihar, Kerala, and other regions of our country because of which there is a grave danger to the integrity of present day India.”

Warnings unheeded

The heavy cost the nation had to pay for this kind of poisoning of the minds of young children ( a poisoning aided by the BJP using state power whenever and wherever they got hold of it) was seen in Gujarat during the mass murders following Godhra and in Orissa recently. For years before the Godhra riots secular activists like Teesta Setalvad had been warning repeatedly that if the communal hatred being taught to Gujarat children went unchecked, then Gujarat was heading inevitably towards the kind of communal carnage it witnessed in 2002.

After all the children in Gujarat who were exposed to the RSS type of education were not only learning to see the enemy in Muslims and Christians, they were also learning how to deal with it.

Children reading the Gujarat State Social Studies text for class IX would learn:

“apart from the Muslims even the Christians, Parsees and other foreignersare also recognised as the minority communities. In most of the states the Hindus are in minority and Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are in majority in these respective states”.

In the Gujarat State Social Studies text for Std. X, which virtually eulogises fascism and Nazism, the children would learn how to deal with these ‘foreigners’ who are making the Hindus a minority in their own country.

“Internal Achievements of Nazism: Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time by establishing a strong administrative set up. He created the vast state of Greater Germany. He adopted the policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race. He adopted a new economic policy and brought prosperity to Germany….He instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people.”

That in order to maintain the purity and supremacy of the ‘Aryan’ race millions of Jews were butchered was not even thought worthy of mention.

After all, the RSS ideologue, Guru Golwalkar, had categorically stated inWe or Our Nationhood Defined, p. 55-56:

“German race-pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic racesthe Jews. Race-pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for use in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”

These are only a few samples of the kind of ideological poisoning that is undertaken by the RSS and its allies. We have in our book RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi: The Hindu Communal Project, Sage, New Delhi, 2008, (authored by Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan, all Professors of History at JNU) tried to show extensively how the vicious Hindu communal propaganda not only led to the murder of one the greatest living Hindus, Mahatma Gandhi, but even today threatens the very survival of the great legacy of our freedom struggle — a secular, multi-cultural democratic state.

No regulatory framework

No civilised country in the world today will permit racism (communalism is akin to racism and anti-semitism) to be propagated at the popular level, especially at the child’s level. It is shocking that more than sixty years after independence hate speeches can still be given during mass election campaigns threatening to cut off the hands of Muslims. It is totally unacceptable that our children are still exposed to hatred towards other communities despite secular governments making promises about “detoxifying” the education system. A promise last made in 2004 when the victory of the secular forces provided a historic opportunity to combat communalism and to restore the civilisational values of the freedom struggle which were getting severely eroded under BJP rule. However, more than four years later, schools are free to choose any textbooks they please and there is no regulatory framework in place for whetting textbooks before they can be used.

(The writers are professors of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University.)