by SUHASINI HAIDER
“Journalist sabka dost hota hai (Journalists are everybody’s friends),” was Saleem Shahzad’s response when I asked him about the Taliban connections of a common acquaintance, “What matters is if he gets the story or not.” In his career, Shahzad had certainly been accused of “playing all sides of the fence” — the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but his brutal death showed that he had made some very powerful enemies as well.
Many are shocked with the boldness of his abductors — that a prominent journalist could be taken from the heart of Islamabad’s high security zone, somewhere between the capital’s F-8 and F-6 sectors. When his body surfaced in a river canal, bearing marks of torture — broken ribs, the use of rods — it showed that those who meant to kill him, also wanted to send a message to others like him. Some have written that it was Shahzad’s last article, drawing links between the “PNS Mehran” naval base attacks and jihadist elements within the Navy which was the motive for his killers. And the angry reaction from other Pakistani journalists has been, “If the all-powerful ISI isn’t behind the killing, then surely it can and must find out who is.”
But drawing the world’s attention to al-Qaeda’s infiltration of the Pakistani military goes beyond any one article Shahzad may have written — the running theme of much of his reporting in the last few years. He is the only journalist to have interviewed terrorist commanders Ilyas Kashmiri and Baitullah Mehsud, consistently holding the view that even as they planned diabolical attacks on the Pakistani army, they had help from retired or “rogue” Army officers. Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade, he believed, had been originally raised by ISI officers to fight against India, and diverted to fighting on the Afghan border when the India-Pakistan peace process forced a drawback on the ‘Kashmiri jihad.’ Shahzad said these officers had continued their links with Ilyas Kashmiri.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)