Al-Qaida leader: We have entered India

Home minister meets security and intelligence officials for talks on terror threat

Al-Qaida has expanded into the Indian subcontinent, the leader of the terror group said in a video statement released on Thursday, vowing that a regional branch would introduce Islamic law and "wage jihad against its enemies".

At least three Indian states with large Muslim populations had been put on alert in the wake of the video's release, local TV stations reported.

In the video, which was seen online by the SITE monitoring group, Ayman al-Zawahri said al-Qaida had been preparing for years to set up in the region.

The new group "is the fruit of a blessed effort of more than two years to gather the mujahedeen in the Indian subcontinent into a single entity," Zawahri said.

While the statement referred to the "Indian subcontinent" - a term that most commonly refers to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal - Zawahri's comments were widely seen as directed at India, a largely Hindu nation with a large Muslim minority.

Zawahri said the group, Qaedat al-Jihad in the Indian subcontinent, will fight for an Islamic state across the region, "which was part of the Muslims' territories before it was occupied by the infidel enemy".'

Serious concern'

The leader of the new group, Essam Omar, said in an audio recording released with the video, that Jews and Hindus - who he referred to as "apostates of India" - "will watch your destruction by your own eyes".

Until recently, India had largely seen itself as beyond the recruiting territory of international jihadists like al-Qaida. Over the past few months, however, the Islamic State militant group, which has seized control of large parts of Iraq and Syria, has grown in prominence in India, and is increasingly believed to be gaining followers in the country. Last month, an Indian engineering student who had traveled to Iraq with friends, and who was thought to have joined the Islamic State, was reported killed.

Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh met with top security and intelligence officials on Thursday morning to discuss the threat.

A spokesman for India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party said the statement was "a matter of serious concern. But there is nothing to worry about. We have a strong government at the federal level".

India, though, has a notoriously underfunded and ill-trained security infrastructure. In 2008, a small group of Pakistani militants attacked Mumbai, India's financial hub, effectively shutting down the city for days and leaving 166 people dead.

Ruse for Zawahri

New Delhi has also waged a long-running insurgency war in India-controlled Kashmir, the country's only majority-Muslim state, with militants fighting to bring independence to the Himalayan region or join it to neighboring Pakistan. The fighting has left thousands of people dead.

Some analysts saw the announcement, which showed Zawahri speaking in front of a dark curtain, as an effort to revive the fortunes of al-Qaida, which has been largely eclipsed, at least publicly, by the Islamic State, which recently executed two US journalists.

"This may be a ruse for Zawahri to enhance his diminishing clout among Arab Muslims and Pakistani mujahedeen who are veering in a big way toward the Islamic State militant group leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi," said Rana Banerji, a prominent Indian intelligence and security analyst.

AP-AFP

(China Daily 09/05/2014 page11)