Jaish-e-Muhammad

JM

12/12/2006

Jaish-e-Muhammad, known in English as the Army of Muhammad, operates under a number of telling names like the Army of the Prophet Muhammad and the Army of Holy Warriors, or Jaish-e-Mujahideen. Headquartered in Kashmir and in Pakistan they were established in 2000 by a former General Secretary of the Harkat-ul-Ansar and the Maulana Masood Azhar. They are a salafi fundamentalist Islamic organization. They are not however, Kashmir's most popular terrorist group. That distinction belongs to Hezb-ul-Mujahideen (the Party of Holy Warriors), the militant arm of Kashmir's largest political party - the Jamaat-i-Islami.

The Army of Muhammad was founded in Pakistan for the express purpose of terrorizing Kashmir. Jaish-e-Mohammed is funded, armed, and controlled by Pakistan's ISI. They were trained religiously and physically by the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Pakistan is Ground Zero for terrorist clubs. As the present-day home of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Islamic government sponsors more terrorist attacks than any nation on earth - more than Saudi Arabia and Iran combined. Every time you see terrorism occurring in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, you can be almost certain Pakistan's ISI is behind it.

The Army of Muhammad's roots go back a decade or so. While a member of Harakat-ul-Ansar, Maulana Masood Azhar was captured during a 1994 raid in Jammu and Kashmir. He was incarcerated for several years, but his release was secured in exchange for 155 hostages on an Indian Airlines plane hijacked in December 1999. During his imprisonment, his bad-boys club, Harkat-ul Ansar, had been added to the U.S. list of Terrorist Organizations, leading Masood Azhar to rename his religious gang the Harakat-ul-Mujahideen. But since competitive jihadists took control of his newly-named terrorist organization while he was in detention, when Masood Azhar was released, he simply formed a new outfit, the Army of Muhammad. At least it was an honest description. Muhammad was an active and ruthless terrorist. And that left the HA, now HM, to other brainwashed and bloody morons.

It is troubling to report that the ransomed convict, Masood Azhar, received substantial assistance reinvigorating the HA turned HM, now JM, from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, and Sunni OPECers like the Sauds. His new terrorist club, the Army of Muhammad (Jaish-e-Muhammad), was also endorsed by three religious school chiefs: Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai of the Majlis-e-Tawan-e-Islami, Maulana Mufti Rashid Ahmed of the Dar-ul Ifta-e-wal-Irshad, and Maulana Sher Ali of the Sheikh-ul-Hadith Dar-ul Haqqania.

As salafists, they were fundamentalists, and thus the opposite of radicals or insurgents. And as fundamentalist Muslims, the Army of Muhammad received an endorsement and support from the Pakistani political party known as Jamiat-i Ulema-i Islam. So the bottom line here is that all of these organizations are linked because they are all Islamic. And that means, when America's president cries "the terrorists have perverted the great religion of Islam" he is lying. When the president calls Pakistan an ally in the war on terror, he is saying the opposite of what is actually true.

Soon after his release from jail in a hostage exchange, Mazood Azhar was joined in his re/establishment of the Jaish-e Muhammad venture by three-quarters of his Harakat-ul Mujahideen members. He immediately traveled to Afghanistan where he met with the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda. Traveling back and forth across the non-existent border, Azhar organized recruitment rallies across Pakistan that called for jihadists to attend Afghanistan's terrorist training camps so that they would be equipped to fight in Kashmir now that the war against the Soviets was over. His recruitment rallies were so popular, they were promoted extensively on Pakistan's state-owned television.

But then displaying amazing duplicity, in December 2002, the Army of Muhammad leader was placed under house arrest in Pakistan (for about fifteen minutes) by general, dictator and all around good Muslim, Pervez Musharraf. He successfully fooled George Bush into believing that he was an ally rather than foe. After all, America was rewarding the largest state-sponsor of terror on earth, and the nation that was harboring Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, Mullah Omar, and the Taliban, with billions of dollars in bribes, aid, and armaments.

Yes, it is true; the very nation which had officially financed Muhammad Atta and the 9/11 suicide bombings that killed 3,000 Americans, was now a recipient of American aid and armaments. The nation which had educated, built, deployed, trained, armed, funded, and directed the Taliban, the nation that had spared bin Laden's life during the Clinton administration and was harboring him during the Bush administration, was being mislabeled an ally in the "war on terror." This all serves to confirm that every aspect of Bush's ill-advised crusade was a farce. Yes, America, every facet of the war on terror, from its name to the enemy, from Afghanistan to Iraq, is a complete fraud - a deadly and expensive, grotesquely immoral fraud.

And if that surprises you, it shouldn't. A consistent pattern of deceit and deception has been deployed ever since George W. Bush stepped onto the World Trade Center rubble pile and spoke into the megaphone, saying that America would hold those who were responsible accountable. Had he shot himself, it would have been a good beginning.

Even though the 9/11 suicide bombers all confessed to their crime, screaming the Islamic Prayer of Fear, "Allahu Akbar," into the voice recorders of the doomed airliners, America aided and abetted the actual enemy, the religion which was responsible: Islam.

All of this posturing and propaganda served to broaden the Army of Muhammad's mission. Now in addition to overthrowing Indian rule in Kashmir and integrate the province into Pakistan, Jaish-i-Muhammad wanted to overthrow the military government in Pakistan and replace it with an Islamic theocracy. And all the while, hey continued to use their offices in Pakistan as jihad schools. Delivering speeches at various cities and towns in Pakistan after his release, Masood Azhar declared that his militants would eliminate Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, whom he termed "Abu Jahl" in reference to a Meccan mentioned in the Qur'an that Muhammad didn't like.

Jaish-e-Muhammad is funded primarily through Islamic charities. One of its founders, Sheikh Omar Saeed was charged with the beheading of American reporter Daniel Pearl.