Jaish founder Azhar now fights Pak forces as ISI loses control
Express News Service, Indian Express
January 16, 2007
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/261981.html

Jaish-e-Muhammad founder Maulana Masood Azhar has broken free from ISI control and joined hands with other militants to fight Pakistani forces in the tribal area of Bajaur or nearby Dir where he is believed to be hiding, The New York Times reported today, quoting a former Pakistani intelligence official.

Azhar, freed by India in Kandahar during the IC-814 hijack, was detained and the Jaish banned after Pakistan-based militants carried out an attack on the Indian Parliament in December, 2001. But weeks later, a British-born member of Azhar’s group, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, kidnapped Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was beheaded by his captors. Sheikh surrendered to the ISI, the agency that had supported Jaish-e-Muhammad, and was sentenced to death for the kidnapping.

After Pearl’s killing, Pakistani officials arrested more than 2,000 people in a crackdown. But within a year, Azhar and most of the 2,000 militants who had been arrested were freed.

According to the NYT, Azhar typifies how extremists once trained by the ISI have broken free of the agency’s control, turned against the government and joined with other militants to create powerful new networks.

The report quoted Robert Grenier, who served as the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Islamabad from 1999 to 2002, as saying that Azhar received support from the ISI when he founded Jaish-e-Muhammad in 2000 to fight Indian forces in Kashmir.

The ISI intermittently provided training and operational coordination to such groups, Grenier said, but struggled to fully control them. “I never believed that government ties with these groups was being irrevocably cut,” said Grenier, now a managing director at Kroll, a risk consulting firm.