by Adrian Levy
‘Where have you been?’ asked his father, wanting a souvenir of his son, a fragment to fill the void of waiting. In Pakistan, Javid told him. And Afghanistan. Sipping his tea, he explained that while serving in the Muslim Brotherhood he had come across a mujahid who had mesmerised him, an implacable, smooth-skinned man nicknamed Supahi al-Yemeni, or ‘the Warrior from Yemen’, who rarely broke into a sweat. Supahi had said that he bottled up his fear. The proof was that in an engagement with the enemy he always remained standing even under heavy fire, trading bullets until his Kalashnikov glowed in the dark. Everyone had been a little afraid of Supahi’s self-control and recklessness, which were daunting qualities for young Kashmiri recruits so raw they still dropped their weapons and tripped over guide ropes at night. But Javid had been drawn in as Supahi told him of his experiences as a veteran of many wars. Believing that in Javid he had found a like-minded soul, Supahi convinced him to undergo specialist training. In the summer of 1990 they had taken a bus to Uri, a town in western Kashmir, then climbed high up to the LoC and crossed over with a few dozen other boys, following a toe-tingling midnight scramble so close to Indian Army camps they could hear the soldiers guffaw. When they finally reached the other side they were exhilarated, calling out ‘Naraay takbir, Allahu akbar!’ (Cry out loud, God is great) before sliding down the snowy slopes on their trouser bottoms, like boys in the park. Eventually, as the temperature dropped further, Javid had arrived in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, his face tinged with blue.
Small tent villages run by religious organisations encircled Muzaffarabad, the capital of what all Kashmiris dreamily eulogised as ‘Azad’, or Free Kashmir, the region over the LoC that was administered by Pakistan. Now it had the appearance of a refugee camp and the smell of a rubbish dump. Uniformed instructors, who everyone murmured with respect were members of the ISI or from the Pakistan military, taught Javid how to strip down a Kalashnikov and assemble a rocket launcher. Once a week he ate slivers of fatty mutton; the rest of the time it was cold bread, rice and daal scoffed down while squatting on the ground. They dug latrines day and night, but raw sewage flowed everywhere, and wild dogs converged to pick at the garbage left rotting in the open. However, for the first time in his life, surrounded by pious and like-minded youths, Javid felt alive, and over the weeks he spent there the camp was deluged with new recruits from his side of the Line of Control.
‘Somehow, between prayers, and from one week to the next, thousands of boys came over,’ Javid told his father as he sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the living room of his childhood home in Dabran, a flock cushion wedged behind his back and a Chinese rug thrown over his legs. ‘Within a month there were barely enough weapons to go around, only one Kalashnikov for every seven volunteers.’ They counted out bullets, sharing the few they had equally between them all. Soon there were no live-fire exercises at all. Although Pakistan had planned this secret Kashmiri revolution, it had been taken aback by the speed with which it had spread, and the demand for arms and training. What had started as a dribble of fighters had become a torrent, with one group of 1,800 young men rumoured to have crossed over the LoC in a single day. Wedding caterers from Rawalpindi had to be brought in to cook for the ISI’s massing Kashmir militia. ‘No one teaches you how to prepare for a revolution,’ Javid told his father. ‘Which books should we read? It was chaos.’
While Pakistan tried to come to grips with the forces it had set in motion, Javid moved up the ranks. Many boys were sent back over into Indian Kashmir after just a few weeks of basic guerrilla-warfare training, but Javid, with his BSc in engineering, was picked out. Supahi suggested he accompany him over another mountainous border, this time the ranges that divided Pakistan and Afghanistan. Working their way between boulders on ponies bowed by the weight of bursting saddlebags carrying munitions and banknotes, they eventually reached Camp Yawar, the jihad factory of the Holy Warriors where Saifullah, the warrior former student from the Binori Town madrassa in Karachi, had trained thousands, the place where Masood Azhar had endured his night-time humiliation. By the time Javid arrived it was capable of housing up to 1,800 recruits, and with strictly assessed diploma courses and a postgraduate programme, Yawar had evolved into a college of war. Here, Javid told his father, were serious-minded revolutionaries. His first lesson had been to accept that he was no longer a Kashmiri, but an Islamic fighter who would respond to any call to perform holy jihad, the world over. ‘First Kashmir, then Palestine,’ he recounted. Mr Bhat stared back at his son, fearing that he understood all too well what this meant.
Yawar’s core curriculum was based around three pillars: Haj Habi Tablighi (religious indoctrination), Tarbiyat (training) and Jihad (the holy fight). Two kinds of courses were offered: the basic one-month guerrilla-warfare starter (the one Masood had failed in 1988), and a three-month specialist course that included modules in explosives, encrypted communications and counter-intelligence. From this second course, students graduated as fully-fledged jundullahs, or soldiers of Allah. The best would be picked out for further training as commanders, learning how to manage men as well as weapons, and how to plot and execute operations. Javid completed this final course, becoming an ordnance specialist, handling explosives for the first time and also learning to create highly volatile home-made incendiaries by mixing textile fixatives with petroleum jelly. He was taught how to manufacture mines, IEDs and booby traps, and shown how to transform a battery-powered doorbell into a remote detonator.
In April 1992, Javid was ready. He was appointed district commander for Anantnag, part of the Holy Warriors’ high command structure in south Kashmir, and was launched back across the Line of Control into India, repeating his first treacherous mountain journey in reverse. His base would be a newly-established Holy Warriors camp in the remote forests east of Anantnag, where he and his father had once hunted musk deer.
From now on, Javid Ahmed Bhat of Dabran took on another identity: ‘Sikander’, the Persian name for Alexander the Great. He chose it because he believed it befitted a mujahid with an understanding of justice, capable of compassion as well as bravery. And the Kashmir operation he had been sent to mastermind began well, as he mounted audacious operations against Indian patrols while recruiting hundreds to the cause, like-minded boys he had searched out from among former neighbours and friends, who were sent over the LoC to be trained and armed by the ISI. However, it was not long before there were breakaway factions. Everyone in Kashmir had an opinion about everything, and even these splinter groups split again to form new cells. Too many Kashmiris wanted to be king, Sikander complained to his closest comrades. Far away in Pakistan, Brigadier Badam realised this too, as he surveyed the rapidly disintegrating ranks of militants. He knew they would have to be consolidated if the insurgency was to begin to bite.
In the autumn of 1993 Sikander was one of the Holy Warriors’ senior Kashmir commanders who received a message that their group was being subsumed into the unified ISI-backed outfit Harkat ul-Ansar, the Movement of the Victorious. A new chief of military operations was coming to the valley to whip everyone into shape: the Afghani. Sikander told his father that initially he had been worried. While he was an important commander in south Kashmir, in the eyes of Islamabad he was but a small cog. He needed to prove himself all over again.
Things had gone well. From the moment they met in January 1994, the Afghani could see that Sikander was brave and committed. He also came with the blessing of Langrial, the Afghani’s old comrade, who had sized up the bright young Kashmiri at Camp Yawar and crossed the LoC with him in 1992. Langrial and Sikander had even conducted a few successful operations together in Kashmir. The Afghani was quick to appoint Sikander his lieutenant.
Shortly after the Afghani’s arrival, however, news broke that Langrial had been caught. Sikander was among the first to volunteer to bring about Langrial’s freedom. He was a central figure in the brazen thirty-hour firefight in Elahi Bagh in Srinagar on 16 January, from which he and the Afgha
ni only narrowly escaped alive. Sikander was there too when the Afghani abducted Major Bhupinder Singh, the Indian Army officer who was supposed to be exchanged for Langrial. And Sikander was also present when that plan foundered, and the Major was executed. He told his father that his role in this killing had ‘saddened him’. He was more than happy to kill Indian troops in battle, but the cold-blooded execution of an unarmed man breached his moral code.
However, in February 1994, when the Afghani learned that Masood Azhar was coming to south Kashmir on a mission to get the ISI’s Kashmir operation back on track, it seemed only natural that Sikander should be put in charge of all security arrangements. He selected the remote village of Matigund, high above Anantnag, as the place where Masood would deliver his first address, an event that the ISI hoped would draw a line under the Langrial affair.
However, the visit had gone disastrously wrong, with Masood and the Afghani being captured. As District Commander of Anantnag, Sikander felt he had failed both the Movement’s Chief of Military Operations and its General Secretary, who were both now in Indian hands. He had been charged with their security, and he should have been there to protect them. But, like a schoolboy, he had fallen off his motorcycle on the way to the majlis, and therefore had not been in the room to voice his concerns at the ill-advised plan for Masood to give the Friday sermon at Anantnag. Sikander imagined he was now a laughing stock. He felt as if he had to restore his reputation and exact revenge.
Immediately after the arrests, Sikander began blasting the first Indian patrol he found, strafing, bombing, hurling grenades and risking the lives of all those around him. This led to mass round-ups and crackdowns, in Dabran and elsewhere, although when Masood heard about it later, he was impressed, writing ‘Commander Sikander attacked the Indian Army for fifteen consecutive days.’
In his mind, Sikander had to rectify the mess, but those around him were alarmed by his actions. Eventually he was disarmed by his fellow Brothers and forced to take refuge in a safe house in remote Lovloo village, high up in the Pir Panjal mountains, until he cooled off. ‘I was brought down to earth,’ he told his parents.
In the early summer of 1994, plans arrived from Pakistan for an audacious plan, backed by the ISI, to free Masood, the Afghani and Langrial. Sikander was to run it, and he received instructions that he was to conduct another kidnapping. As he related this story to his parents Sikander seemed uneasy with it, and skimmed over some events. All he would say was that he had been told to seek out foreigners, rather than well-connected Indian nationals or army officers. Western hostages could be used to exert pressure on the Indian government to release the prisoners, he had been advised.
Sikander had hastily put together a kidnap party that in June 1994 seized two British hostages, Kim Housego, who was only sixteen, and a thirty-six-year-old video producer, David Mackie, both of whom had been trekking with their families in the hills above Pahalgam. They were held in the Pir Panjal mountains for seventeen anxious days, while Sikander’s group attempted to negotiate with the Indian authorities.
He finished this story abruptly, his father recalled, claiming that it had ended well for the hostages and badly for him. Although he had put together enough supplies and armed protection to hold out in the mountains for months, influential voices on the other side of the Line of Control had ordered him to end the operation. The government of Benazir Bhutto in Islamabad had come under intense international pressure after Kim Housego’s father, a former British journalist based in New Delhi, launched a noisy public campaign to save his son, claiming that the group holding him had links to the Pakistani establishment. Soon after, with the Pakistani Prime Minister demanding that the hostages be freed, Sikander had been forced to hand the two Britons over to Kashmiri journalists at Anantnag. He had vowed never to get tangled up with foreigners again. ‘It wasn’t like transporting bullets or rice,’ he told his father. Human cargo was prickly and temperamental. Hostages required kilos of meat to eat, and were capable of shredding their captors’ nerves. Furious foreign governments were difficult for Pakistan to ignore. All of Sikander’s men had been ‘deeply affected’ by the operation, finding the stress of living in close physical proximity to their unpredictable Western charges far more taxing than fighting in the woods and villages.
Now, in January 1995, after various other abortive plots to secure Masood’s freedom had been proposed, a new order had come from over the Line of Control. A few days previously, a courier known as ‘Zameen’ had arrived from Muzaffarabad with news that a high-level delegation was on its way from Pakistan, bringing instructions, approved by the ISI, that would lead to Masood and the Afghani being freed. Sikander said that all he knew was the code-name: Operation Ghar.
Draining his tea, Sikander kissed his family goodbye. ‘The end is not yet written,’ he told them as he pulled his pakul down over his head before vanishing into an indigo night speckled with snow. If Mr Bhat had known that this would be the last time he would ever see his son, he would have asked Javid what he meant.
Sikander headed for the Heevan Hotel, a three-storey wood-and-tin building on the banks of the Lidder River in Pahalgam, the nearest thing the trekking town had to luxury. It was a journey of just thirty-five miles, but it took Sikander a couple of days, as he was a wanted man and had to travel by foot and pony, sticking to the remote mountain ridges, frequently doubling back on himself to ensure no one was following. Popular with wealthy Indian honeymooners and executives, and the odd Western trekker doing India-lite, the Heevan, the police suspected, had become a refuge for senior commanders in the Movement, with several members of staff under scrutiny for having contacts with the insurgent group. The police knew that Sikander had stayed there on several occasions. He did not mingle with the paying guests, who enjoyed large, comfortable mustard-yellow bedrooms with TV, air-conditioning and hot showers. Instead, the mujahid from Dabran slipped in through a kitchen door around the back, and occupied a disused storeroom in the attic, with a view of the blackness of the pine forest behind and up to the glistening Pir Panjal and the raucous Lidder River gurgling down below, clearing his head.
There word reached Sikander from Zameen, the ISI messenger. Operation Ghar was to involve yet another kidnapping. Sikander told two confidants that, even worse, Zameen had said his targets would once again be foreigners, so as to heap pain on India by internationalising the Kashmir crisis, drawing Western embassies into the fray. Why do this again, Sikander had asked, but Zameen was a messenger and had no idea. All he had been told was that Sikander was ordered to capture European or American specialists working on infrastructure projects in the region, people of consequence from powerful corporations that would work hard to get them released. To avoid a repeat of the embarrassing climbdown of the previous year, the Movement was to create a front organisation to carry out the kidnappings, making it harder for the Indian security forces to anticipate their tactics and easier for Pakistan to disguise its involvement. More significantly, the captives were not to be concealed in the Pir Panjal. Instead, they would be spirited over the LoC into Pakistan, a treacherous journey of more than a hundred miles, mostly by foot, sometimes by pony, a marathon of mountain passes and peaks that, if successfully traversed, would surely secure the release of Masood and his jailed colleagues.
Three weeks later, at the end of February 1995, Sikander heard from Zameen again. Most of the kidnap team had crossed the LoC. Right now they were camped in the snow-covered forests past Uri, the last Indian-administered town on the old Muzaffarabad road. The party consisted of twenty-four ‘brothers’, as the mujahids referred to one another. They had been organised into an outfit called ‘al Faran’, a name randomly chosen by someone in Islamabad that had vague Islamic connotations, being a mountain in Saudi Arabia. Some of the team were Punjabis from Bahawalpur, Masood’s hometown; others were drawn from the madrassas of Karachi; more than a dozen were Pashtuns from either side of the Afghan border. All were war veterans, and among them was ‘the Turk’, whose rea
l name was Abdul Hamid, a mujahid of Turkish ancestry who had fought just about everywhere. Sikander knew him, and was immediately worried.
The Turk had a reputation as a kal kharab, a crazy guy. He had been flitting back and forth between Kashmir and Pakistan for a couple of years, and Sikander had seen him in action on many occasions. There was no denying he was a brave and experienced mujahid, having also survived battles in Sudan and Somalia, even fighting with the Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed, and rumoured to have been part of the detachment of foreign Islamic shock troops involved in the so-called ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident of October 1993, a badge of honour in the world of jihad. Two US helicopters had been brought down after rocket-propelled grenades were fired into their tails, triggering the notorious battle in which nineteen American soldiers died and many hundreds of Islamic militiamen were killed or wounded. He was also said to have been in Bosnia and the Caucasus, setting ambushes for Russian troops (who he had also slain in large numbers in Afghanistan for much of the 1980s).
Sikander knew that the Turk would be difficult to lead, and even harder to follow. Coupled with his legendary temper was a deep religiosity, a spirituality that comforted simple fighting men, although his commanders had found it often swamped his strategic vision.
There was some good news. Sikander’s role was to make sure that Operation Ghar was supported in every way possible once the team had entered his theatre of south Kashmir, but he was not expected to travel with the al Faran brothers day-to-day, so handling the Turk would fall to al Faran’s Pakistani field commander, Mohammed Hassan Shafiq. An alumnus of the Darul Uloom madrassa in Khanewal, Punjab, another offshoot of Masood’s grand madrassa in Karachi, Shafiq had trained at Camp Yawar at the same time as Masood, graduating with honours, and had joined the Holy Warriors as a senior commander with the nom de guerre Abu Jindal, roughly translated from the Arabic as ‘the Killer’. Since early 1994 he had been fighting in Kashmir with the Movement, regularly crossing the LoC with newly trained fighters, weapons and explosives. Sikander knew him as cool on the battlefield and ruthless in his dealings with the enemy. Abu Jindal, Sikander was certain, was equipped to keep a lid on his deputy. He was renowned for his battlefield vision, even if the Turk’s eyes were often cloaked by a crimson rage.
