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Maldives battles Islamist offensive

MALE: Across the road from the Zikura Masjid, loud Hindi film music blasts out of a store selling high-end audio equipment.

No one seems to object: in the Maldives, the sacred and the profane have learned to coexist.

Just around the corner, though, stand the Zeenia Manzil apartments. Inside a makeshift, one-room mosque in the building, police investigators say, a group of local residents linked to the ultra-right Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis sect planned the September 29 Sultan Park bombing – the first major Islamist terror strike in the Maldives.

Rejecting liturgical practices at the State-run mosques, the group argued that the mainstream Sunni Islam promoted by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s regime was heretical — and the regime itself illegitimate. Behind their campaign, investigators believe, were the massive resources of Pakistan and West Asia-based Islamist networks.

Among the key figures in planning the Sultan Park bombing, investigators believe, was Saeed Ahmed, the Zeenia Manzil Masjid’s leading ideologue.

Mr. Ahmed, who was a key participant in the 2004 street protests against President Gayoom’s regime, left for Pakistan several months ago. His family claims to have no knowledge of his whereabouts.

Like several other Maldives Islamists, Mr. Ahmed is thought to have been linked to the Jamia Salafiya Islamia, a Faislabad-based seminary that has received dozens of religious students from the Maldives. It has also produced several key leaders of one of the world’s most feared terror groups: the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Among them was Faislabad resident Abdul Malik, who as head of the Lashkar’s Umm ul-Qura camp between 1998 and 2003 trained thousands of Lashkar operatives for the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir. Mr. Malik, operating under the code-name Abu Anas, was killed in a 2003 fire-fight with Indian troops near Sangrama, in northern Jammu and Kashmir

Several Maldives nationals are believed to have trained at Lashkar-run facilities in Pakistan — some during Mr. Malik’s tenure as head of Umm ul-Qura. Ahmad Shah was put through the daura aam, or basic combat course, one Lashkar-run camp in the late 1990s. “So many Maldivians were training there,” he said in a recent interview.

In the run-up to the Sultan Park bombing, evidence emerged that these networks were intact. Maldivian national Asif Ibrahim, was arrested in Kerala in April, 2005, after attempting to source equipment and recruit cadre for a Male-based terror group, the Jamaat-ul-Muslimeen.

Last April, three Male residents were arrested on charges of preparing to go to Pakistan to receive jihad training.

Although acquitted for want of evidence, none made secret of their ideological leanings. Fatimah Nasreen, one of the three, recently said of Osama bin-Laden: “There are things I support, and things I can’t decide on.”

Allegiances forged in foreign seminaries such as Jamia Salafiya propelled the slow but apparently inexorable growth of neo-conservative Islam on the islands.

As early as December 1999, Islamists launched incendiary attacks against the regime, arguing that the millennium celebrations planned were part of a plot to spread Christianity.

In 2003, posters appeared on the walls of a school in Edhyafushi island, praising Osama bin-Laden.

A Male shop displaying a Santa Claus was attacked in 2005.

By mid-2006, Islamists centred around Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis preacher Sheikh Ibrahim Fareed succeeded in establishing a base in the south Maldives Island of Himandhoo.

A new mosque, propagating neo-conservative Islam, was set up in defiance of laws that mandate that religious institutions must be licensed. Sharia codes were imposed on residents.

Efforts to act against Islamists met with resistance. While the Himandhoo mosque was shut down in October 2006, it soon revived. One government supporter on the island, Ibrahim Shameem, was murdered two months later.

Just this June, Islamists and police fought a street battle after officials attempted to close down an Islamist mosque in Male.

In the wake of the Sultan Park bombing, the Maldives government has begun to fight back.

Police backed by troops cleared Himandhoo on October 7, after battles, which left one officer seriously injured. Sheikh Fareed himself has been arrested, in an effort to contain the ideological infrastructure on which Islamists depend.

Officials in the Maldives, though, aren’t convinced their war against Islamist violence is over.

“I think we still need to be alert,” Maldives Home Minister Abdullah Kamaludeen told The Hindu. “Both the available intelligence and plain and simple prudence,” he said, “make this imperative.”

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