Islamic militants defy Pakistan

Rhetoric which brought India and Pakistan close to war has cooled but the killing continued today.

Despite its denials, Pakistan has backed for a decade hardline Islamic groups who want Kashmir absorbed into Pakistan under Sharia law. They are probably now beyond the control of Pakistan's leader, General Pervez Musharraf.

So far Pakistan's pledge to end support for cross-border operations by at least 13 militant groups has had enough of a ring of truth for India to consider a reduction in the 700,000 troops it has massed on its front line with Pakistan.

The Indian government's leading strategist, K Subrahmanyam, said: "The United States is fully involved in this commitment.... This commitment is what India wanted."

Atrocities blamed on India continue to fuel Kashmiri hopes for "freedom from the Indian occupation". But there is growing evidence that Pakistan's backing of hardline Islamists fighting in Kashmir with links to the Taliban and al Qaeda has sidelined locals. They fear that Kashmir is being used as a battleground by pan-Islamic movements bent on provoking a nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

"Kashmiris feel that the legitimate movement for self-determination is being paralysed by an Islamic terrorist movement which is nothing more than that," said leading human rights lawyer Pervez Imroz in Kashmir's capital, Srinagar. "Weakened Kashmiri nationalists once welcomed the Islamists groups even if it meant the devil was coming to rescue them. Now they are horrified by them."

The biggest Pakistan-based groups of militants, Lashkar-I-Taiba, Jaish-i-Mohammed and Hartakul Mujahadin, all had close links with the Taliban and al Qaeda, Pakistan's intelligence services and Musharraf 's own arm. They have hundreds fighters based in Pakistan, where Jaish has been blamed for a suicide bombing which killed 12 French engineers in Karachi recently and the murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl.

Reining them in could bring Musharraf into conflict with his own security forces.

Western intelligence sources said they believed radical Islamic groups were planning a major attack on India similar to the May massacre of Indian troops and their families near Jammu in which 34 people died. Both Jaish and Lashkar claimed responsibility for the attack.

"Samir" is 19. He claimed to have been abducted by three Pakistani guerrillas who force-marched him with eight other Kashmiris into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir across the "line of control". He now sits in an Indian army base near Kupwara, his face wrapped in a black cloth to hide his identity from foreigners since he surrendered two weeks ago.

He was picked up at the crossing point on his trek to Pakistan by a Pakistani army vehicle and taken for three months' military training. He was given an hour's Islamic indoctrination every day. The message was simple - Kashmir must be freed of Indian occupation and turned into "pure" Islamic state.

"When we came back to fight, we hid out in the jungle," Samir said. "The only contact we had with locals was for food. We would raid their homes at night to force them to feed us. I gave up because I never wanted to fight in the first place. The Islamists just want a jihad, they don't care about Kashmir".

Some Indian officers freely admit that foreign fighters, mostly Pakistanis and Afghans, are rarely taken prisoner because they fight to the death, and because India doesn't want to prisoners which provoke Islamists to take hostages to secure prisoner releases. Murders, suspicious disappearances, and apparently motiveless crimes have become routine in the Himalayan foothills and the Vale of Kashmir. Between 33,000 and 80,000 people have been killed.

Another 3,000 to 4,000 have disappeared as India has struggled to maintain its grip on the region which it has held since 1947.