Mumbai: Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Guerrilla Attack
Source: There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India.The economic disparities created by India's unfettered capitalism are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem.
You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.
An e-mail message to Indian media outlets taking responsibility for the attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen. Almost universally, experts and intelligence officials said that name was unknown.
Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau.
Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. But the combination of the two, said Gohel in London, is a "front name. This group is nonexistent."
"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism."
An Indian security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified said the name suggested ties to a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.
On Sept. 15, an e-mail message published in Indian newspapers and said to have been sent by representatives of Indian Mujahedeen threatened potential "deadly attacks" in Mumbai.
The message warned counterterrorism officials in the city that "you are already on our hit-list and this time very, very seriously."
Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were, indeed, reported killed in the attacks in Mumbai.
Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known.
But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.
"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar.
They don't do hostage-taking and they don't do grenades." By contrast, Gohel in London said "the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group."
Hoffman said the attacks, which he called "tactical, sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the perpetrators.
The Indian security official said the attackers likely had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir.
On Thursday, the group denied involved in the Mumbai attacks. India blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a suicide assault on its Parliament by gunmen in December, 2001 that led to a perilous military standoff with Pakistan.
In London, Gohel said the Mumbai assaults seemed to blend the tactics of the attack on Parliament and an event two years earlier the 1999 hijacking of an Air India flight to Afghanistan that affected foreigners and involved hostage-taking.
The Indian official also suggested the foot-soldiers in the attack might have emerged from an outlawed militant group of Islamic students. Photographs from security cameras showed some youthful attackers carrying assault rifles and smiling as they began the operation.
"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," Fair said. "The economic disparities created by unfettered capitalism are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.
"The public political face of India says, 'Our Muslims have not been radicalized.'
But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that's not true. India's Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad," she said.
"Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. 'Al Qaeda's in your toilet!' But this is a domestic issue. This is not India's 9/11." More...