India on alert after al Qaeda opens South Asia front

Kashmiris say al Qaeda has no role in their struggle since it is a political dispute.

NEW DELHI: A day after al Qaeda announced a new branch to "wage jihad" in the Indian subcontinent, India has asked its security apparatus to study Wednesday's video message.

Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri said in a video message on Wednesday (Sep 3) that the new operation would take the fight to Myanmar, Bangladesh and India, which has a large but traditionally moderate Muslim population.

The group once attracted extremists from around the world to training camps on the Afghan-Pakistan border, but has seen its global influence eclipsed by the Islamic State militant group fighting in Iraq and Syria.

India said it had asked security agencies to study the Zawahiri announcement, which experts said appeared to be a reaction to IS' growing dominance.

"This is just a publicity stunt, it shows their desperation because IS is now showing that they are the real threat in the world right now," said Ajit Kumar Singh, research fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute of Conflict Management. "It's a fight for supremacy between al Qaeda and the IS."

In a video statement on Wednesday, Zawahiri singled out Assam, Gujarat and Kashmir - Indian regions with large Muslim populations - along with Bangladesh and Myanmar as territories the new organisation would target. "This entity was not established today but is the fruit of a blessed effort of more than two years to gather the ‘mujahideen’ in the Indian sub-continent into a single entity," he said.

Al Qaeda has no role in Kashmir struggle

Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, has a long history of violence between the locals and security forces. But Kashmiris said al Qaeda has no role to play in their struggle against Indian rule of the disputed territory.

"They [al Qaeda] have no scope here. Kashmir is a local political dispute and al Qaeda has nothing to do with it," Ayaz Akbar, spokesman for separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani told AFP.

Millions of Muslims fled India for what is now Pakistan in 1947 when the British Empire partitioned the two countries at independence, and tensions persist between those who remain and the Hindu majority.

Indian Muslims have also been the victims of violence led by Hindu extremists. Hundreds died during the 2002 Gujarat riots, at a time when India's now Prime Minister Narendra Modi was chief minister of the state. 

Opening a new front

While still regarded as a threat to the West, al Qaeda's most destructive strike remains the September 11, 2001 attacks by hijacked airliners on New York and Washington. It is active in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where its surviving leadership are thought to be hiding out, but has been significantly weakened there by a decade-long campaign of Pakistani security forces and US drone strikes on its hideouts.

After the death of its figurehead Osama bin Laden in May 2011, it was eclipsed first by its own offshoots in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and now by IS.

Zawahiri on Wednesday called on the "umma," or Muslim nation, to unite around "tawhid," or monotheism, "to wage jihad against its enemies, to liberate its land, to restore its sovereignty and to revive its caliphate." He said the group would recognise the overarching leadership of the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and be led day-to-day by senior Pakistani militant Asim Umar.

A senior Afghan Taliban commander told AFP that Asim Umar - not his real name - was a Pakistani national who has written books on the history of Islamic military struggles and predictions for future conflict. Local officials say many of the Arabs once drawn to al Qaeda in Pakistan have moved to join the fight in Syria and Iraq, and there is anecdotal evidence of Pakistanis joining them, though numbers are hard to ascertain.

But there have been very few reports of young Indian men leaving to fight Muslim extremist causes abroad, which experts say is because local grievances have kept them at home. "We don't know about any active Al-Qaeda cell or members in India until now," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani expert on militant movements.

"Now they are trying again. It could be due to the rise of IS and the drop in support for al Qaeda, defections in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere - now they are trying to open a new front. But the problem is that if your support base is shrinking in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan - these were al Qaeda strongholds - if al Qaeda is losing there, you can't hope that it will get some new recruits in India or Burma (formerly Myanmar)."

Muslims are a minority in Myanmar, and the stateless Rohingya have complained of persecution by the Buddhist majority, but the country has not seen violence linked to hard line interpretations of Islam. Bangladesh has only limited history of involvement with Muslim extremist causes abroad, although local militant groups that count Afghan-trained militants among their members have carried out a series of attacks in the country since 1999. Bangladeshi authorities said they were looking into the video.