How London brought terror on itself Asia Times, 16 July By B Raman
B Raman is additional secretary (retired), cabinet secretariat, government of India, New Delhi, and, presently, director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai and distinguished fellow and convener, Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter. Email: itschen36 at gmail.com
www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GG16Df04.html
That three of the suspected perpetrators of the bomb attacks on London on July 7 were British youths of Pakistani origin should not only have been no surprise to British intelligence, it should have been anticipated: the radicalization of Britain's Muslim youth of Pakistani origin began in the mid-1990s with the full knowledge and complicity of British and US intelligence agencies.
In the mid-1990s, the Pakistan-based jihadi group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM - previously known as the Harkat-ul-Ansar, HUA ) sent a contingent to help Bosnian Muslims in their fight against the Serbs. They were sent by the government of Benazir Bhutto at the request of the Bill Clinton administration. The contingent, which was raised and trained by Lieutenant General (retired) Hamid Gul, former director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who himself used to visit Bosnia, included a large number of British Muslims of Pakistani origin.
According to estimates, about 200 Muslims of Pakistani origin living in the United Kingdom went to Pakistan, received training in the camps of the HUA, and joined the HUA in Bosnia with the blessings of London and Washington. Among them was Omar Sheikh, who went on to mastermind the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.
A decade before Bosnia, the CIA had raised and funded a large corps of jihadis of Arab origin - including Osama bin-Laden - to help the Afghan mujahideen in their jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
By the time of the Serbian crisis, these Arabs of Afghanistan vintage had already started creating mayhem beyond Afghanistan, notably in Indian-held Kashmir, so Western intelligence wanted to avoid the use of Arabs in Bosnia. They turned to Pakistanis, particularly Pakistanis living in Britain and other countries in Western Europe. Thus began the radicalization process of Muslim youth of Pakistani origin in western Europe.
_______________________________________________ Marxism mailing list Marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm