In the autumn of 1993 Sikander was one of the Holy Warriors’ senior Kashmir commanders who received a message that their group was being subsumed into the unified ISI-backed outfit Harkat ul-Ansar, the Movement of the Victorious. A new chief of military operations was coming to the valley to whip everyone into shape: the Afghani. Sikander told his father that initially he had been worried. While he was an important commander in south Kashmir, in the eyes of Islamabad he was but a small cog. He needed to prove himself all over again.
Things had gone well. From the moment they met in January 1994, the Afghani could see that Sikander was brave and committed. He also came with the blessing of Langrial, the Afghani’s old comrade, who had sized up the bright young Kashmiri at Camp Yawar and crossed the LoC with him in 1992. Langrial and Sikander had even conducted a few successful operations together in Kashmir. The Afghani was quick to appoint Sikander his lieutenant.
Shortly after the Afghani’s arrival, however, news broke that Langrial had been caught. Sikander was among the first to volunteer to bring about Langrial’s freedom. He was a central figure in the brazen thirty-hour firefight in Elahi Bagh in Srinagar on 16 January, from which he and the Afghani only narrowly escaped alive. Sikander was there too when the Afghani abducted Major Bhupinder Singh, the Indian Army officer who was supposed to be exchanged for Langrial. And Sikander was also present when that plan foundered, and the Major was executed. He told his father that his role in this killing had ‘saddened him’. He was more than happy to kill Indian troops in battle, but the cold-blooded execution of an unarmed man breached his moral code.
However, in February 1994, when the Afghani learned that Masood Azhar was coming to south Kashmir on a mission to get the ISI’s Kashmir operation back on track, it seemed only natural that Sikander should be put in charge of all security arrangements. He selected the remote village of Matigund, high above Anantnag, as the place where Masood would deliver his first address, an event that the ISI hoped would draw a line under the Langrial affair.
However, the visit had gone disastrously wrong, with Masood and the Afghani being captured. As District Commander of Anantnag, Sikander felt he had failed both the Movement’s Chief of Military Operations and its General Secretary, who were both now in Indian hands. He had been charged with their security, and he should have been there to protect them. But, like a schoolboy, he had fallen off his motorcycle on the way to the majlis, and therefore had not been in the room to voice his concerns at the ill-advised plan for Masood to give the Friday sermon at Anantnag. Sikander imagined he was now a laughing stock. He felt as if he had to restore his reputation and exact revenge.
Immediately after the arrests, Sikander began blasting the first Indian patrol he found, strafing, bombing, hurling grenades and risking the lives of all those around him. This led to mass round-ups and crackdowns, in Dabran and elsewhere, although when Masood heard about it later, he was impressed, writing ‘Commander Sikander attacked the Indian Army for fifteen consecutive days.’
In his mind, Sikander had to rectify the mess, but those around him were alarmed by his actions. Eventually he was disarmed by his fellow Brothers and forced to take refuge in a safe house in remote Lovloo village, high up in the Pir Panjal mountains, until he cooled off. ‘I was brought down to earth,’ he told his parents.
In the early summer of 1994, plans arrived from Pakistan for an audacious plan, backed by the ISI, to free Masood, the Afghani and Langrial. Sikander was to run it, and he received instructions that he was to conduct another kidnapping. As he related this story to his parents Sikander seemed uneasy with it, and skimmed over some events. All he would say was that he had been told to seek out foreigners, rather than well-connected Indian nationals or army officers. Western hostages could be used to exert pressure on the Indian government to release the prisoners, he had been advised.
Sikander had hastily put together a kidnap party that in June 1994 seized two British hostages, Kim Housego, who was only sixteen, and a thirty-six-year-old video producer, David Mackie, both of whom had been trekking with their families in the hills above Pahalgam. They were held in the Pir Panjal mountains for seventeen anxious days, while Sikander’s group attempted to negotiate with the Indian authorities.
He finished this story abruptly, his father recalled, claiming that it had ended well for the hostages and badly for him. Although he had put together enough supplies and armed protection to hold out in the mountains for months, influential voices on the other side of the Line of Control had ordered him to end the operation. The government of Benazir Bhutto in Islamabad had come under intense international pressure after Kim Housego’s father, a former British journalist based in New Delhi, launched a noisy public campaign to save his son, claiming that the group holding him had links to the Pakistani establishment. Soon after, with the Pakistani Prime Minister demanding that the hostages be freed, Sikander had been forced to hand the two Britons over to Kashmiri journalists at Anantnag. He had vowed never to get tangled up with foreigners again. ‘It wasn’t like transporting bullets or rice,’ he told his father. Human cargo was prickly and temperamental. Hostages required kilos of meat to eat, and were capable of shredding their captors’ nerves. Furious foreign governments were difficult for Pakistan to ignore. All of Sikander’s men had been ‘deeply affected’ by the operation, finding the stress of living in close physical proximity to their unpredictable Western charges far more taxing than fighting in the woods and villages.
Now, in January 1995, after various other abortive plots to secure Masood’s freedom had been proposed, a new order had come from over the Line of Control. A few days previously, a courier known as ‘Zameen’ had arrived from Muzaffarabad with news that a high-level delegation was on its way from Pakistan, bringing instructions, approved by the ISI, that would lead to Masood and the Afghani being freed. Sikander said that all he knew was the code-name: Operation Ghar.
Draining his tea, Sikander kissed his family goodbye. ‘The end is not yet written,’ he told them as he pulled his pakul down over his head before vanishing into an indigo night speckled with snow. If Mr Bhat had known that this would be the last time he would ever see his son, he would have asked Javid what he meant.
Sikander headed for the Heevan Hotel, a three-storey wood-and-tin building on the banks of the Lidder River in Pahalgam, the nearest thing the trekking town had to luxury. It was a journey of just thirty-five miles, but it took Sikander a couple of days, as he was a wanted man and had to travel by foot and pony, sticking to the remote mountain ridges, frequently doubling back on himself to ensure no one was following. Popular with wealthy Indian honeymooners and executives, and the odd Western trekker doing India-lite, the Heevan, the police suspected, had become a refuge for senior commanders in the Movement, with several members of staff under scrutiny for having contacts with the insurgent group. The police knew that Sikander had stayed there on several occasions. He did not mingle with the paying guests, who enjoyed large, comfortable mustard-yellow bedrooms with TV, air-conditioning and hot showers. Instead, the mujahid from Dabran slipped in through a kitchen door around the back, and occupied a disused storeroom in the attic, with a view of the blackness of the pine forest behind and up to the glistening Pir Panjal and the raucous Lidder River gurgling down below, clearing his head.
There word reached Sikander from Zameen, the ISI messenger. Operation Ghar was to involve yet another kidnapping. Sikander told two confidants that, even worse, Zameen had said his targets would once again be foreigners, so as to heap pain on India by internationalising the Kashmir crisis, drawing Western embassies into the fray. Why do this again, Sikander had asked, but Zameen was a messenger and had no idea. All he had been told was that Sikander was ordered to capture European or American specialists working on infrastructure projects in the region, people of consequence from powerful corporations that would work hard to get