The Mind of a Terrorist Read online

On Christmas Eve, 1999, a group of terrorists took the 178 passengers of Indian Airlines Flight 814 from Nepal hostage in a complicated operation in which they flew to India, Pakistan, and Dubai before landing in Kandahar in Afghanistan and demanding the release of Omar Sheikh and two other convicted terrorists in exchange for the passengers. They were successful. Here, too, Kashmiri played a part.

  Omar Sheikh was later behind the murder of the Israeli-American journalist Daniel Pearl from the Wall Street Journal. Pearl was kidnapped and eventually beheaded in 2002, and a video in which his throat is cut open before he is decapitated was popular in fundamentalist circles. Pearl’s body was found cut into ten pieces.

  In late February 2000, Ilyas Kashmiri personally beheaded a young Indian soldier by the name of Bhausaheb Maruti Talekar during a guerrilla attack on the India-Pakistan border. This was in revenge for an Indian assault on Pakistan the day before, in which three Pakistani girls were reportedly raped and subsequently decapitated.

  Seven others were killed during Kashmiri’s revenge attack near the border post. The soldier’s severed head was displayed in several Pakistani newspapers, and according to one part of the story that hasn’t been verified, Kashmiri drove around with the head somehow mounted on his car before delivering it to the chief of the army, Pervez Musharraf, and receiving a large cash reward for killing an Indian officer.

  Later, Kashmiri was arrested and tortured for attempting to murder none other than Pervez Musharraf with a car bomb. By that time Musharraf had become the president of Pakistan.

  Kashmiri escaped with his life from that incident, too.

  Headley had never heard of a more worthy fighter.

  Kashmiri had been his own man for a long time.

  Sure, he had connections to several terrorist groups and organizations, but he always seemed to fall afoul of them. Since 2005, he was the so-called operational leader of the feared terrorist group Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami—commonly known as HuJI—which was behind acts of terrorism in Pakistan, Kashmir, Bangladesh, India, and Afghanistan. Kashmiri promoted himself at the same time as the leader of a faction known as Brigade 313, named after the 313 men who fought for the prophet Muhammad in the city of Badr, routing Abu Sufyan and his thousand men in a violent clash in the year 624. It’s considered one of the most important battles in the Muslim narrative about Muhammad.

  Brigade 313 was a sort of umbrella organization for a long series of different terrorist groups, consisting of Taliban supporters from Pakistan and several Lashkar-e-Taiba members, in addition to members of HuJI.

  In the only interview Kashmiri gave in later years, he wouldn’t directly say just how big Brigade 313 was.

  “I cannot tell you,” Kashmiri told the Asian Times journalist. “Except war is all tactics and this is all Brigade 313 is about: reading the enemy’s mind and reacting accordingly. The world thought that Prophet Mohammad only left women behind. They forgot there were real men also who did not know what defeat was all about. The world is only familiar with those so-called Muslims who only follow the direction of the air and who don’t have their own will. They do not have their own minds or dimensions of their own. The world has yet to see real Muslims. They have so far only seen Osama and Mullah Omar, while there are thousands of others. Wolves only respect a lion’s iron slap; lions do not impress with the logic of a sheep.”

  “Can we expect more attacks in the same fashion as the one in Mumbai?” the journalist asked. Before the interview he had been taken to Kashmiri blindfolded and moved from place to place for several days, to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

  “That was nothing compared to what has already been planned for the future,” Kashmiri answered coolly.

  “Even against Israel and the USA?”

  “I am not a traditional jihadi cleric who is involved in sloganeering. As a military commander, I would say every target has a specific time and reasons, and the responses will be forthcoming accordingly.”

  Kashmiri stepped into the room and gave Headley a very strong handshake.

  Heavily armed guards protected Kashmiri around the clock, but even so, he was rarely seen without an AK-47 on his shoulders. Always prepared for the unexpected.

  Kashmiri’s face was more worn than his forty-five years justified. But he was in good shape, strong and fit.

  In the only known photo of him, Kashmiri is wearing classic American Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, which he rarely took off and which half hid his missing eye behind red-tinted lens. He had colored his long beard with henna so that it had a reddish glow—perhaps as the prophet Muhammad did, according to some accounts, when he was en route to war.

  Kashmiri was always at war—with everyone and anyone who wronged his Muslim brothers and sisters, or denied or offended Islam in its strictest, most literal form.

  “The entire Muslim community is one body and we will take revenge for all injustices and tyranny,” he said.

  Headley and Kashmiri spoke of the injustices committed in Denmark and of the cartoons of Muhammad, which Kashmiri found both “humiliating” and “degrading.”

  Headley also told Kashmiri about his trip to Copenhagen and Aarhus earlier in the year, and of his increasingly detailed dreams of an attack that would balance an account that had sat in Denmark’s favor for too long.

  Kashmiri quickly declared that he would help punish Denmark.

  Jyllands-Posten was chosen as the target. The time was “soon.” The reason was the Muhammad cartoons. And the response would be deadly.

  Headley was brought to Kashmiri by Pasha, who feared that Lashkar was losing its courage and might give up the plans for an attack on Denmark. Pasha and Headley had taken two others, Nawaz and Ijaz, with them to visit the one-eyed legend.

  Nawaz was a close friend of Pasha’s, and Ijaz was one of Headley’s old classmates from the military academy. Ijaz had resigned from Pakistan’s air force, and it just so happened that Ilyas Kashmiri knew his brother, who likely worked for the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI.

  It was a small world. Especially in these circles.

  Kashmiri and Headley spoke of the international jihad for several hours.

  Headley couldn’t help but laugh to himself when the terrorist leader said “shistem” instead of “system.” His pronunciation was strange. But Headley listened attentively to each and every word.

  There are many ways to look at al-Qaeda.

  The terrorist organization was born out of the cooperative effort of several men with different backgrounds and in different countries who were all seeking to pull the fundamentalist Muslim battle for freedom in different directions. Through a series of coincidences, the men were gathered in “the Base”—the literal Arabic translation of “al-Qaeda”—in the late 1980s by the charismatic Osama bin Laden and the ideologically fervent Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the stated goal of throwing the Americans and other infidels out of the Arabian Peninsula and ultimately gathering the Muslim countries under one leader in one caliphate.

  There is still disagreement as to how centrally run al-Qaeda really was and is. The group has put out numerous videos, speeches, magazines, audio recordings, and manifestos, but often it has confirmed its connections with known militant Islamists only after they’ve died. In other cases, not at all. It’s more or less impossible to draw a precise diagram of the organization.

  Al-Qaeda was behind the double bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, on August 7, 1998, in which 223 were killed and several thousand injured. The group also took responsibility for the attack on the American destroyer USS Cole two years later.

  The attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, though, was unquestionably the group’s greatest “achievement.” Despite the earlier attacks, very few people had ever heard of Osama bin Laden before the Twin Towers came crashing down. The day after, bin Laden’s name was probably the most widely spoken one on the planet.

  Behind the attack lay a broader philosophy. For one, as bin Lad
en emphasized several times in his speech after the attack, the United States of course needed to be punished for its role in the many conflicts of the Middle East. But more importantly, bin Laden personally saw the United States as a weak nation on the brink of collapse. It just needed a little push.

  Bin Laden often used Vietnam as his favorite example. Sure, over fifty thousand Americans had been shipped home in body bags, but it wasn’t until after a series of grim pictures showed the realities of the war that opinions changed and people demanded the end of the war.

  It was the same with the two Black Hawk helicopters shot down in Somalia in October of 1993, when the American soldiers’ bodies were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. That, too, made the American people give up their desire for war, and the United States soon pulled out of the conflict.

  The Americans were weak, easily scared people who lacked the courage for a long, hard battle. They were people without faith in a real religion that could keep morale up.

  That was their weakest link. That was how they would conquer the country, bin Laden concluded.

  The terrorist attack on September 11 also had the goal of dragging the United States into Afghanistan—a country that notoriously had never been conquered. The United States could probably overpower the Taliban and kill a few thousand jihadists, but in the process the country would also become worn out, economically—the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost the United States at least $1.5 trillion—as well as in human terms with the loss of many soldiers’ lives and increased resistance against the foreign policy activism in the Middle East.

  Bin Laden figured it like this: if America could first be wounded on her own soil, she could then be crushed when her soldiers landed for close-quarters combat in Afghanistan.

  Bin Laden and al-Qaeda saw the economic crisis in 2008 as further proof of their theory: the US was grasping at straws, and before long the states would secede one by one; and one by one, the stars would disappear from the Stars and Stripes.

  Maybe president Bush’s home state of Texas—the Lone Star State—would be the first.

  By some accounts, Ilyas Kashmiri was directly connected to al-Qaeda even before the September 11 attacks. However, he was mostly engaged in the fight against India in the occupied portion of Kashmir until sometime around the year 2005, and then in the large spring offensive in Afghanistan in 2006, when he began to see the world in a new light. Peace would not come to Kashmir, Palestine, Afghanistan, or any other place until the United States had been brought to its knees. The struggle for jihad must be global. Ambitions needed to be greater than to simply cause minor damage to the Indians.

  “We are sick and tired of the great Satan’s global intrigues, and we aim for its demise to make this world a place of peace and justice,” Kashmiri stated.

  He also judged that, if they could choose freely, the citizens of Muslim countries would choose either Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar as their leaders. He had to accept the consequences of that conclusion and allow himself and Brigade 313 to be absorbed into al-Qaeda—which happened through a connection to Mustafa Abu al-Yazid.

  From al-Qaeda’s side, reward came in the form of bringing Kashmiri into the inner circle. The terrorist group was otherwise led by Arabs, but they made an exception for Kashmiri. In letters from his secret hiding place in Abbottabad in Pakistan, bin Laden wrote to “brother Ilyas” and asked him to prepare a missile attack against Air Force One, should President Obama visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan. Killing Barack Obama would make Vice President Joe Biden the president, which—according to bin Laden—would throw the United States into even deeper water.

  Kashmiri was considered a proper leading member of al-Qaeda by many, and he was entrusted with the task of organizing attacks in the West. Later, he was named as a possible successor to Osama bin laden.

  Kashmiri hadn’t given up India as a terrorism target, but he now saw a real war between Pakistan and India as a way of making the Pakistanis give up their struggle against the Islamists and al-Qaeda in Waziristan—and of drawing India’s attention away from the Kashmir region. A war between the two countries would, in a roundabout way, make life easier for Ilyas Kashmiri and his people.

  One theory says that it was Kashmiri who, while he was in hiding, pulled the strings and got Lashkar to make their Mumbai attack so violent. There is much that points to Kashmiri and Headley having indirectly worked together in the past. Headley simply didn’t know it.

  In the house in Waziristan, Kashmiri praised Headley for his planning and surveillance in Mumbai.

  “Well done. Good!” he said.

  Kashmiri had several good contacts in the West aside from Headley. Among others, he had a loyal Pakistani taxi driver in Chicago whom he had known for fifteen years and who was willing to donate money for a possible terrorist attack on American soil. He might even help with the attack.

  Kashmiri also knew people in Europe who had all given their word that they considered him their leader. All he had to do was call.

  Headley was impressed by Kashmiri’s approach to their plans for terror. It was brutal but based on logic, with a clear line drawn between what was just and what was unjust, Headley thought.

  In Kashmiri’s mind, there were no limits, only opportunities for bringing about the goal of a unified Islamic nation with Sharia as its law. It would be costly in blood, for sure. But it was necessary.

  Kashmiri knew that killing civilians was forbidden by the Qur’an. If anyone slew a person—unless it be in retaliation for murder or for spreading mischief in the land—it would be as if he slew all mankind.* To kill a Muslim would be even worse.

  But there were ways around such laws. In the Qur’an, Kashmiri could also find support for the death penalty for apostate Muslims. So, if a government leader didn’t introduce sharia, or—maybe even worse—if he entered into shady agreements with the American infidels, then he was not a true Muslim, which in Kashmiri’s universe was the same as apostasy. Thus it was perfectly fine to kill him.

  Kashmiri took it upon himself to decide whether or not Muslims were on the true path. For example, he judged that Pakistan was certainly not. Pakistan had failed Afghanistan when it had really needed a helping hand, and now Pakistan was courting America. That was also why he—unlike Lashkar-e-Taiba—had no problems with attacking deep in the heart of the county if it was necessary.

  Anybody who would not submit to a fundamentalist belief in Islam could, in reality, be punished by death. Everything could be attacked.

  Headley declared that he now considered Kashmiri his new pir Sahib—his master.

  He swore an oath of eternal fidelity and loyalty.

  Kashmiri was happy to help Headley. In the course of their discussion, he announced that he had already seen the first “broadcast” of video recordings of potential targets in Denmark, and he fully trusted Headley to make the plans.

  It would be magnificent.

  Kashmiri envisioned an attack on Jyllands-Posten that would create the maximum number of casualties, and he immediately proposed a plan that was far more concrete:

  Fill a truck with explosives and drive it either right up to Jyllands-Posten’s offices in Copenhagen or directly into the building at full speed. And then push the button.

  Kashmiri made it very clear that Headley needn’t to wait for his friends from Lashkar if they didn’t have the manpower for an attack on Denmark. Kashmiri would provide the necessary men, funds, and weapons, if Headley would just deliver a fully prepared plan.

  The attack on Denmark was a mission for Brigade 313. A mission for al-Qaeda.

  * Sura 5, verse 32.

  12

  THE WILL

  Lahore, Pakistan

  Tuesday, March 3, 2009

  The men opened fire without warning.

  First they shot at the wheels of the large bus carrying Sri Lankan cricket players. Then, directly at the police escort. They fired an antitank rocket at the bus but, despite the short distance, it flew right over
its target and instead struck a utility pole.

  It was 8:49 a.m., and in the following seven minutes, all was chaos near the Liberty Market Roundabout in Lahore.

  The bus’s windows were blasted to pieces, and glass shards flew through the air and lodged themselves in the athletes’ shoulders, legs, and arms.

  The local Pakistani cricket team was actually supposed to be playing against a team from India, but the Mumbai attack had put a stop to that. Instead, it was now a visiting team from Sri Lanka that suddenly became the target of violence.

  After a few minutes, the driver, Mehar Mohammed Khalil, saw an opportunity to escape and, while under fire, he floored it and drove the quarter mile from the roundabout to Gaddafi Stadium, where the team was supposed to be warming up for the day’s match. From there, the athletes were evacuated in a Pakistani military helicopter.

  Six officers, a driver, and a civilian were killed in the attack that Tuesday morning.

  The perpetrators escaped, but witnesses and amateur recordings from the roundabout made it clear that they were dealing with ten to twelve young men.

  That the cricket players got away with their lives, and that the mission immediately appeared to have been a fiasco, did nothing to change the fact that in its execution it was a nearly perfect terrorist attack.

  The method was similar to the attack in Mumbai just three months earlier. The men wore backpacks, were young, had powerful weapons, appeared out of nowhere, and fired without hesitation.

  Another thing was that Lashkar had previously condemned cricket in a fatwa, as it was—according to the group—“an evil and sinful” sport, which for many Pakistanis had become “a new religion” that prevented them from fulfilling their religious responsibilities.

  “The British gave Muslims the bat, snatched the sword, and said to them: ‘You take this bat and play cricket. Give us your sword. With its help we will kill you and rape your women,’” Lashkar wrote in an article. They continued: