Three weeks later, at the end of February 1995, Sikander heard from Zameen again. Most of the kidnap team had crossed the LoC. Right now they were camped in the snow-covered forests past Uri, the last Indian-administered town on the old Muzaffarabad road. The party consisted of twenty-four ‘brothers’, as the mujahids referred to one another. They had been organised into an outfit called ‘al Faran’, a name randomly chosen by someone in Islamabad that had vague Islamic connotations, being a mountain in Saudi Arabia. Some of the team were Punjabis from Bahawalpur, Masood’s hometown; others were drawn from the madrassas of Karachi; more than a dozen were Pashtuns from either side of the Afghan border. All were war veterans, and among them was ‘the Turk’, whose real name was Abdul Hamid, a mujahid of Turkish ancestry who had fought just about everywhere. Sikander knew him, and was immediately worried.
The Turk had a reputation as a kal kharab, a crazy guy. He had been flitting back and forth between Kashmir and Pakistan for a couple of years, and Sikander had seen him in action on many occasions. There was no denying he was a brave and experienced mujahid, having also survived battles in Sudan and Somalia, even fighting with the Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed, and rumoured to have been part of the detachment of foreign Islamic shock troops involved in the so-called ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident of October 1993, a badge of honour in the world of jihad. Two US helicopters had been brought down after rocket-propelled grenades were fired into their tails, triggering the notorious battle in which nineteen American soldiers died and many hundreds of Islamic militiamen were killed or wounded. He was also said to have been in Bosnia and the Caucasus, setting ambushes for Russian troops (who he had also slain in large numbers in Afghanistan for much of the 1980s).
Sikander knew that the Turk would be difficult to lead, and even harder to follow. Coupled with his legendary temper was a deep religiosity, a spirituality that comforted simple fighting men, although his commanders had found it often swamped his strategic vision.
There was some good news. Sikander’s role was to make sure that Operation Ghar was supported in every way possible once the team had entered his theatre of south Kashmir, but he was not expected to travel with the al Faran brothers day-to-day, so handling the Turk would fall to al Faran’s Pakistani field commander, Mohammed Hassan Shafiq. An alumnus of the Darul Uloom madrassa in Khanewal, Punjab, another offshoot of Masood’s grand madrassa in Karachi, Shafiq had trained at Camp Yawar at the same time as Masood, graduating with honours, and had joined the Holy Warriors as a senior commander with the nom de guerre Abu Jindal, roughly translated from the Arabic as ‘the Killer’. Since early 1994 he had been fighting in Kashmir with the Movement, regularly crossing the LoC with newly trained fighters, weapons and explosives. Sikander knew him as cool on the battlefield and ruthless in his dealings with the enemy. Abu Jindal, Sikander was certain, was equipped to keep a lid on his deputy. He was renowned for his battlefield vision, even if the Turk’s eyes were often cloaked by a crimson rage.
There was something else about the kidnap team that pleased Sikander. Some of its members were Kashmiris, who had been included for their local knowledge, contacts and allegiances to local insurgent groups who might be called on to assist the operation. It was also important to make sure al Faran had a genuine azadi element to it, so the Indian government could not turn the kidnappings into a political issue, blaming Pakistan for interfering on Indian soil.
The most senior Kashmiri was Qari Zarar, an old hand from Doda, a district in Jammu, the southern half of the state. Zarar had been recruited primarily for his mountaineering skills. He could read a track like no one else, but his nerve had been called into question. Sikander worried about him. The Pashtuns had an expression, which translated as ‘last man standing’, that referred to a man’s courage under fire. Whenever a Soviet helicopter gunship had roared overhead in Afghanistan during the 1980s, its auto cannon spitting out three thousand rounds a minute, the first person to hit the deck would be thrown out of the unit, and the last would be made the leader. Although he had not fought in Afghanistan, Zarar was thought of as having ‘a mouthful of dirt’. Beside him would be a sixteen-year-old novice, also from Doda, a teenage gujjar boy who Zarar called beta, or son. This boy was rumoured to be so green he barely knew how to shoulder a rifle. But he did have hidden uses, Sikander was advised, including a thorough knowledge of the secret shepherds’ routes through the high Pir Panjal and into the deadly Warwan.
Sikander could not quite put his finger on it, but for some reason he was still filled with anxiety. The team was an awkward mix of men and boys, with different allegiances and priorities, some too weak, in his opinion, to see things through, others too strong-willed and unpredictable for such a delicate operation. Having been in the business of kidnapping several times already, including direct experience of holding Western hostages, this was not the unit Sikander would have chosen. But he was not in overall charge, his authority having been significantly weakened by the loss of the Afghani and Masood, as well as the failure of the Housego and Mackie operation. It was too late to gripe or turn back. But in March 1995, as he awaited the team’s arrival in south Kashmir, busying himself concealing weapons, ammunition and food in the horseshoe of hills above Anantnag, Sikander received some alarming news.
Instead of making their way directly to Anantnag, as had originally been intended, the al Faran party had been forced to divert to the ancient citadel of Charar-i-Sharief, in Badgam district, twenty miles south-west of Srinagar. Heavy snow and rain had hampered their passage down from the LoC, and when they reached the valley they encountered heavier Indian patrols than had been expected. Unable to push on, they had decided to consolidate at Charar-i-Sharief, a wooden medieval settlement, closely stacked on a knife-edge of a hillside, which was known to strongly support the militancy. As far as the Indian security forces were concerned, the town was a vipers’ pit of enemy gunmen at the best of times, and in March 1995 thawing militants from many different groups were known to have converged there, holing up in and around Charar’s main attraction, a wooden mausoleum and prayer hall that had been erected in ancient times because of a story that the flying coffin of Sheikh Noor-ud-din Wali, a famous rishi, or saint, who had attracted a vast following in the fourteenth century, had descended from the heavens and chosen Charar as its final resting place.
The arrival in Kashmir of the remains of Noor-ud-din had had an enormous impact on the region, gradually transforming it from Hinduism to Islam. Noor-ud-din, who had spent his last years living in a cave, surviving, it was said, on only one cup of water a day, had even been chosen as Kashmir’s patron saint, a decision that had infused the region with its unique flavour of Sufism. This holiest of shrines had become a place of pilgrimage for devotees from across the subcontinent. Relics of the Sheikh’s life and death were guarded inside a complex decorated with chandeliers and ancient Persian rugs, and surrounded by a maze of inns and food halls, markets and boarding houses – a Kashmiri Lourdes, flocked to by hundreds of thousands of worshippers of all faiths, especially the sick. More importantly to the insurgents, all approaches to the shrine could be observed, making it the perfect redoubt, with the added advantage that the reverence it inspired made the Indian security forces tiptoe around its boundaries.
When the brothers of al Faran arrived seeking refuge in Charar-i-Sharief in March 1995, they discovered they were not the first. Ahead of them was a group of Kashmiri and Pakistani insurgents under the command of Haroon Ahmed, a mercenary from Peshawar. Known to his men as ‘Mast Gul’, or simply ‘the Major’, he had come over to boost the Kashmiri insurgency, working for Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), the largest of the indigenous Kashmiri militant groups, which had also been lavished with cash and weapons by the ISI. Now Mast Gul had stockpiled munitions in the holy of holies. ‘I had hoped to lure India into a direct attack,’ he said later, ‘bringing about a battle in this holiest of cities that would make the entire ummah [Muslim world] rise up in hatred.’