Lashkar commander killed: In rise and fall of Abu Dujana, a tale of falsehood and ambition

Written by  Praveen Swami New Delhi | Updated: August 2, 2017

Four weeks before he was shot dead in the small southern Kashmir village of Harkipora that had been his home for five years, a poem hailing the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s seniormost commander in the state appeared on online jihadist chat groups: “on the day of judgment”, it reads Urdu arguably more fired by passion than skill, “your face will shine like the moon, and the roads will be paved with a carpet of eyelids”.

Emblazoned over Abu Dujana’s image, the panegyric hailed the Karachi jihad commander’s decision to join breakaway Hizb-ul-Mujahideen operative Zakir Bhat, also known as Zakir Musa, in forming the organisation just announced to be also known as Zakir Musa, in forming the organisation just announced to be al Qaeda’s fledgling unit in the state.

For the most part, media accounts of Dujana have focused on his career in the Lashkar, with which his relationship had irrevocably broken by the time of his killing in a Jammu and Kashmir Police-led operation on Monday. The real significance of his story, though, is in what it tells us about the rapidly changing character of the jihad in Kashmir, and its possible globalisation.

Like so many to do with the Kashmir jihad, Dujana’s story is coloured in greys, replete with politics, perfidy and personal ambition — all driving it towards its bloody end. To understand the landscape in which Dujana lived and died, it is useful to study his epitaph. The text is curious: there are lines drawn verbatim from Marxist poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s 1979 ‘Hum Dekhenge’, a critique of Islamism and military dictatorship — famously performed by Iqbal Bano at a Lahore stadium in 1985, dressed in a black sari, a dress suppressed by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s regime.

Zia-ul-Haq’s decision to hang former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto , had in the same year Faiz’s poem was written, led to savage attacks on the Kashmir’s leading Islamist party, the Jama’at-e-Islami. Jama’at cadre’s homes and businesses were burned down in Anantnag, Pulwama, Shopian and Kulgam — Dujana’s areas of command.

Faiz’s lines spoke of “that day, promise in the book of eternity, when the forts of tyrants will fall like tyrants”. Kashmir’s anonymous jihad poet, though, replaced Faiz’s day of revolution with that of the apocalypse, when “all else has been obliterated, and only Allah’s name remains”. Dujana, whose identity is yet to be conclusively established by the police, but is thought to have been a Karachi resident, arrived in the Lashkar’s south Kashmir heartlands in 2014. The Assembly elections that year had seen a record turnout, bringing the PDP-BJP alliance to power.
The PDP’s victory was rooted in quiet support from the Jama’at. Thorough the 1990s, the Jama’at had grown steadily in influence, using its links with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen to intimidate – and often kil l- its National Conference adversaries. The Indian state had taken vengeance, but now the Islamists sensed opportunity.

Ever since the India-Pakistan near-war of 2002-2003, Islamabad had slowly cut off support to jihadists, fearing a catastrophic conflict: from a peak of 4,507 in 2001, fatalities fell to 117 in 2012. For all practical purposes, the jihad in Kashmir had collapsed-and when Dujanah arrived, he found his chief, Abdul Rehman, code-named Abu Qasim, profoundly reluctant to 

risk his life for the case.
In 2013, facing murder charges related to the assassination tion of police officer Syed Abdul Shabbir, Rehman’s key overground organiser, Muhammad Yusuf Dar, agreed to work as a police informer. Dar began betraying Lashkar fidayeen attackers sent to Qasim in return for his safety and that of his boss. “Either Qasim didn’t know, which isn’t likely,” said a police officer, “or he was willing to pay this price”.

Then, under pressure from the Lashkar hierarchy in Pakistan, Qasim attacked a BSF convoy in Udhampur. He was killed. Dujana was appointed head of the Lashkar in southern Kashmir and continued the arrangement his commander had made, intelligence sources told The Indian Express. The motivation may, in part, have been personal. Dujana had, by this time, married Rukayyah Dar, daughter of a farmer from Harkipora, and spent much of his time there.

In 2016, the tidal wave of protest which swept rural Kashmir after the killing of jihadist Burhan Wani, undid the modus vivendi. Dujana emerged, at Wani’s funeral, a public figure — admonishing crowds for manhandling Wani’s body. He became a point of contact for young jihadists, and a target for intelligence and police services.
This summer, as police and intelligence services renewed their assault on the jihadists — 117 have been killed this year, the highest in the last seven — Dujanah had a series of near-escapes. In Bandipora to receive fidayeen coming across the Line of Control in May, he was surrounded by the Army. There was only one person who knew precisely where the pick-up was to take place: his aide Dar.

Reference

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/lashkar-commander-killed-in-rise-and-fall-of-abu-dujana-a-tale-of-falsehood-and-ambition-4778106/