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Hizbul Mujahideen militants in southern Kashmir during the early 1990s.
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THE MEN WHO GATHERED in Srinagar on a bright Sunday morning in early July had all left their lives behind; not once, but twice. They sat, about 25 of them, on the lawn outside the historic Mujahid Manzil—once the epicentre of a movement for Kashmiri independence—trading stories, chain-smoking cheap filterless cigarettes, inspecting old wounds. More than 20 years ago, all these men left their homes in Kashmir to cross to the other side—to Azad Kashmir, a sliver of the former princely state under Pakistani control. They crossed the mountains to become militants; to be trained with guns and explosives and grenades in camps run by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Some returned as fighters; some never fired a shot. Within six or seven years, they had all ceased to fight; they left the camps, became refugees in Pakistan, and started new lives on the other side of the line. They married, had children, scraped together work. And then, two decades after they first crossed over, they began to return, in ones and twos—smuggling themselves back into the state they once dreamt of liberating from Indian rule.
They find themselves back in a place they hardly recognise, transformed by decades of grinding conflict most of them did not witness. Many of the men they knew have been lowered into graves, and the simpler, even innocent, ways of life they grew up with are now long gone.
More than a few men arrived late to the meeting—the old landmarks had vanished, they complained, and they couldn't find their way through streets they once knew well. But they too have aged beyond recognition: men who were teenagers when they departed—too young to shave, in some cases—now have graying beards, wrinkled faces, tired bodies. They still use their old code names, and they spoke to one another in a mix of Kashmiri and Urdu, their accents slightly hardened by years on the other side, with the occasional curses in Punjabi slang. They marvelled aloud, almost bewildered, at all that had changed and not changed in their absence. One man declared that he had walked past the old Palladium Cinema in Lal Chowk a few days earlier to discover it was gone—militants had burned it down in 1990. Another pointed to one of the city's innumerable open drains, which carry sewage into the river Jhelum, and shook his head in amazement: "It's been 20 years," he said, "and they still haven't covered these drains."
Between these men, meeting for the first time back in Kashmir, regret and resignation hung in the air: they were finally home, but it was no longer the place they once left, and they were no longer the young men who left it. The battle they had gone off to fight, fired by hope and passion, quickly extinguished both. Now they traded tales of what they had abandoned in Muzaffarabad, where they settled after leaving the camps: the things they discarded and left behind. "I sold my rickshaw for a few thousand rupees," one man said. "I knew that on the way back, you have to spend money to pay guides and bribe police. I sold whatever I had, just to come back. Now we have no money at all. Sometimes I think, 'Is this what we did to our lives?'"
One of the men pointed to a white-bearded figure, wearing a grey jumper and dark brown trousers, who walked towards the lawn with a limp. "Look, Hanief Hyderi is coming. He too has grown old." Everyone stood up to welcome Hyderi, a 57-year-old former militant commander who had been among the first of these men to return, back in 2006, and served as a kind of unofficial leader for the group. After embracing each man three times—an unusually formal greeting rarely seen in Kashmir—Hyderi, who has a squint, offered me a firm handshake.
He turned to address the men, urging caution in the presence of a journalist. "Everyone here [in Kashmir] is a spy—either with India or ISI," Hyderi said, scanning the entire lawn. "All of you, see that man, even he can be a spy." The men turned to where Hyderi was gesturing, towards a trashpicker rummaging through a bin, and they burst into laughter. Hyderi laughed too.
Two decades ago, after protests exploded across the state in the wake of the elections held in 1987, which were widely regarded as rigged, the idea of revolution smoldered in these men. Like millions of Kashmiris, they rallied around the slogan "No election, no selection, we want freedom!" Convinced that armed insurgency could eject India from Kashmir, tens of thousands of young men joined militant outfits, took pseudonyms, and smuggled themselves across the Line of Control (LoC) into Pakistan-administered Kashmir; some were killed before they even crossed the line. In Pakistan, they were taken, often blindfolded, to secret training camps, and taught to make bombs, fire anti-aircraft guns and wage guerrilla war. Many were brought to Afghanistan, where they were expected to acquire additional expertise and support the mujahideen fighting the Soviet-backed Afghan government. From Muzaffarabad, they were "launched" in small groups back across the border, to attack Indian army bunkers, hurl grenades at army patrols, and plant land mines to destroy Indian convoys.
Some of the men who crossed over abandoned their weapons as soon as their training was complete, unable or unwilling to become fighters. Many others grew disillusioned with the harsh realities of a freedom struggle run by Pakistani intelligence, which showed little concern for the independence or freedom of Kashmiris. Ideological clashes soon broke out among the fractured militant groups, pitting pro-independence secular nationalists against pro-Pakistan Islamist groups like Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), favoured and backed by the ISI. Within a few years, many of the Kashmiris who joined the insurgency had quit fighting, and by 1995, most had resigned themselves to living in exile on the other side of the line—certain that if they tried to sneak back across, they would be hunted down by the Indian army or "renegade" militants-turned- counterinsurgents.
When the situation along the de-facto border calmed in 2004, after extended talks between Pakistan's then-president, Pervez Musharraf, and the Indian government—culminating in the opening of a bus route across the LoC—the former militants in Muzaffarabad grew restless to return. That same year, one former militant climbed up to a sentry post on the LoC with his wife and two children, and shouted a plea to the Indian soldiers: "My name is Nisar Ahmad Pathan, and I want to come home."
In the past eight years, a few hundred former militants have returned to the valley; some reports put the number as high as 500, though SM Sahai, the inspector-general of police in Kashmir province, cited a figure of "about 250". Their numbers were tiny at first, but the passage of a "rehabilitation policy" for surrendered militants in November 2010 increased the flow of returnees. Most of the men sitting on the lawn outside Mujahid Manzil had come back this year—all by flying from Lahore to Nepal, and then illegally crossing the border into Uttar Pradesh. After entering Kashmir, they presented themselves at police stations, where they were detained and interrogated before being released, with orders to return for scheduled visits. (The families of those who returned after the start of the rehabilitation programme had filed applications with the police before the men even arrived.)
At the meeting in Srinagar, the men talked of floating a new political party, called Haqeeqi Tehreek (True Movement), with a platform opposed to India and Pakistan and a mission to bring back all the former militants from Pakistan-administered Kashmir, along with refugees and their families displaced since 1947. But this seemed a distant ambition: their main focus remained the problems of day-to-day existence, and the gathering felt more like a support group than a revolutionary council. Few spoke of their militant days, or their time in Pakistani training camps, though stories of their mistreatment on the other side flowed freely.
"We should not talk about our past," Hyderi told the men. "We should just delete that chapter. It's better to focus on how to bring all our brothers back."
He asked the men if anyone disagreed. A short, stout man spoke up. "I have a friend who's stuck in Muzaffarabad for sixteen years," he said. "Yesterday, he called me and asked me whether home is treating me well. I couldn't lie to him. I told him the truth. I told him at this age it's not good to be jobless and it's really painful to carry bricks on your shoulders."
Hyderi cut him short. With a grimace, he urged the men to encourage their friends on the other side to return, in spite of the difficulties they had faced. "I have one request to all of you," he said. "Please don't talk about your suffering when your friends call you from Pakistan—this is not good. If we lie, it will be better for them."
"Tell me one thing," Hyderi continued. "Did we come here to live comfortably and make money? Every one of us made money in Muzaffarabad—I'm not saying we were well-off, but we were not dying of starvation either. We earned and ate properly. I didn't come back to make money. I just wanted to see my family, and I always prayed to God, please let me die in my homeland."
The group fell silent for a moment, and Hyderi asked one of the men to take down all their phone numbers and addresses. "We have to look after each other," he said. "You never know, your best friend can be sharpening his sword against you." A notebook made the rounds, and each man scribbled his number on the page. The circle broke off into a handful of smaller conversations, most of them dedicated to the minutiae, and the frustrations, of their new lives.
One man complained that his brother had welcomed him home with open arms, but turned him out a few days later; others chatted about what little work they'd managed to find—one a house-painter, another a wood-carver, a third a shop assistant, several others nothing at all. "My wife is not happy now," I heard one say. "She asked me, 'What was my sin? Why did you come back when you had nothing here?'" Soon the call to afternoon prayers came from a nearby mosque, and the men filed off together.
Before they walked away, two or three middle-aged men with skullcaps wandered past and asked me about this ragtag crowd meeting on the lawn. "Who are these guys?" one man inquired. They're former militants, I said, who've recently come back from Azad Kashmir. He nodded in recognition, cast a skeptical eye in their direction, and said, "So have they come here to create a new mess?"
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A FEW DAYS AFTER MEETING at Mujahid Manzil, I went to see Hanief Hyderi at his home, in a densely packed cluster of houses near the airport on the outskirts of Srinagar. His small two-storey house looked like it was still under construction: there were unfinished concrete floors and bare brick walls, and some of the windows were still missing their glass—but Hyderi explained that it had been built a few years earlier, with money his wife had borrowed from her brothers. When I arrived, he was waiting for me in a by-lane near a neighbourhood mosque, wearing grey sweatpants and a matching baggy jumper.
Hyderi, who nearly suffered a brain hemorrhage a few years ago, looks older than his 57 years. He speaks with a quiet rasp, calmly and slowly; his manner is both rigid and resigned, fitted to a man who lost his battles but never abandoned his stern faith in the cause. A few minutes after we sat down inside the house, in a sparsely furnished room with a few mattresses piled in a corner, one of his daughters suddenly appeared with cups of tea on a tray, and Hyderi quietly reproached her for entering in the presence of
male strangers.
He joined the Kashmiri branch of Jamaat-e-Islami as a teenager in the late 1960s. "My father was a worker in a silk factory," Hyderi said. "I left school after sixth grade—I wasn't interested in studying, I was more into the technical side since my childhood. My father sent me to learn tailoring, then I got into the iron and steel fabrication business, making gates, grills. Eventually I had two shops."
"From my early days of youth," Hyderi continued, "I supported Jamaat-e-Islami." The ideology of Jamaat, a conservative Islamic movement founded in Lahore in 1941, began to spread through the valley in the early 1970s—the Jamaat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani won his first election to the legislative assembly in 1972. The movement commanded the respect of young men like Hyderi, who regarded the Islamist party as the only true resistance to collaboration with India—particularly after Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, the father of Kashmir's independence movement and the state's most powerful political leader, signed an accord with Indira Gandhi in 1974 that separatists regarded as a capitulation.
In the mid-1970s, Hyderi started a small madrassa in Srinagar's Hyderpora neighbourhood—as many Jamaat supporters had done across the state. Earlier, he told me, he had taught the Quran to local children in a mosque, but when his iron-working business grew, he rented a few rooms nearby and hired another teacher to expand his intake of students.
Before the fateful 1987 elections, Hyderi campaigned for the Muslim United Front, a coalition of Islamist separatist parties attempting to unseat the Abdullah family's National Conference. He walked the city to hang banners and distribute pamphlets, and served as a poll worker for Syed Mohammed Yousuf Shah, a Jamaat candidate whose apparent victory was reversed in one of the highest-profile cases of poll rigging. Shah, who would later become a top militant leader under his nom de guerre, Salahuddin, was arrested after the election along with many of his supporters; Hyderi presented himself for arrest as well. "I was tortured by the police," he told me. "The cops asked us, 'Are you trying to make Kashmir into Pakistan?'"
Hyderi and his jailed compatriots would make up part of the first wave of Kashmiris to cross the LoC and take up arms against India—convinced that the elections had proven only violence could resolve the Kashmir dispute. By early 1988, militants representing the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), a nationalist pro-independence outfit, had already been to Pakistan-administered Kashmir and returned with weapons; a JKLF bomb that blew up a Srinagar telegraph office in March 1988 announced the beginning of the insurgency.
That summer, Hyderi was approached by Abdullah Bangroo, later to become the first military commander of Hizbul Mujahideen, who told him that a group of Jamaat men were planning to cross over and join the insurgency. He bid farewell to his old identity—his real name, Abdul Ghaffar Bhat, no longer sees much use—and became Hanief Hyderi. ("I liked the name," he remembered, because "Hyder" means lion in Arabic.)
He told his wife that he was going to Pakistan for six months to train as a militant, leaving her and their children. She was furious, he told me: "She said, 'Why did you marry, then? You have three young children.'" Hyderi's answer was blunt: "I can divorce you, if you want me to." He kissed his children goodbye, and left for Pakistan the following morning. By that night, he and six other men were climbing across the mountains of north Kashmir, led through the passes by a Gujjar tribesman; within a week, he was shooting a Chinese-made pistol at dummy targets in an ISI-run training camp near Muzaffarabad.
Hyderi, however, was not sent directly back into Kashmir: his performance in the camp, and his Islamist orientation, led the trainers to divert him to the jihad in Afghanistan. "I was good with light weapons like AK and pistol," Hyderi said, "so I was sent to Afghanistan." He received further training in heavy arms like anti-aircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenades during three months in Khost Province, along with regular religious lectures and readings in the history of military tactics. "In Afghanistan we were introduced to war literature," he said. "All the strategies—Saladin, all the great Islamic warriors."
The Kashmiris were dispatched to assist mujahideen operations in eastern Afghanistan: Hyderi joined patrols along the crossing at Torkham, "a very crucial border through which ISI would send food and other commodities to the mujahideen", he said. Later, he joined the attack on a Soviet military camp in Jalalabad, where Hyderi and other Kashmiri fighters were supposed to provide cover for Arab militants assaulting the camp. (The young Arabs, he recalled, "were crazy—they would never retreat, and keep fighting until they die or kill the enemies".) Instead, he recalled, their ambush was strafed by fighter jets. "We lost many men there," he said. "I hid under a rock, and when the bombing stopped, I slid out and saw bodies soaked in blood, corpses with missing arms and limbs. Oh god, it was so bad. We gathered what remained of the bodies and handed them over, in bits and pieces, to the locals for burial." Hyderi went silent for a few seconds, and turned his face towards the window. "Let's just leave this part," he said.
After six months in Afghanistan, Hyderi returned to Muzaffarabad, where he was informed of plans to create a new "hard-hitting" militant organisation, Hizbul Mujahideen. The insurgency had thus far been dominated by the JKLF, a nominally secular outfit fighting to make Kashmir independent of both India and Pakistan. The subsequent rise of HM, affiliated to Jamaat-e-Islami, would decisively shift the insurgency to an Islamist, pro-Pakistan ideology.
"The idea suited my religious belief," Hyderi said. "Islam is my way of life, and politics cannot be separate from Islam. It was all so simple—the goal was to liberate our homeland from India, and make it an Islamic state." The ambitions of HM's founders, and their sponsors in Jamaat-e-Islami, extended into Pakistan as well. "Our plan was big," Hyderi said. "We seriously thought that after we defeated India, we would have a bigger say in Pakistan. We would have been very powerful if we defeated India, and it would have been possible to change Pakistan into a completely Islamic state."
"HM was not child's play," Hyderi continued. "Its men engraved the poems of Iqbal in their hearts, they read Quran and they loved martyrdom. I know how much thinking has gone into the formation of this group. It has a strong ideological belief; it has a proper organisational structure. That is why it survived, and it's still fighting."
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