Al-Qaida Announces New Branch on Indian Subcontinent

New Delhi: Al-Qaida has released a video announcing the establishment of a new branch on the Indian subcontinent, saying it is meant to revive jihadist activity in a region "which was once part of the land of Muslims, until the infidel enemy occupied it and fragmented it and split it."

In the 55-minute video, which was posted on jihadist forums, al-Qaida's leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, addresses listeners in parts of the region with large Muslim populations, assuring Muslims "in Burma, Bangladesh, Assam, Gujarat, Ahmedabad and Kashmir that your brothers" in the militant organization "did not forget you and that they are doing what they can to rescue you."

Al-Zawahri said that the new branch had been two years in the making. The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online, said the video was posted Wednesday.

Indian news outlets reported Thursday that the country's Intelligence Bureau had verified the video's authenticity and alerted police across the nation to a heightened threat.

Sambit Patra, a spokesman for the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, called the announcement "a matter of serious concern."

"The government will take a note of it, and surely see to it that whatever action we have to take against this will be done," he said, according to ANI, a wire service.

Al-Qaida, which has been weakened by military and economic pressure in the years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has not traditionally recruited heavily in India or staged major attacks on Hindus. Instead, its ideological focus has been on driving out a "far enemy" - the United States and its allies - from the Middle East. Analysts say its leaders may be wary of provoking conflict with this region's huge Hindu population.

This summer, however, has seen recruiting of Indian Muslims by the Islamic State group, a Sunni network that split rancorously from al-Qaida last year and has rapidly expanded, threatening to eclipse its forerunner. Many analysts in India saw al-Qaida's announcement Wednesday as an effort by the older organization to confront a rising challenge to its leadership of the Islamic militancy in the region.

In his videotaped address, al-Zawahri does not make specific reference to the Islamic State group, but he does call for unity among jihadists, saying "discord is a curse and torment, and disgrace for the believers and glory for the disbelievers."

Laith Alkhouri, a senior analyst at Flashpoint Global Partners, a New York security consulting firm that tracks militant websites, called the message "a serious counter-narrative" to the Islamic State expansion.

"Al-Zawahiri is establishing an antithesis to ISIS and its ideology, a message to mujahedeen unify together, not kill Muslims and kill each other, and, keep the focus of the attacks on Western powers," Alkhouri said in a written reply to questions, using an abbreviation for the Islamic State group. "In other words, maintain the original al-Qaida goals."

Some analysts played down the announcement's significance because al-Qaida has little presence in India, where militant networks rely on local fighters and are driven by local conflicts.

One measure of that weakness is that no Kashmiri militants have ever been associated with al-Qaida, said Wilson John, a terrorism expert at the Observer Research Foundation. Organizers of the 2008 militant attacks on Mumbai were forced to bring in fighters from Pakistan, presumably because they were unable to recruit inside India, he added.

"There is an ideological disconnect," he said, because most Indian Muslims have little sympathy for Wahhabi, the religious movement followed by some extremists. "They never had this support despite two decades of trying to find an anchor in India."

In the video statement, the al-Qaida leader vows to "crush the artificial borders established by the English occupiers to divide the Muslims." The subcontinent's population was split along religious lines by a partition engineered by the British Empire in 1947. Millions of Muslims flooded into Pakistan, but a large Muslim minority stayed in India, where it makes up roughly 14 percent of the population.

In his recorded speech, al-Zawahri refers twice to Gujarat, a state with a large Muslim population that was led for 12 years by India's new prime minister, Narendra Modi. Gujarat was the site of bloody religious riots in 2002, when Modi had just become chief minister, leading to the deaths of more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. Security officials have told Indian newspapers that the state has been a target for militant activity since then.