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Terrorist groups refuse to leave Kargil

A guerrilla group fighting for Kashmir's secession from the Indian Union today said it would seize more land rather than leave strategic heights in the northern part of the state, as Pakistan is pressing it to do.

"The 10-year-old Kashmiri guerrilla war has entered a phase of taking and holding territory, as happened in neighbouring Afghanistan against Soviet occupation in the 1980s," Lashkar-e-Toiba leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed said.

He said the Lashkar and other groups facing a two-month Indian ground and air offensive in northern Kashmir would disregard Sunday's deal between Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief and US President Bill Clinton for their withdrawal.

Saeed said the guerrillas would remain on the icy heights in the Kargil-Drass area and had plans to take more territory elsewhere.

"We are making our plans to capture more territories. This has been our most successful experience," he said of the occupation of the Kargil heights.

But he said it would be "practically impossible to work in this area" after two months because of the harsh winter cold and snows in the region.

"So we will go also to areas where we can continue working in winter. We will, Inshallah (god willing), start taking more territories in Kashmir."

He said, however, that an unspecified number of guerrillas would remain on the Kargil hills through the winter.

Saeed said the Western-backed guerrillas adopted the same tactics in Afghanistan against the Red Army and after 10 years they had captured territory and strengthened their positions there.

"Today, after 10 years in Kashmir, this phase has come," he said, and cited the capture of the Kargil-Drass heights as the first stage. "It happened in Afghanistan and today in Kashmir it has begun... It happens everywhere."

Clinton and Sharief reached an agreement on Sunday under which Islamabad said it would appeal to the guerrillas to withdraw from the Kargil heights because they had achieved their purpose of highlighting the Kashmir dispute for world opinion.

But Saeed said the guerrillas' objective is the liberation of Kashmir, and that had not yet been achieved.

"It is correct, the Kashmir problem has become number one problem," he said, but "we neither considered only this as our aim in the past nor can regard it as the grounds to stop fighting.

"We will, god willing, continue our work, and our firm stand is that so long as 700,000 Indian troops are present in Kashmir, they [Pakistan] have no right to ask us to withdraw."

Saeed said all the Islamic mujahid (rebel) organisation had the same opinion.

Lashkar-e-Toiba is a member of a 14-group 'United Jihad Council' alliance, which began a meeting in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir today to formulate a formal response to the Washington deal.

But Saeed said he was sure all groups in the alliance would reject the deal.

He said Kashmiris could not be asked to withdraw from their own land, whether it be Srinagar or the Kargil-Drass area. "All these are their own areas. How can the Pakistani government tell Kashmiris to leave that place and come here?"

UNI

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