Operation ‘Fox-Hunt’ (6 page)

“Two of Major Shezad’s men go inside and come out firing. The guards will run for cover as a natural instinct. The other
men, including yours, use the diversion to deploy their weapons. Ensure that you all carry your handguns on person and not in the bags. They will be useful as your men attack the distracted and panicking guards focused on the men coming out of the toilet with submachine guns blazing and terrified civilians running helter-skelter. Hamza’s men will use the distraction to blaze across the security at check-in and run over to the airside.”

“There will be a few guards at the final departure lounge.”

The video focused on three men with MP5s strolling around casually; beyond them was the glass that separated the passenger side from the airside. “That’s where you punch through,” Colonel Khan emphasised by tapping his fingers at the paused screen.

The nods from both young officers convinced Colonel Khan that the plan seemed more than acceptable to them. It encouraged him to power on, “Once on the Sargodha airfield, the PAF will share the satellite pictures, detailed maps, etc., of the airfield with you. We will take a break now and regroup for further discussions.”

Major Shezad couldn’t help smiling as he saw Hamza rub his hands in glee. He went over,

“How are you? It’s been a long time. Good to see you again.”

Hamza gave him a salute and shook his hands. “It’s an honour to serve with you again, sir”, he lowered his voice then and said, “Incidentally, sir, there seems to be no escape plan.”

Shezad smiled, “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die,” he quoted Lord Tennyson. “Into the valley of Death, rode the six hundred.”

“Indeed sir, feel like a sacrificial lamb at Eid,” Hamza answered in good humour,

Colonel Khan seemed to have overheard them and he strode across, “Aha gentlemen! The effects of a classical education haven’t been lost on either of you,” and they burst into laughter.

3

Kupwara: J&K: One month later: 0400 hours IST

B
loody rain,” Major Ankush Sood swore as he threw away his cigarette. “Let’s get this show on the road, Shinde Saheb.”

Havildar Major (HM) or Sergeant Major Sambhaji Shinde signalled the vehicle behind their ‘Aditya’ Mine Protected Vehicle or MPV. Two Stallion trucks followed them out of the camp. The tail of the convoy was brought up by a Suzuki Gypsy mounted with a 7.62 mm machine gun.

Ankush Sood was an assault engineer now on a stint with Rashtriya Rifles (RR), a counter-insurgency force drawn from the Indian Army. Ankush commanded the Charlie Company 27 Rashtriya Rifle. He was fast realising that the rigours of counter-insurgency operations were far removed from his earlier unit and course postings.

The counter-insurgency operations in Kashmir valley had participation from various armed and paramilitary forces: The Indian Army, Rashtriya Rifles (RR), Paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Border Security Force (BSF) and the local Jammu & Kashmir Police. While the CRPF, BSF and ITBP were deployed in the urban area, the countryside was dominated by the RR and a few
CRPF units. The Indian Army was deployed along the Line of Control and as a backup force to other forces. The J&K police provided civil liaison and operational inputs to these forces. It also had a spearhead force called the Special Operations Group (SOG). This force is the elite anti-insurgency police unit. RR (aka National Rifles) is a young force, raised 20 years back, given the long history of the Indian Army. It is a counter-insurgency force made up of troops on tour of duty from other regular units of the Indian Army. The force has some 80,000 troops. It had four force headquarters in the Kashmir valley. Kilo force, to which Ankush’s unit belonged, was responsible for actions in Kupwara-Baramulla districts. The majority of the force is derived from the infantry units of the Indian Army, while around 40 percent is contributed by the other arms. The force is deployed in Jammu & Kashmir. Some consider it the world’s largest counter-insurgency force. It is unique to the Indian Army in the sense that support arms’ officers also serve in frontline combat position and enjoy the experience and pride of leading teams into combat. So despite being an Engineering Corps officer, Ankush found himself commanding a combat team of tough soldiers of the Maratha Light Infantry, an infantry regiment from which the troops of his unit were drawn. As the trucks rolled down a narrow road, Ankush could see troops from the Road Opening Party (ROP) on the side of the tracks. Every few metres, their vehicles had been parked. Every morning, all over the troubled countryside of Kashmir, troops left their camps at the crack of dawn. Their job was mundane, but important. To clear roads, check them with metal detectors and bomb-detection dogs and post a sentry after the clearing of a stretch of road. Every few metres, guards were posted alongside and within sight of each other. The troops could see the roads clearly and ensure that no explosives or ambushes were planted. The roads were guarded
through the day and kept open until the troops came back home in the evening. These troops enabled operational columns such as Ankush’s to rush through to their operations. Usually every company was rotated on ROP duty. Like everything in Kashmir, ROP was a term which was unique to an insurgency-affected area.

The guerrilla war in the Kashmir valley has been hard and bitter. And it had started around a couple of decades ago from a political movement which had been hijacked by Pakistan to fulfil its own territorial agenda. The conflict had gone through various cycles of insurgency and continued to haunt the region as the potential nuclear flashpoint. For the Pakistani establishment, Kashmir represented the negation of what they believed was the essence of the two nation theory; Muslim majority parts of British India were rightfully Pakistan’s. Kashmir, as per them, had been treacherously snatched by a wily opponent who had used the insecurity of a Hindu despot to grab the territory. Indians considered the concept of a religion-based state as a travesty to their secular constitution and considered the accession of the territory as final. Pakistan and its armed forces had gone through four armed conflicts to snatch back the territory over the last 60-odd years. Many believed that the insurgency fomented through its proxies was the fifth and continuing conflict. Pakistan had created an infrastructure of about 40 camps which trained these militants through various groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) across Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK), Pakistani Punjab and western provinces in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The camps were controlled to varying degrees through the ISI and the Pakistan Army. The control stretched from financial backup and training to political support for front organizations like Jammat-Ud-Dawa (JUD). Early in the conflict, the stage was dominated by
Kashmiri groups with a nationalist agenda. Eventually, due to attrition caused by a strong Indian military counteroffensive and the need for Pakistanis to directly control the conflict, the baton was now with pan-Islamic ideology groups like the Lashkar-E-Toyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, among others. These trained militants were then pushed into Indian Kashmir through the Line of Control (LOC). LOC is the de facto border which divides the Indian and Pakistani controlled parts of Kashmir and is disputed by both sides. It has remained more or less constant post the 1971 war and the Shimla Agreement signed on 3 July 1972, named so after the capital of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh where it was signed. Indians responded to the Pakistani action of pushing the militants across the border under the cover of fire by fencing a very large part of the LOC. This fencing is electrified and has both passive and active response and detection systems. Active response consists of anti-personnel mines and border pickets with armed troops while the passive response consists of motion sensors, UAVs and other devices which might not stop an infiltrator but will send signals to a control room if the fence is breached. The same is communicated to the headquarters of forces in the area to investigate and take action appropriately to terminate the threat. So even if the troops are not present during the breach of the fence, a three-tiered system swings into action to isolate the infiltrator by tracking him down before he reaches a major urban area where it becomes difficult to detect and terminate the threat. The first level consists of the Army unit whose area of responsibility the fence comes under, the second tier is the units beyond the immediate area which the infiltrator will move into and third is the civil forces and intelligence units in the nearby vicinity. Over the last decade, insurgency has been suppressed through a combination of effective and sometimes brutal military crackdown and a series of
political carrots rolled out to the Kashmiri people. The conflict still continues to simmer between the two countries via the Indian Security and Intelligence services and Pakistani intelligence and its proxy groups like LET and JEM along with a handful of Kashmir-based but Pakistan-trained insurgents. Since majority of militants were not local Kashmiris but Pakistanis, they tended to have no permanent homes in the valley. It was common for them to spend a night in a sympathiser’s house in a village. It was also common for some of the local insurgents to come to the villages and spend a night in their homes or stay with family and friends while passing through an area. Sometimes they came into villages for nothing else but to procure rations and supplies. The security forces tried to catch them before they left a village in the early hours of the morning. The operation involved cordoning off a village and then searching it thoroughly for insurgents. It is a set-piece part of any counter-insurgency operation and deployed widely over large swathes of conflict zones across the world.

A breach in the LOC had been detected in the Kupwara district sector 77 around 1800 hours the earlier evening and Ankush’s unit, along with others had been alerted. The understanding was that the insurgents would, having crossed the fence, be moving into adjacent areas. The chances were that they would head out into a nearby village, and the nearest was a small hutment of twenty odd houses and a few cultivated hillsides, called Loab.

Ankush and the forty men in the convoy were on a cordon and search operation. The intelligence claimed that a team of twenty infiltrators had gotten through the defences and had been sighted by a roving Heron UAV around Loab village. The unit planned to put around a cordon by 0500 hours so that the militants, if there, would not have a chance to escape. In a covered gypsy behind him sat the Mukhbir or the local
contact who could identify anyone that should not be there. For obvious reasons, his identity had to be protected, and hence was masked.

As the convoy reached the village, Ankush ordered his section commanders to surround the village. He sent a J&K policeman, who was their local liaison, to rouse the Immam (the village priest) and the headman. The troops installed roadblocks on every possible route that could be used to escape from the village. By 0530 hours, men and women were separated. Kids were put in the school house with a female teacher. Ankush led his men on a house to house search. The civilian military aged males were filing past the Mukhbir in the covered Gypsy with darkened glasses. Twenty minutes into the search, a soldier called Ankush to one side and explained that the Mukhbir had something to say.

Ankush accompanied the intelligence officer, Vijay, a bored-looking Major, to the back of the car.

“Well? What is it Irfan bhai?” Irfan was a code name; all Mukhbirs in the district were called ‘Irfans’.

“Sir, this man,” he gestured towards a tall man presumably in his thirties whom the soldiers had taken to one side. “This man is Asim and he is from Trigam. He is a political worker for Hurriyat conference,” said Irfan referring to the primary separatist party in Kashmir. “It’s the first time in three years that he has ever come to his family house.”

This information suddenly seemed to have bolstered Vijay’s interest, “Get that fellow into the back of the truck, Havildar Saheb,” he hollered to the Havildar Major. Then he turned around, picked up a 9mm pistol, asked for the house Asim had been brought out from and took two soldiers to that house. These three were joined by two local policemen. Half an hour’s
search yielded some important evidence. The policemen tagged, recorded and marked it. Vijay turned to the police officer who took charge of the evidence.

“You will come to the camp now? Along with the evidence?” The policemen gestured that they would follow in their Gypsy. Vijay lit a cigarette and thoughtfully went back to the Gypsy, his eyes locked onto the protesting Asim. Ankush and his men were completing the search operation. He looked at his Timex Triathlon watch. It was already 1000 hours. He was eager to question the prisoner. A sixth sense told him that he had hit on something. It was another hour before the convoy of military vehicles left the village. As they drove towards the camp by a road hemmed in from the forest on both sides, a low thup-thup-thup of a Cheetah helicopter of the Indian Army could be heard. Ankush looked up and saw the chopper circling the forest. A convoy of army trucks was parked on the side of the road with troops dismounting. They were carrying Israeli Tavor rifles and wore bandanas on their heads; a few wore the coveted maroon beret.
Special Forces, so others are sniffing around too
, thought Ankush as he adjusted his Ray Bans. The convoy rolled on into the camp.