However, one crucial brother was missing. Key to the Afghani’s military plan had been his chosen deputy, a Pakistani field commander called Nasrullah Mansoor Langrial, a gutsy fighter who had been running rings around the Indians in Kashmir for the past year, setting bombs and booby traps, mounting hit-and-run operations on Indian bases and patrols. Nasrullah and the Afghani were men of the same breed, the former being a farmer’s son from the Punjabi village of Langrial, a community of impoverished and religious jati tribesmen. Like many Pakistani families, Nasrullah’s parents made so little from the fields they rented from the local zamindar landlord that they had sent their son to a nearby Deobandi madrassa, where he was educated for free and inculcated with the merits of jihad. He had proven an eager pupil, and after graduating he had headed for Camp Yawar. There, in the deserts of Khost, the gangly youth Nasrullah had been transformed into the mujahid Langrial. With his lion’s beard, smiling face and tall, lean frame, he led from the front, eschewing marriage and home comforts for a life of jihad. It had been the same story with the Afghani, and the two men had fought together on many occasions, Langrial attaining the name in jihadi circles of ‘Darwesh’, the smiling and happy narrator of a hadith. But now, in January 1994, a courier came to the Afghani with news. Langrial had been caught in an ambush in Kashmir, and was being held by the Indian security forces.
The Afghani reeled. He told his comrades that they must risk everything to free his brother in jihad. He immediately diverged from the ISI plan and entered Srinagar, where he launched a reckless and savage frontal attack on security forces in the Elahi Bagh quarter of the city, the firefight (on 16 January 1994) lasting thirty hours. The Afghani had hoped to take prisoners to trade for Langrial, but he was lucky to escape with his own life. Three days later he tried again, this time kidnapping an Indian major, Bhupinder Singh, but the authorities refused to negotiate. In his fury, the Afghani executed the Indian officer and then went into hiding, leaving the Movement’s embryonic cells to melt into the dense pine forests.
When Brigadier Badam heard the news from Indian Kashmir, he was furious, Masood would later write. He immediately sent for Maulana Khalil in Karachi, and warned him that this was not the streamlined operation the ISI had paid for. ‘A number of messages were sent to the chief commanders in Kashmir to join hands. We did not, however, receive any confirmation of our orders,’ wrote Masood. Someone senior from the Movement would have to travel to Kashmir to get the Afghani back on course. The obvious choice was General Secretary Masood Azhar, who in recent times had been travelling widely, acting as Maulana Khalil’s roving ambassador and chief fund-raiser abroad, armed with a range of doctored passports provided by the ISI. Whatever his private thoughts about going to India, Masood hid them, writing vaingloriously in his journal: ‘It was my duty in the organisation to maintain unity among the mujahideen, and it was felt necessary that I needed to be there to fulfill this job. Heads had to be brought together, prayers must be said.’
But although Masood’s message rang clear in the ears of fighting men like the Afghani, the editor of the Voice of the Mujahid was not a fighting man. Once before he had demonstrated his lack of judgement in a live-fire situation, and this would be his first foray back onto the battlefield.
In late January 1994, as Masood said his farewells, his father, Master Alvi, worried that his son was not ready to grab jihad by the throat. ‘Was he not better leading from Karachi?’ Master Alvi wrote in a desperate letter to one of Masood’s brothers, later seized by Pakistani investigators. The ISI was too busy concocting a cover story to listen. Masood was now Wali Adam Issa, a Portuguese businessman. The Movement’s contacts in Britain had obtained a stolen Portuguese passport through the maulvi of a mosque in east London, and the ISI had had it stamped with Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi visas. Everyone was convinced that this mission was well within Masood’s capabilities, as he had already travelled widely around Europe and the Horn of Africa, even assisting another merging jihad general in Sudan, Osama bin Laden, the son of a Saudi construction tycoon, who had fled there from Afghanistan.
Masood Azhar arrived in New Delhi on 29 January, via Dhaka, on a Biman Bangladesh fight, in a newly tailored Western suit, his beard trimmed, he would write, ‘to resemble those worn by captains of industry’ he had seen in the pages of Time. He had clipped his fingernails and remembered to shower and use anti-perspirant, but the Indian immigration official still stared him down. Within minutes, his new nylon shirt was soaked with sweat. He didn’t look Portuguese, the officer observed. Masood would later write that he had wondered if the man ‘could smell Bahawalpur’ on him. Luckily, he had practised his response. He was originally from Gujrat, in Pakistan’s Punjab, but had left for Portugal some years before. The officer looked down at his screen. He scrutinised the passport again, and waved Masood through.
Masood headed for the five-star Ashoka Hotel in Chanakyapuri, the kind of hushed, moneyed place that asked no questions as long as the bills were paid. Delighted, he unpacked his bag and called his contact, a Kashmiri carpet exporter. This man was an old hand. He brought Masood some hot bread and nihari, made that morning at Karim’s in Old New Delhi. ‘Eat,’ he told him, according to Masood’s written recollections. ‘Relax. No need to hurry. The Kashmir plan is running a little late.’
Masood the tourist. His first stop was naturally the town of Deoband, a three-hour journey east in Uttar Pradesh state. Afterwards, he browsed Old New Delhi’s Islamist bookshops and visited roadside shrines to long-dead maulanas. He went shopping in New Delhi’s Connaught Place, buying boiled sweets, woollen socks, a bottle of talcum and a small brass bell that he thought would be useful when he came to convene his first majlis, or council meeting, with the mujahids of Kashmir. What did you buy for fighting men, he wondered. He found a place selling compasses, and bought a dozen as presents for the field commanders.
Finally, on 9 February, after twelve days of shopping, eating and waiting, they were ready for him. Wearing his comfortable kurta pyjama suit and skullcap as if he were a returning haji, Masood flew to Srinagar. As soon as he arrived he was thrown into a panic by the lines of khaki-clad security men, and he began shaking as a Kashmiri policeman with a clipboard approached him, having spotted the Portuguese passenger on the flight manifest. ‘Foreigner registration,’ the officer demanded, taking down Masood’s details. He felt horribly exposed, but emerged from the airport unscathed.
During the taxi ride into the city the sheer scale of the Indian military presence became clear to Masood for the first time. The sight of Kashmiris with their pony carts cowering beside the road as vast army convoys thundered past made him shake with fear. Thinking back over all those speeches and newspaper articles he had written, it dawned on him that the reality was far worse than he had imagined: he had ‘never seen more miserable-looking people anywhere in the world’. Srinagar in February was dark, dank and freezing, the dirty brown ice sludge on the roads splattering the people on the pavements. Locals hung around braziers filled with burning rubbish while Indian soldiers looked on enviously, shivering at their positions, dressed in balaclavas, winter-issue coats and oversized galoshes. Most shops had their shutters rolled down, and parts of Dal Lake were frozen over. There was not a tourist to be seen. Shuddering, as he wrote later, Masood searched for the Qasmia madrassa in downtown Srinagar, following the instructions he had memorised. That evening, safely indoors, as he sat beneath a quilt warming his hands on a Kashmiri kangri or charcoal burner, the Afghani slipped in.
They would leave at first light, the fighter announced, heading south for Anantnag. The leaders of the three militant groups that had merged to form the Movement would be waiting for them in the forest near the isolated village of Matigund, a difficult journey east of Anantnag along unmetalled mountain roads, a four-hour drive from here, possibly six, depending on the snow and the Indian security presence. ‘Before we left, one of the local Kashmiri mujahids gave me his pheran [Kashmiri