Tariq Saeedi
To callously steal from Shakespeare:
What’s in a name? that which we call ISIS
By another name would be as evil.
In this fantasy-reality world, sometimes the same phenomenon appears under different names and sometimes different events go under the same name.
Before looking at Jundullah trend over the years, let’s glance fleetingly at Al-Qaeda.
There are huge volumes of undeniable evidence now that Al-Qaeda was very heavily supported by the CIA. — And curiously, among some one hundred groups and organizations resisting the soviet occupation of Afghanistan, only Al-Qaeda had a name that was aimed at wider ideological aspects rather than narrow tactical aims.
Al-Qaeda means the base, the foundation. For example, in a right-angle triangle, the horizontal line on which the whole triangle stands is called Qaeda.
As if the people who named it Al-Qaeda, knew exactly what they were doing.
Ever since the Afghan-Soviet war, every insurgency or armed struggle in an Islamic country has shown direct connections with Al-Qaeda, mostly in the shape of people trained by Al-Qaeda acting as leaders in every widening circle of revolts, and in rare and localized incidents as an inspiration.
Back to Jundullah. — If the regional governments in Central Asia can fully understand the Jundullah phenomenon, they would automatically find tools to protect peace and stability in their territories.
Jundullah (also spelled Jundallah, Jundollah) can be approximately translated as the army of Allah or soldiers of Allah.
The name Jundullah was first used by the Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo in their clash with the Serbs in the 1990s. No matter who thought up this name, the organization was fueled very overtly by the American funding and support. Among other things, the infrastructure of the former Yogoslav territories was bombed to oblivion through the ‘humanitarian’ bombing by the USA-NATO.
After Bosnia, the label Jundullah appeared in Chechnya, where it was called Jundullah Brigade. There is more than mere coincidence that an independent and hostile Chechnya would have fit perfectly with the American ambitions to surround Russia, to make it a prisoner on its own soil.
Jundullah was being used, and is still being used, like a brand name with no copyright owners.
From Chechnya, it appeared in Indonesia. It was called there Jundullah Lashkar. This was miraculously in time to help create conditions for the separation of East Timur from Indonesia.
In parallel, Jundullah surfaced in Iran and wreaked havoc in the provinces bordering Pakistan.
This was aptly in time when it was necessary to pressurize Iran to give up its nuclear programme and trigger some kind of internal process to replace the sitting regime with some kind of ‘democratic’ government. From one flank the Balochs were posing as Jundullah and from the other the MeK (Mujahideen-e-Khalq) carried the banner of Jundullah.
Around that time, Jundullah appeared obligingly in Pakistan when the Musharraf government was finally trying to come up with an independent policy of its own, divorced from the American ambitions in the region.
The leadership of Jundullah in most cases was local except in Chechnya where it was co-led by the locals and the Arabs.
In each case, the Jundullah was built on the available anger in the local populations that had mainly been caused by the corruption and injustice. In other words, the architects of Jundullah deftly exploited the existing holes in the fabric of the society.
The declared aim in all the cases was to fight for the cause of Islam and community but in reality the activities of Jundullah were always perfectly aligned with the ambitions and plans of the United States and its allies. Though, it is a different thing that the outcome did not always match the expectations.
Moreover, the American financial and material support to most of these appearances of Jundullah is fairly established by the documentary and circumstantial evidence already.
Jundullah is a brand name and Al-Qaeda is a brand name. So is ISIS.
We have argued already that the extensive corruption and injustice, coupled with the excesses of the ‘proximity to power’ have created weak spots and holes in the Central Asia societies.
This is further exasperated by the rising barriers against the freedom to worship.
Who would be interested in exploiting these holes, and why?
To be continued . . .