al-Qaida Declares Holy War on India
Pastor Dale Morgan
al-Qaida Declares Holy War on India*
By AIJAZ HUSSAIN
The Associated Press
Saturday, June 9, 2007; 4:24 AM
SRINAGAR, India -- A group claiming to represent the al-Qaida terror
network declared a holy war on India over its partial control of the
divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, Indian officials said Saturday.
A statement and video was sent Friday to the Current News Service, in
Srinagar, the main city of India's Jammu-Kashmir state, in which a
masked man standing next to an automatic weapon read the declaration.
We declare righteous holy war against India on behalf of God the great
in which Jammu and Kashmir will be the launch pad for holy war in
India," said the statement signed by Abu Abdul Rehman al-Ansari,
purportedly the chief of al-Qaida Fil Hind or al-Qaida in India.
While this is the first time the group has been heard from since it
announced its establishment in July, police said they were taking the
threat seriously.
Police are trying to establish the veracity of the statement, said the
state's director general of police Gopal Sharma. "But there is no need
to panic," he said.
There have been allegations that Islamic militants fighting to wrest
predominantly Muslim Kashmir from India have ties to al-Qaida, but these
links have not been proven.
The statement _ five pages long and given in Urdu _ mentions
insurgencies in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, the
Palestinian territories and Algeria and describes them as a global
Islamic movement "aimed at wiping out borders and leading to the
establishment of an Islamic Caliphate."
Muslims account for 130 million of the India's 1.1 billion people and
their relations with the country's Hindu majority have been largely
peaceful since the bloody partition of the subcontinent at its
independence from Britain in 1947.
But there have been sporadic bouts of religious violence, and India's
part of Kashmir _ a Himalayan land divided between India and Pakistan in
a 1948 war _ has been beset by an Islamic separatist insurgency since 1989.
More than 68,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the
conflict.
India has also blamed Kashmiri militants for a string on bombings across
India in recent years.