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| India-Pakistan | |||
| Hardliners take over Jaish-e-Mohammad | |||
| 2003-08-28 | |||
| A bit more info in the fracturingof Jaish-e-Mohammad, between the ISI loyalists and the hardliners. When Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar announced the formation of his new outfit Khudam-ul-Islam last week, he was basically trying to conceal his diminishing clout over his cadre. The fact is, militant and intelligence circles say, the Jaish has split over whether or not to attack US interests in Pakistan. Pitted against Masood is his erstwhile right-hand man, Maulana Abdul Jabbar alias Maulana Umer Farooq, who’s wanted by Pakistani authorities in connection with deadly attacks on a Taxila hospital and a missionary school in Murree. Unlike Masood, Jabbar refuses to kowtow to the military establishment’s order of not attacking US interests in Pakistan. It’s Jabbar who now controls the dominant faction of Jaish, renamed last year as Jamaat-ul-Furqaan. The need for a new name arose because the US state department had placed the Jaish on its terrorist watchlist and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf had promised in his speech on January 12, 2002, to ban extremist organisations. (For all practical purposes, though, Jamaat-ul-Furqaan is still popularly known as Jaish.) The decision to float Khudam is Azhar’s ruse to portray he has not lost control over the Jaish — and has instead chosen to establish a new outfit. Apart from these two factions, militant and intelligence circles say the Jaish has broken into many splinter groups which have chosen to defy the military establishment’s diktat of not attacking US interests. These smaller groups have gone underground, fanning tremendous anxiety among intelligence circles. It’s feared that these Jaish dissidents, largely anonymous and beyond control, have spread countrywide and are desperate to avenge the Taliban’s fall and the arrest of Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. Could be another Saudi Arabia situation, where the government will crack down on the hardcore Jihadis attacking the state, while continuing to allow the mainline Jihadi industry continue operating. Jaish insiders accuse Masood and his cohorts of misusing the organisation’s resources to enrich themselves. For instance, Masood, who hails from a lower-class family that resided in a slummy area of Bahawalpur, Punjab, moved to the city’s posh Model Colony. He and his cohorts began driving around in Land Cruisers and Land Rovers along with their retinues of gunmen. The Jabbar faction alleges that Masood also appointed his relatives and friends to supervise the Jaish’s mushrooming assets—seminaries, publications, offices and bungalows. His blatant favouritism and lavish lifestyle irked those who had spent grim years in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
The Jaish is supposed to have 10000 members, so this is not an inconsiderate number who might "go rogue" | |||
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |