The authors of this book have attempted a difficult thing: to ‘write about something that could never be known’. Here is a terrific and scary story about a group of American, British and European trekkers kidnapped by jihadists in Kashmir in July 1995 and slaughtered in December. Their wives were allowed to go free, and one of the men escaped. Another was decapitated. Four were reportedly, but only reportedly, shot dead. At the book’s core, the authors remark, ‘is an event that only one person survived’.
The original purpose of the kidnap was to force the Indian government to free a number of prisoners, principally Masood Azhara, a key crony of Osama bin Laden. But as experts on kidnapping from Scotland Yard, the FBI and some dedicated anti-terrorist sleuths from India and Kashmir slowly discovered, Pakistani and Indian authorities were involved in ‘The Game’.
The Meadow, by two experienced foreign correspondents, makes a big claim, stated twice on its cover: ‘Kashmir 1995—Where the Terror Began,’ and ‘a brutal kidnapping that marked the beginning of modern terrorism’. Yet the book, outlines how before the kidnapping
Masood’s gunmen experimented with tactics and rhetoric of Islamic terror, unveiling to the world extreme acts and justifications that were at that time new, but that would soon become all too familiar.
The authors further observe that years before the Kashmir kidnapping, terrorist acts rocked Sudan, Kenya and Somalia (‘Black Hawk Down’) and Masood’s recruiting trips to Britain ‘packed mosques up and down the country’. ‘French, German, and British intelligence services warned that Masood’s influence extended deep into Europe.’ By 1995 the Taliban ‘controlled nine of Afghanistan’s 30 provinces’. No wonder freeing Masood was the major demand made to the Indians if the hostages were to be released.
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