Jihadis on the prowl

The arrest of two suspected terrorists belonging to the dreaded Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), an affiliate of Al Qaeda, in the heart of Guwahati, about a fortnight ago has once again brought to light the fact that various Islamic terror groups have been working overtime to destabilize Assam. The two, identified as Bahar Miya and Rasul Miya, are from Brahmanbaria and Netrakona districts of Bangladesh and were staying illegally in India for quite some time without valid passports and acquiring Indian documents through fraudulent means. The police have not only seized incriminating documents, including Aaadhar and PAN cards, from their possession but also eleven SIM cards, four of which were issued in Bangladesh, one in Nepal, and six in India, including two in Assam. Matiur Rahman of Samaguri, who had facilitated the issue of Aadhaar and PAN cards to the two terrorists, has narrowly escaped arrest. The presence of Islamic terrorists in Assam, however, is not a new thing. The notorious ISI of Pakistan, for instance, has been constantly at work to organise the entry of Islamic terrorist elements for several decades now. Some of the objectives of the ISI have been to promote fundamentalism and militancy among local Muslim youth (particularly those belonging to the immigrant variety), promote communal tension by way of false and highly inflammatory propaganda, create new militant outfits, provide weapons and training to the recruits, and so on. It may be recalled that the Assam Police were arrested on August 10, 1999, for dreaded terrorists from the heart of Guwahati, two of whom were confirmed Pakistani nationals, and the other two ISI operatives from J&K and Uttar Pradesh, respectively. These four had arrived in Dhaka from Karachi on a PIA flight and held meetings with ISI officials in the Bangladesh capital before sneaking into Assam through the international boundary in Karimganj. Unfortunately, while they were arrested when the AGP-led government was in power, all four ISI operatives who had worked under the banner of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen had managed to come out of jail after the Congress came to power in the state in 2001. Over the years, the Assam Police have also found that the Islamic terror groups operating from Bangladesh have misused a number of madrasas and mosques, particularly in lower Assam, in order to carry forward their agenda. What is even more alarming is that a number of youth belonging to indigenous Muslim families have also fallen into the trap of the Islamic terror groups over the years.