Mumbai Terrorist Attacks
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- kelpie0
in that case its paul schrader's fault
- The band leader from Letterman? i always thought he was a shady mofolocustsloth
- Never trust a bald manukit
- that's paul schaferflashbender
- GeorgesII0
from international herald tribune
The men came wearing black hoods, firing automatic weapons and throwing grenades, taking hostages, attacking two hotels, a cinema, a café, a train station and other popular and undefended "soft targets."
An e-mail message to Indian media outlets that claimed responsibility for the bloody attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from the Deccan Mujahideen.
Global terrorism experts said Thursday they had never heard of the group. And based on its tactics, they said, it was probably not a cell or group linked to Al Qaeda.
"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism." "It could be a cover name for another group, or a name adopted just for this particular incident."
Chrtistine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested that the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims - and not linked to Al Qaeda or the violent South Asian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage taking, and they don't do grenades."
Hoffman agreed that the assault was "not exactly Al Qaeda's modus operandi, which is suicide attacks."
But he said the timed attacks, which he called "tactical, sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the perpetrators. Fair also noted that the fact the group had not proclaimed its ideology in a manifesto was "not at all unusual."
"You don't see these types of terrorist operations very often, if at all," Hoffman said. "These aren't just a bunch of radical guys coming together to cause mayhem.
"This takes a different skill set. It doesn't take much skill to make a bomb. This is not just pressing a button as a suicide bomber and dying. You don't learn this over the Internet."
The word Deccan describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahideen, of course, is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. The very name - if it is a real group - suggests a domestic agenda.
"It's maybe not so much a group as a cell that will take on a name for a specific operation," said Fair. "In India you hear these unusual names."
Fair did not agree that the attacks on Wednesday necessarily required deep planning and training.
"This wasn't something that required a logistical mastermind," she said. "These were not hardened targets. A huge train station with zero security. Two hotels with no security, both owned by Indians. Leopold's Café. How hard is it, really? It's not rocket science."
Fair believes the attacks could be "yet another manifestation of domestic terrorism" that has its genesis in a longstanding institutional discrimination against Muslims.
"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," she said, "The economic disparities are startling, and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India."
The CIA puts the population of India at 1.15 billion, with Hindus making up about 80 percent of the total and Muslims 13.4 percent.
Fair said one incident - "a watershed event" - that continues to anger Muslims were the riots that swept nearby Gujarat State in 2002. The violence killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people, most of them Muslims.
"The public political face of India says, 'Our Muslims have not been radicalized.' But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that's not true. India's Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.
"Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. 'Al Qaeda's in your toilet!' But this is a domestic issue. This is not India's 9/11."
For Hoffman, who has studied terrorism for more than 30 years, the Mumbai attacks are "alarming on a number of levels."
"It's not often that things in terrorism alarm me. So much is a repeat of what we see almost every day, like suicide bombings. There's no real innovation in terrorism, which is why 9/11 was so terrifying, because it was so innovative and heinously clever.
"But these attacks show how a handful of men, basically using weapons off the shelf, can paralyze a city and frustrate highly trained security forces. These attacks were calculated to spread alarm and anxiety - to put it quite frankly, to unhinge things - and that's exactly what they've done."
- sea_sea0
not sure if this was posted but see NDTV live coverage here:
- Khurram0
taking that reporty ^, I think my initial gut reaction was right. Indigenous southern Indian muslim boys, columbine stylee bringing the apocalypse in a pique of nihilistic rage.
But too early to speculate...
- Horp0
I got as far as "There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," she said, "You cannot put lipstick on this pig" and I couldn't regain my composure.
- Khurram0
- imbecileGeorgesII
- your mom...Khurram
- No, your mum.. being shot, by extremists.autoflavour
- sorry but I loled.VectorMasked
- haha me too.. sorry...
:( loljanne76
- mattiaBK0
125 killed, and 327 wounded!! What in the world??!!!
- Nairn0
I, for one, am gladdened to know that 7 years of civil liberty impingements and billions upon billions of euros security spend mean this sort of thing could never possibly happen here.
All hail our freedoms! Great success!
- moth0
Nice. Imagine sitting holed up in your hotel room in the Taj, safe from dodging bullets, while your well meaning mum tweeters "Someone check on my son in room 234..."
- omgitsacamera0
looking at the CNN-IBN coverage does give me a new perspective..
- MakeBelieve0
I hope whoever that did this does not escape justice. Intelligence services dont know who it is yet, even if they are from Punjab. I think its too soon to jump to conclusions about them being Muslims or that religion has anything to do with it. It is surprisingly well executed and very destructive. I dont think Pakistani intelligence would do something so stupid, they are battling terrorists in their own country - why open up another front?
In fact all of this terrorism and much of what happens across the world is NOT because of religion but of revenge, retaliation or occupation. People misuse religion to gain support for their twisted vendetta.
In Islam, the Quran clearly says that to kill a single person is as if one has kiled a whole nation. And in combat or battles, innocent people/non-combatants, trees/crops, religious people and places are not to be harmed - and is a major sin. Also suicide is forbidden, so there is no room for 'terror' in this particular religion.
- KwesiJ0
"revenge, retaliation or occupation"
it mostley justifys a lot of dubious foreign policy and security spending
- Once you kill a guys family, he will come after you. Cycle never ends.MakeBelieve
- this is a part of it no doubt, but there's always people pulling the strings from distance for their own reasonsKwesiJ
- ukit0
New Delhi said it was raising security to a "war level" and had no doubt of a Pakistani link to the attacks, which unleashed anger at home over the intelligence failure and the delayed response to the violence that paralyzed India's financial capital.
Officials in Islamabad have warned any escalation would force it to divert troops to the Indian border and away from a U.S.-led anti-militant campaign on the Afghan frontier.
- MakeBelieve0
The only martyres of these attacks are the innocent civilians.
There is no room in any religion for death of innocent people, life is always considered sacred.
All those Indian lives are just as important as those British, American and Israeli (foreign) ones we get constantly reminded about.
This is not an Indian 9/11. Massacres and in-fighting is common in India, including against Muslims by Hindu extremists. Dont let Pakistan and India go head to head, but let them work together.
Terror is a gunman shooting innocent bystanders, terror is also dropping a bomb on a whole civilian city.
- iCanHazQBN0
100!