Muslim organisations in India have launched anti- terrorism campaigns to save Muslim youth from falling into the trap laid by militant organisations.

The recent train bomb blast in Mumbai has once again raised an important question. Are Muslim youth being targeted by the so-called jihadi organisations?

As per the media reports, police suspect that the Indian Muslim youth, however small in number, are working in India as foot soldiers of international terrorist organisations. The community cannot neglect the threat posed by the militant organisations. Actually these Militant organisat-ions are creation of the new international world order promoted by America’s CIA, British intelligence unit, M15, and Israeli security intelligence service Mossad.

Militant Jihad now demonized by Washington as the main threat to the capitalist ‘civilised world’ is creation of America. History bears testimony to the fact that the US has a long history of sponsoring Islamist reaction and terrorism – in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere – in pursuit of its own global interests.

In the 1980s, as part of its covert war against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, the CIA printed thousands of copies of the Quran. Less benignly, the US also provided arms and funds for what John K Cooley in his book ‘Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America & International Terrorism’ describes as: “a huge foreign mercenary army; one of the largest ever seen in American military history”. In doing so, the US “uncorked the bottle containing the genies which would, in the 1980s and 1990s, unleash violence and help spread the culture of violent jihad around the world, from New York to the Philippines”. Washington initiated “a process that would culminate in the horrific attacks in Mumbai on July 11 2006.

Dilip Hiro in ‘War Without End: the rise of Islamist fundamentalism & the global response’ writes that the US and its allies funded, armed and trained between 80,000 and 150,000 Islamist guerrillas, hailed as mujaheddin or ‘freedom fighters’ by Ronald Reagan, US president from 1981-88. In 2001, when the US sent troops to Afghanistan, these ‘freedom fighters’ were reclassified as ‘illegal combatants’ and denied the basic rights of prisoners under the Geneva Convention.

“The training manuals used by Al-Qa’ida operatives today are based closely on the CIA and Pentagon manuals issued to the mujaheddin in the 1980s. US Marine training manuals translated into Persian, Arabic and Urdu were found to be particularly good in teaching the recruits how to make traps and break down weapons,” writes Hiro.

The aim of the US policy in Afghanistan, as first formulated by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to president Jimmy Carter (1977-80), was not just to cause the withdrawal of Soviet forces, but to spread a virulent cocktail of reactionary Islam and nationalism into the pre-dominantly Muslim Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union. The aim was to provoke Moscow into invading Afghanistan and thereby ‘give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam war’.

The US-led operation in Afghanistan required massive funding. According to John K Cooley, a full-time mujaheddin fighter’s pay could range from $100 to $300 a month – compared to $162 a month for a Pakistani army captain. Cooley notes: “For the majority of Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians, Egyptians, Filipinos and others, these were huge sums, although the US defence department’s secret ‘black budget’ quadrupled to $36 billion a year between 1981-90.

As costs spiralled, Washington encouraged the wholesale switch of Afghanistan’s economy towards opium production to provide illicit funds. As a result, writes Cooley, “from slight production before the Russians and CIA began the war in 1979, the so-called Golden Crescent countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan have grown into the largest centre of heroin production, consumed elsewhere as well as locally, in the world”.

Today, Afghanistan accounts for 75% of global opium production. The effects in the region have been devastating: “Social workers found around 200,000 child heroin addicts in Pakistan. By January 2000, more than one million addicts, including 80,000 children, lived in Karachi alone”.

The US also turned to the Saudi regime to enlist the support of wealthy individuals as bankers to the Islamist counter-revolution. Cooley calls this “the creeping privatisation of the jihad” for which bin Laden became the foremost symbol.

This programme was then extended to the non-Arab Muslim world. By the time the Afghan mujadeddin captured Kabul in 1992, an estimated 35,000 Islamists from 43 countries had participated in the jihad, nearly two-thirds of them from Arab states, with the Saudi kingdom contributing 15,000 – according to Saudi foreign minister, Saud al Faisal – followed by Yemen, Algeria and Egypt. In this way, the future leaders of Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia (responsible for the Bali bombing in October 2002), the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines and GIA in Algeria, all received training as guests of the CIA with bin Laden as their tour guide.

These US trained fighters are now frustrated as they have realised that America has exploited their religious sentiments to achieve its own strategic agenda. They had realised all along that, in the name of combating terrorism, the Bush administration had embarked on a campaign against Muslims and Muslim-majority countries. Hence now these fighters are inflamed. The rampant anti-American feelings have motivated many angry young Muslims to turn to terrorism, including suicide bombings – as freelancers, rather than as members of such organisations as Al-Qaeda – and have made the world even less secure than before.

The community needs to educate our youth about various players who are misguiding Muslim youth in the name of religion. These agents of CIA are targeting Indian Muslims working in Gulf countries and exploiting their religious sentiments. A number of Muslim organisations have launched anti-terrorism campaigns. These campaigns must be supported, as we must stop our youth from being exploited and falling into the trap laid by the militant organisa-tions.

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