Srinagar, Kahmir attack what's in a name?

Al Jazeera's "fighters" = everyone else's "terrorists"


Indian troops storm Kashmir hotel

Aj Jazeera


Security forces surrounded the hotel, which had been overtaken by a group of fighters

A standoff in the main market area of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, has ended after nearly 24 hours, with the death of two fighters at the hands of security forces.

Kuldeep Khuda, the police chief of Indian Kashmir, said on the Thursday that "the operation as far as we are concerned is over".

A small hotel taken over by the men was left in flames after the police operation.

The standoff began when the attackers threw grenades and opened fire in Srinagar's Lal Chowk, before forcing their way into the hotel on Wednesday.

The police entered the four-storey building on Thursday morning, and killed the first fighter.

"The other terrorist tried to set the building on fire ... the building caught fire and he tried to make his escape but he was shot down," Khuda said.

"We are trying to find out if any more terrorists were inside but there are two bodies that are visible."

Khuda claimed one of the fighters was a Pakistani national.


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Troops storm hotel, end siege in Indian Kashmir

By Izhar Wani (AFP) – 9 hours ago

SRINAGAR, India — Commandoes stormed a hotel in Indian Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.

The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both the pro-Pakistan extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.

The gunmen had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar's main market area. One police officer was killed in the attack and one bystander succumbed to his injuries Thursday. "The operation as far as we are concerned is over," Kuldeep Khuda, the state police chief, told reporters at the scene.
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2 militants killed in 22-hour-long gunbattle in India-controlled Kashmir

NEW DELHI, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Indian security forces Thursday killed two militants, allegedly belonging to the Pakistani terror outfit Lashker-e-Toiba, who were holed up in a hotel in the Indian-controlled Kashmir's capital city Srinagar, after a 22-hour-long fierce gun battle in which at least two people lost their lives, a senior police official said.
"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kashmir's police chief Kuldeep Khooda told the media in Srinagar.

He said a policeman was killed while a paramilitary trooper and eight civilians were injured when the terrorists opened fire and lobbed grenades when they were intercepted at a police check post in the Lal Chowk area.

"One of the civilians succumbed to his injuries today," he said.
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Militants die as Kashmir gunbattle ends

By James Lamont in New Delhi
Financial Times (India)
Published: January 7 2010 06:04


A day-long gunfight between militants and security forces in Srinagar, the capital of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, came to an end on Thursday morning after two gunmen were killed.

The attack, blamed by Indian officials on “Pakistani elements”, was the highest profile strike since the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008, which claimed the lives of more than 160 people. It was the first militant attack on Srinagar for two years when armed men had stormed a paramilitary camp killing.
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Lal Chowk gunbattle ends, two terrorists killed


Peerzada Ashiq , Hindustan Times

Srinagar, January 07, 2010


In a surgical operation that lasted for more than 22 hours, security forces on Thursday claimed they have killed two Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) militants holed up inside a hotel in Srinagar after they fired at a CRPF picket at commercial hub Lal Chowk on Wednesday.

IG CRPF NC Asthana confirmed that two militants have been killed in the operation.

“We suspect one more militant has been killed but we have only recovered two bodies,” said Asthana. He said the operation took time because the security forces were busy in evacuation of civilian population stuck in the nearby building. “We ensured that before the final assault in the morning that civilians are evacuated from the nearby buildings,” said Asthana.


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Siege ends at Lal Chowk; 2 militants gunned down
Agencies Posted online: Thursday , Jan 07, 2010

Indian Express

Srinagar : Security forces stormed a hotel in busy Lal Chowk area killing two LeT terrorists including a Pakistani, ending a 22-hour fierce gunbattle that also left a policeman and a civilian dead.

....

The DGP said concerted efforts were being made by Pakistani terrorists to hit targets in J and K and in other parts of the country. "There is desperation in infiltration, there is desperation in carrying out such attacks".

Khoda said the militants probably had some other target to attack, "but because of the encounter, they rushed into the hotel and took positions there to open fire at the police".

The ultras first lobbed grenades and opened fire at a CRPF picket outside Palladium Cinema in Lal Chowk before taking shelter inside the hotel.

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Fidayeen lay siege to Srinagar hotel
M Saleem Pandit, TNN, 7 January 2010,
Times of India

SRINAGAR\NEW DELHI: Two heavily armed terrorists — members of suicide squad (fidayeen) — lobbed grenades, shot dead a constable, then attacked a vehicle that came to evacuate him before entering into a hotel, triggering a fierce gunbattle — the first in over two years — in Srinagar’s business hub of Lal Chowk on Wednesday.

Initial reports indicated that the suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists wanted to enter the nearby CRPF camp. But, when they were stopped during a routine check near Pladium in the heart of Lal Chowk, they began firing and hurling grenades. They then entered the nearby Punjab Hotel, took positions and continued firing at the security forces comprising J&K police and CRPF. Soon, armoured vehicles carrying police reinforcements surrounded the hotel. Shopkeepers downed shutters and passers-by ran helter-skelter. The firing continued when reports last came in.


....

While sources in security agencies said the terrorists belonged to LeT, a little known outfit, Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the attack in a faxed statement to local media offices.
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Terrorists were in touch with Pak handlers: Home Ministry sources
PTI, 7 January 2010, 07:25pm
Times of India


NEW DELHI: The Lashker-e-Taiba terrorists, who were killed by security forces during the siege at Lal Chowk in Srinagar, were in constant touch with their handlers in Pakistan when they were holed up inside a hotel there.

According to highly placed sources in the Union Home Ministry, nearly 700 terrorists, half of them foreign mercenaries, are active in Jammu and Kashmir.

They said some more attacks were expected to take place as the holed up militants at the hotel in Lal Chowk area had communicated the same to their handlers in Pakistan, the sources said.

According to the official data available with the Home Ministry, 413 infiltration attempts were made from across the border during which 93 terrorists were killed while 110 managed to sneak in.

Out of the 110 who had infiltrated, 70% were foreign militants while the remaining locals.
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22 hours of terror ends in the Valley

7 Jan 2010, 1133 hrs IST
Times Now (India)

After over 22 hours of fierce gunbattle between terrorists and security forces in Lal Chowk, Srinagar, the three terrorists, who struck at the heart of the city, were killed on Thursday (January 7), the Home Ministry confirmed.

The first terrorist was gunned down yesterday evening, while the other two ‘fidayeen’ identified as Qari and Mustafa were killed today afternoon. Sources said that Qari is a local Kashmiri militant, while Mustafa is a Pakistani and could belong to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

"The encounter is over. Two terrorists have been killed. We are ascertaining if there are any more terrorists inside the hotel who may be dead," Kuldeep Khooda, DGP, told reporters.


....

Though Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen claimed the responsibility for the attack, Police said it was the handiwork of Lashker terrorists only.

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4 Dead After 20-Hour Gun Battle in Kashmir
By HARI KUMAR
New York Times
January 8, 2010

NEW DELHI — A 20-hour gun battle prompted by a deadly militant attack on a police outpost in Kashmir’s summer capital ended Thursday at a hotel after the police killed two militants, including one Pakistani national, Indian police officials said.

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“In this operation just two terrorists are killed, but we are trying to ascertain whether any more terrorists are inside the building” said Kuldeep Khoda, the police chief of Jammu and Kashmir. Mr. Khoda also said that both militants belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization based in Pakistan that has been blamed for the attacks on Mumbai, India, in November 2008.
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Indian troops storm hotel, end siege in central Srinagar

Thursday, 07 Jan, 2010

Dawn

SRINAGAR: Commandos stormed a hotel in Indian-administered Kashmir on Thursday where two militants had been holed up for nearly 24 hours, killing the gunmen and bringing an end to the siege.

The four-storey hotel in Srinagar, the summer capital of the volatile Himalayan region, was on fire before police announced both extremists had been killed in a morning assault by security forces.

The gunmen – one a Pakistani and the other an Indian Kashmiri, according to police – had taken refuge in the hotel on Wednesday after throwing grenades and opening fire in Srinagar’s main market area
....

A militant group, Jamiat-ul-Mujahedin, claimed it was behind the assault, which left five police and four civilians injured. Police pointed the finger at the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).

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Gun and bomb attacks rock Kashmir

BBC Wednesday, 6 January 2010

On the other side of the de facto border dividing Kashmir a policeman was killed in a gun battle in Srinagar.

India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir and have fought two wars over it.

Police in Srinagar say militants threw a grenade and opened fire at police in the city's historic Lal Chowk or Red Square.

At least two gunmen are thought to have taken refuge in a hotel from where they exchanged fire with the security forces.

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The media's disingenuous failure to state the obvious

Inconvenient Truths

The media's disingenuous failure to state the obvious.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted on Slate Monday, Dec. 8, 2008, at 12:08 PM ET

The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center." Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that "[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."

This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.

Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.

Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.

In rather the same way, the international community is deciding to be, shall we say, nonjudgmental in the matter of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay unpleasantness. Everything from the cell phones to the training appears to be traceable to the aboveground surrogates of an ostensibly banned group known as Lashkar-i-Taiba, which practices what it preaches and preaches holy war against Hindus, as well as Jews, Christians, atheists, and other elements of the "impure." Lashkar is well-known to be a bastard child—and by no means a disowned one, either—of the Pakistani security services. But how inconvenient if this self-evident and obvious fact should have to be faced.

How inconvenient, for one thing, for the government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a new and untried politician who may not exactly be in charge of his own country or of its armed forces but who nonetheless knows how to jingle those same keys of peace. How inconvenient, too, for all those who assume that the Afghan war is the "good" war when they see Pakistani army units being withdrawn from the Afghan frontier and deployed against democratic India (which has always been Pakistan's "real" enemy).

The Syrian and Pakistani situations are a great deal more similar than most people have any interest in pointing out. In both cases, there is a state within the state that exerts the real parallel power and possesses the reserve strength. In both cases, official "secularism" is a mask (as it also was with the Iraqi Baathists) for the state sponsorship of theocratic and cross-border gangster groups like Lashkar and Hezbollah. In both cases, an unknown quantity of nuclear assets are at the disposal of the official and banana republic state and also very probably of elements within the unofficial and criminal and terrorist one. (It is of huge and unremarked significance that Syria did not take the recent Israeli bombing of its hidden reactor to the United Nations or make any other public complaint.) Given these grim and worsening states of affairs, perhaps it is only small wonder that we take consolation in our illusions and in comforting doubts—such as the childlike wonder about whether Jews are deliberately targeted or just unlucky with time and place. This would all be vaguely funny if it wasn't headed straight toward our own streets.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.