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US blacklists 11 more Islamist groups

* List includes Al-Badar, Hizb, Jamiatul Mujahideen and Sipah-e-Sahaba

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: The United States on Wednesday added 11 militant Islamist organizations to its lists of “terrorist groups,” reflecting closer attention paid by US policy-makers to the Muslim world in the war on terrorism.

The new second tier list of 38 “other terrorist groups” issued by the State Department also included two new non-Islamic groups — the Communist Party of Nepal and the New Red Brigades in Italy.

The list of secondary groups acts as a watch list for the first-tier list of “foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs)” on which the United States imposes sanctions.

The annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report did not change the list of FTOs, which now has 36 groups.

Two groups were promoted to the list of “foreign terrorist organizations” during 2002 — the communist New Peoplee’s Army in the Philippines and Jamia Islamiya in Indonesia, which has been linked to a bombing in Bali.

The 11 new militant Islamist groups are: Al-Badar Mujahideen, said to have several hundred members in Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was described as an offshoot from Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, a Pakistani-based group.

Ansar al-Islam, the small group which was based in Iraqi Kurdistan until the US invasion of Iraq and which may no longer exist after US and Kurdish forces attacked its base. The United States said it had links with al Qaeda.

The Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement, a small Uighur separatist group based in China’s Xinjiang province.

Hizb-e-Islami, founded by Afghan warlord Gulbaddin Hikmatyar operates mainly in eastern Afghanistan.

Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, described as the largest Kashmiri militant group and the political wing of Pakistan’s largest political party, the Jamaat-i-Islami. The State Department said it may have several thousand members in Kashmir and Pakistan. The Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade, one of three groups affiliated with Chechen guerrillas who took over a Moscow theater and took hundreds of hostages in October 2002. The Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, a small pro-Pakistani militant group formed in Kashmir in 1990. The Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, which emerged in the late 1990s and had members train in Afghanistan. Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs, another of the Chechen groups which took over the Moscow theater in October 2002. Sipah-e-Sahaba, a Pakistani group that is violently opposed to Pakistan’s Shi’ite community. The Special Purposes Islamic Brigade, the third of the three Chechen groups implicated in the 2002 theater attack.

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