The announcement today that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court are seeking arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, alongside senior officials from Hamas, has triggered a political earthquake amid the ongoing expansion of the Israel offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Top ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s announcement — coming after weeks of rumors that warrants may be imminent — stunned many legal observers of the court.

The news sparked immediate outrage from the U.S. government. Warrants against Israeli leaders would mark a new era for international humanitarian law where even close allies of the U.S. can be held to account for their actions.

“The ICC has never indicted a Western official,” said human rights attorney and war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody. “Up until now, the instruments of international justice have been used exclusively against enemies and outcasts.”

Putting Israel in a camp with world outcasts could have grave ramifications for the U.S., a close ally of Israel and chief provider of its weapons and diplomatic cover.

“The prosecutor’s announcement will likely impact assessments of the legal risks for other states which are supporting or aiding Israel’s war in Gaza,” said Sarah Knuckey, an expert on international law and professor at Columbia Law School. “If there are reasonable grounds to believe that senior Israeli officials are responsible for war crimes, then countries aiding Israel’s war in Gaza are at risk of complicity in those same crimes. We may see accelerated efforts in other countries to stop them from selling weapons or providing military aid to Israel.”

The announcement from the ICC means that a panel of judges will decide on whether to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh. The charged men are accused of several crimes associated with the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, as well as the subsequent Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

While Hamas is already internationally isolated, the political ramifications of the charges are potentially grave for Israel. Decades of subjugating Palestinians under a military occupation has led to widespread criticism of Israel, with its conduct during the current war increasingly pushing it toward becoming a pariah.

An issuance of warrants by ICC judges for the arrest of Israeli and Hamas officials — highly likely following the recommendation of its chief prosecutor — would make the world a much more hostile place for Israeli officials accused of crimes by the institution.

“All of the 124 countries that are parties to the Rome Statute are legally obligated to cooperate with the ICC and must arrest anyone on their territory that is subject to an ICC arrest warrant,” said Knuckey. “This would significantly curtail the ability of the suspects, including Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant, to travel abroad and participate in international events.”

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Legal experts also expressed surprise that Khan, seen as close to the foreign policy interests of Western states and even said to be a favorite of Israel, wound up being the one to pull the trigger on one of the most consequential announcements in the history of the ICC.

“Palestinian efforts to invoke the ICC for alleged Israeli war crimes — including illegal settlements — have gotten the slow walk for almost 15 years under three successive prosecutors,” said Brody. “There was an assumption that Khan, so quick to indict Vladimir Putin for atrocities in Ukraine, was reluctant, despite his strong warnings to both Hamas and Israel, to actually hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes.”

The request for arrest warrants comes against the backdrop of a devastating war in Gaza that has already killed tens of thousands of civilians and destroyed the physical infrastructure of the territory. The World Food Programme assessed that parts of Gaza are now in a state of “full-blown famine,” owing largely to Israel’s attempts to block the provision of humanitarian aid.

The war has triggered an outpouring of condemnation of Israel, including denunciations by several European, Asian, and Latin American countries, as well as mass protests across the globe, including in the United States.

The Israeli government has already been hit with genocide charges at the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, over its conduct in the war. Additional charges at the ICC by Khan will increase pressure on the Israeli government, even as it vows to press ahead with the conflict.

“It’s hard to know exactly what forced his hand,” said Brody, “but I think that the overwhelming evidence of Israeli war crimes, the growing global condemnation of Israeli actions and the ICC’s inaction, and the ICJ’s decision that there was a plausible violation of the genocide convention all played a part.”

“I was at the ICC assembly in December as Khan and his team came in for intense criticism from many quarters,” Brody added.

The U.S. government has already attacked the ICC allegations against Israel.

“The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” President Joe Biden said in three-sentence statement. “And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the U.S. “fundamentally rejects” the accusations against Israel, also decrying an “equivalence of Israel with Hamas.”

The U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC, and in the past has threatened and even sanctioned prosecutors associated with the court who have attempted to investigate allegations of war crimes against U.S. military officials. Israel is also not party to the treaty.

There may be limits to how much the U.S. can do to protect Israeli officials, short of campaigning to destroy the ICC and unwind the infrastructure of international law globally.

“How governments react to today’s announcement will be a test of the genuineness of their commitment to international justice for all.”

Despite condemnations by the U.S., other states have issued statements welcoming the ICC announcement, including Ireland, a critic of Israel within the European Union, whose foreign minister called on other countries to respect the “independence and impartiality” of the ICC while condemning threats to the court and its staff. The issuance of warrants against Israel, over the objections of its most powerful superpower patron, will likely be a watershed moment for the ICC as it seeks to establish a reputation as a consistent force for the application of international law globally.

“The ICC, and international justice in general, are often critiqued for being selective, or imperialistic, or reflecting the geopolitical interests of powerful states,” said Knuckey, the Columbia law professor. “Today’s announcement may help to rebalance international justice, and sends a strong message that all governments must comply with international law.”

She added, “Many Western states were very supportive of arrest warrants for Russian President Putin for his crimes in Ukraine. How governments react to today’s announcement will be a test of the genuineness of their commitment to international justice for all.”

The post Can a U.S. Ally Actually Be Held Accountable for War Crimes in the ICC? appeared first on The Intercept.

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The Indian government instructed its consulates in North America to launch a “sophisticated crackdown scheme” against Sikh diaspora organizations in Western countries, according to a secret memorandum issued in April 2023 by India’s Ministry of External Affairs. The memo, which was obtained by The Intercept, lists several Sikh dissidents under investigation by India’s intelligence agencies, including the Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

“Concrete measures shall be adopted to hold the suspects accountable,” the memo says. Nijjar was murdered in Vancouver in June, two months after being named as a target in the document, a killing the Canadian government said was ordered by Indian intelligence.

The memo addresses India’s growing concerns about its reputation due to activism from Sikh dissident organizations and portrays its political enemies as extremist or even terrorist organizations. Titled “Action Points on Khalistan Extremism,” using the name Sikh activists use for a separatist state, the document lists several Sikh activist organizations it blames for engaging in “anti-India propaganda,” as well as acts of “arson and vandalization” targeting Indian interests in North America.

The document instructs officials at its consulates to cooperate with Indian intelligence agencies to confront the groups Sikhs for Justice, Babbar Khalsa International, Sikh Youth of America, Sikh Coordination Committee East Coast, World Sikh Parliament, and Shiromani Akali Dal Amritsar America. It suggests that Nijjar and several other “suspects” are affiliated with one of these groups, Babbar Khalsa International. Babbar Khalsa International is proscribed as a terrorist organization in the U.S. and Canada, but the other organizations named in the document are considered legal in both countries.

A leader of one of another of the listed groups, Sikhs for Justice, was the target of an Indian assassination plot, according to federal prosecutors in the U.S. The indictment, unsealed last week, accused Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, of working with Indian officials to kill Sikhs for Justice general counsel Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen based in New York.

The leaked April memo from India’s Ministry of External Affairs does not explicitly order the killings of Sikh activists. Instead, it calls on Indian consular officials operating in the U.S. and Canada to work in cooperation with India’s Research and Analysis Wing, a foreign intelligence agency; the National Investigation Agency, a counterterror police force; and the Intelligence Bureau, an internal security agency akin to the FBI. Aside from Nijjar, a number of people accused in the document of having ties with BKI are believed to be based in Pakistan or currently incarcerated in India.

The Indian government did not respond to a request for comment. While the U.S. and Canada have both now charged India with orchestrating assassinations against Sikhs in the West, the secret document obtained by The Intercept is the first public evidence showing that the Indian government was targeting these specific Sikh diaspora organizations and dissidents.

Those involved in Sikh diaspora advocacy said that the Indian government frequently characterizes any political activity by Sikh separatist organizations as militant or extremist in nature.

“The Indian government and media consistently aim to manufacture a narrative that describes any type of political advocacy for Khalistan or Sikh sovereignty as ‘Sikh extremism’ as a pretext to justify a repressive security-based response,” said Prabjot Singh, an activist and editor of the Panth-Punjab Project, a digital platform focusing on Sikh politics and sociopolitical issues. “It’s important to recognize that this is a strategy that India employs in Punjab to justify crackdowns on Sikh political organizing, while misusing diplomatic resources abroad to try and enlist other countries as partners in this effort.”

Reputational Harm

India’s crackdown on Sikh activists comes in response to an ongoing campaign advocating for the creation of an independent Sikh state in the Indian province of Punjab. During the 1980s and 1990s, a conflict over separatism in Punjab claimed the lives of thousands of Sikhs and others before the insurgents were crushed by the Indian military. The counterinsurgency involved widespread human rights abuses by Indian security forces, as well as acts of terrorism by separatist militants, including, most notoriously, the deadly bombing of an Air India flight in 1985.

While Sikh separatism has largely been suppressed inside India, the cause has continued in the diaspora as a political movement that organizes protests and lobbies against the Indian government with the aim of holding referendums in Punjab. The Indian government has complained about the activities of diaspora Sikh activists to the Canadian and U.S. governments, often accusing these groups of terrorism.

The secret Ministry of External Affairs memorandum focuses its justifications for the crackdown against Sikh dissident groups on perceived reputational harm from their activities, as well as concerns about the influence of Sikh organizations in Western politics. Under a section labeled “Khalistan Extremism,” the document blames Sikh diaspora organizations for “defaming Indian government of so-called torturing, murdering and disappearing thousands of Sikhs” and “attempting to degrade India’s international image.”

Sikh activists have held major protests at Indian diplomatic missions in Western countries in recent years, some of which have involved provocative denunciations of Indian government officials and vandalism of diplomatic buildings. India has criticized the alleged failure by Western governments to defend its consular staff from perceived threats and harassment during such demonstrations. The document notes with concern the impact of these protests, while suggesting that the Khalistan activist movement is being assisted by public officials in Western countries.

“The pro-Khalistan organizations have become obviously more extreme,” the document says. “Their strategy has gradually shifted from narrative building to street protests, and inputs from our missions indicate that top officials of pertinent countries have provided a guiding hand in pro-Khalistan campaign which has posed a grave challenge to our global interests.”

Ties between India and Western countries have warmed in recent years, owing to a shared interest in containing China. Yet suspicions and tensions in the relationships remain, as the memo indicates. The document expresses the belief that Western politicians may be refusing to crack down on Sikh activists to exert pressure on India on other subjects, including its neutral stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Notably, we have raised our concerns about those elements to the U.S. and Canada constantly. But they keep using human rights and freedom of speech as pretexts, asserting that these organizations have not committed any crime within their territories,” the memo says. “Although the relation between India and the West continues to gain momentum, the Khalistan issue has become a subtle leverage. While depicting India as a strategic partner to contain China and Russia, the West keeps utilizing Khalistan as a geopolitical tool to squeeze India amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”

The classified memo is signed by Vinay Kwatra, India’s foreign secretary, and listed for distribution to several Indian consulates in North America. Kwatra’s signature was analyzed by a forensic handwriting expert and found with high confidence to match records of his signature in other, publicly available documents reviewed by The Intercept.

U.S. and Canadian officials have issued statements indicating that shared intelligence, including intercepted communications of Indian government officials, allowed them to determine that India was involved in Nijjar’s murder. Unsealed court documents in the murder-for-hire plot targeting Pannun likewise indicate significant U.S. government interception of electronic communications between Indian officials and people working on their behalf in the U.S.

Global Assassination Program

The Indian government’s targeting of Sikh diaspora activists made global headlines with the brazen killing of Nijjar, who was shot to death in a hail of bullets outside a Sikh temple near Vancouver in June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused the Indian government of involvement in the gangland-style murder, leading to an ongoing diplomatic crisis.

In the months since Trudeau’s accusation, more details on what appears to be a broad-based Indian targeted killing campaign have become public, including the U.S. Justice Department indictment alleging that Indian intelligence agents also tried to assassinate Pannun, the New York-based American citizen and counsel for Sikhs for Justice. The assassination plot targeting Pannun was thwarted, a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York said, when an person working at the behest of the Indian government hired an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent to carry out the killing.

The indictment against Gupta, the 52-year-old suspect, who has a background in organized crime, includes statements alleging that more people in the U.S. were intended targets. According to documents from the case, Gupta, who is described in court documents as working in close cooperation with intelligence handlers in India, told the undercover DEA operative that India had “so many targets,” including individuals in New York and California, promising “more jobs, more jobs” to the hitman after Pannun was killed.

Sikh diaspora activists have alleged Indian government involvement in the mysterious deaths of other dissidents, including, most recently, a 35-year-old British citizen named Avtar Singh Khanda, who died this year in what his family claims to be a case of poisoning. Khanda had reportedly been harassed and threatened by Indian intelligence in the lead up to his death in a British hospital just days before Nijjar’s murder. The Intercept reported this September that the FBI had also visited Sikh-American activists after the Nijjar’s murder to warn them of intelligence showing that they were at risk of assassination.

An assassination campaign against diaspora Sikh dissidents also appears to be underway in countries outside the West. A Sikh activist in Pakistan named Lakhbir Singh Rode, along with another unnamed dissident, were reportedly targets, according to classified Pakistani intelligence documents previously reported by The Intercept. The Pakistani documents said Rode and the other activist were being surveilled and deemed to be at imminent risk of assassination by India’s Research and Analysis Wing. (Rode reportedly died in early December, with press accounts attributing his passing to illness.) At least two other Sikh dissidents in Pakistan have been killed in recent years. According to Pakistani intelligence assessments, “anti-state activists and local criminal networks” working under the direction of RAW were behind the plots and planned to commit more killings of both Sikh and Kashmiri separatists based in Pakistan.

While India has a hostile relationship with Pakistan spanning decades, the revelation that Indian officials have been carrying out offensive intelligence operations in friendly Western countries has become a source of embarrassment for the Indian government. India responded to accusations by Canada that it assassinated Nijjar by halting visa service for Canadians and accusing Canada of acting as a safe harbor for terrorists. In public pronouncements toward the U.S. since the revelation of its alleged involvement in the targeting of Pannun, India has been more conciliatory, promising to conduct an internal inquiry to discover the facts behind the case.

Tensions With the West

The Indian Ministry of External Affairs document obtained by The Intercept expresses considerable alarm about the growing influence of Sikh diaspora movements in the West. Several prominent Sikh politicians in Western countries have a tense or hostile relationship with India, including Jagmeet Singh, a Canadian parliamentarian and major opposition party leader who was barred from entry to India in 2014 over public comments about its human rights record.

“There are about 1 million Sikhs in North America alone,” the Indian memo says. “The growing anti-India activities and propaganda by pro-Khalistan elements are of great concern for India.” The document goes on to say that members of diaspora Sikh organizations have “penetrated the mainstream politics in the U.S. and Canada,” and are working to “manipulate the countries’ policy towards India.”

In addition to calling for a targeted crackdown on Sikh diaspora organizations, the memo advises Indian authorities based in the West to build closer relationships with local law enforcement agencies and “think tanks,” while monitoring Sikh activists own contacts with government officials. The memo also calls for the recruitment of the Indian diaspora in this campaign. “Indian diaspora needs to be mobilized,” it reads, suggesting outreach to a number of low-profile groups.

“These organizations could be cultivated as vital force in the street confrontation with Sikh extremists,” it says. “Special efforts should be paid to establish cooperation with moderate Sikhs, so as to integrate the neutral Sikh community.”

The fallout from Nijjar’s killing and the attempted murder of Pannun continues to impact Indian ties with Western countries. According to Indian press reports, the U.S., Canadian, and British governments reportedly expelled senior RAW officials working at Indian consular offices in response to Nijjar’s assassination, with the U.S. blocking India from replacing its station chief in Washington. The moves have left RAW with no official footprint in North America for the first time since its founding in 1968.

“The chilling effect on speech that Sikhs are experiencing today is real. Some people who would otherwise speak out against [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi are nervous, some who would otherwise organize and protest over the recent foiled assassination plot are staying home for fear that they themselves could be surveilled, harassed, or experience violence of some kind,” said Arjun Sethi, a human rights lawyer and law professor at Georgetown University. “Many Sikhs left India seeking to seek refuge in North America, and it is unacceptable that some of those same people now fear that the India government could target them on Canadian or American soil.”

“Sikhs who speak out for Khalistan, which today is a political movement, who speak out to criticize India, or who speak out generally, could be caught up in the crossfire.”

The post Secret Indian Memo Ordered “Concrete Measures” Against Hardeep Singh Nijjar Two Months Before His Assassination in Canada appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The Indian government’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, has been planning assassinations targeting Sikh and Kashmiri activists living in foreign countries, according to secret Pakistani intelligence assessments leaked to The Intercept.

The intelligence documents identify a series of threats against people living in Pakistan from RAW, which Pakistani security officials believe is working in conjunction with local criminal and dissident networks to carry out assassinations and other attacks. According to the documents, RAW is targeting individuals and religious institutions alleged to support an armed insurgency in the disputed territory of Kashmir, as well as militant Sikh activists living in Pakistan and wanted by the Indian government.

The documents offer compelling substantiation for the sensational claim that India has been carrying out a transnational assassination program against its political enemies. The Canadian government first made headlines in September with the accusation that Indian intelligence agents orchestrated the assassination of Sikh Canadian activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil. Nijjar was gunned down outside a gurdwara — a Sikh temple — this summer in Surrey, British Columbia.

In October in Britain, the family of activist Avtar Singh Khanda called for an inquest into his sudden death, alleging that he had been poisoned by Indian intelligence agents following a series of public threats to his life. In September, The Intercept reported on threats to Sikh activists in the U.S. after the FBI warned a number of Sikh Americans about intelligence showing that their lives were in danger after the killing of Nijjar. In 2022, a 75-year-old Sikh Canadian man named Ripudaman Singh Malik, who had been acquitted of involvement in a deadly bombing of an Air India flight in 1985, was shot to death in front of his family business in Canada under circumstances that remain unclear. Despite these accusations of involvement in international assassinations, which have caused increased friction in India’s foreign relations, so far little intelligence — Canadian, Pakistani, American, or otherwise — has been made publicly available about these killings.

According to a Pakistani intelligence assessment, this summer RAW was also targeting two Sikh activists in Pakistan for assassination in the cities of Lahore and Islamabad. One alleged target in Islamabad is unnamed, while another is Lakhbir Singh Rode, a prominent Sikh separatist leader living in Pakistan since the 1990s who has long been accused of terrorism by India’s government. Rode was involved in a movement that aimed to create an independent nation in the region of Punjab known as Khalistan in the 1980s and ’90s. That campaign was crushed by a brutal counterinsurgency that claimed the lives of thousands of Sikhs, while forcing many more into exile.

Rode’s son, a Canadian citizen named Bhagat Singh, is, like his father, prominent in the diaspora movement for Sikh separatism. He told The Intercept that his father has long been living under threat from Indian intelligence. 

“It is a well-known fact that he has been on the Indian government’s hit list for years,” Singh said, adding that he was also warned by Canadian intelligence about threats to his own life following the assassination of Nijjar this summer, which he presumes are from Indian intelligence.

“When [Nijjar] was killed, the response from many of us to our governments was, ‘We told you so,’” added Singh, referring to the community of diaspora Sikh activists. “But there is also a lot of anger that a foreign government could simply come here and murder a Canadian citizen.”

The Pakistani, Indian, and Canadian embassies did not provide comment for this story. The pace of suspected attacks inside Pakistan against individuals wanted by India appears to have accelerated in recent weeks. On November 13, India media reported the killing of another militant connected to an Islamist group in Karachi. The possible assassination followed the killings of two other Islamist militants wanted by India that had taken place recently in Pakistan’s tribal regions and the disputed territory of Kashmir. While covered in great detail by the Indian press, these killings have gone almost unmentioned in Pakistan, where local media and civil society are under de facto military control following the removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The lack of attention to the suspected assassinations of both political dissidents and militants has prompted calls for more pressure on India from some members of its diaspora. 

“Anyone who speaks out against the Indian government anywhere in the world is under threat,” said Singh.

The secret documents, which were produced by Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau, a civilian-controlled security agency somewhat akin to the FBI, show serious concern that Indian intelligence will carry out more killings on its soil in the future.

In May, the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau warned that Indian intelligence agents based in two other countries, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan, are being activated to carry out operations in Pakistan, suggesting that Indian operatives have a footprint throughout the region. In September, an Intelligence Bureau document again warned that the Indian government’s intelligence agency was planning “terrorist attacks” and assassinations against targets inside Pakistan: RAW agents were operating from a militant training camp in the Afghan city of Spin Boldak, it said, “to target wanted / prominent Sikh personalities in Pakistan.”

The documents are marked “Not to be disclosed/Communicated to any unauthorized person,” and The Intercept is not publishing them in full in order to protect the source who provided them. The documents specifically name threats to militants involved in the Kashmiri and Sikh separatist causes, as well as conservative Islamic movements in Pakistan. One document states that, “it has been learnt through reliable sources that hostile intelligence agency (RAW) with the collaboration of sub-nationalist groups / anti-state activists and local criminal networks is already planning to carry out terrorist attacks on the marakiz / masjid / religious seminaries / leaders / notables of Ahl-e-Hadith sect linked with organizations remained active in the Kashmir Jihad.” 

Inside Pakistan, a spate of assassinations and other attacks in recent years targeted people alleged to be involved in Sikh and Kashmiri separatism as well as Islamist militancy inside India. This October, the Pakistani government arrested people it says were involved in targeted killings of suspected militants inside Pakistan. The killings were attributed in public statements to a “hostile spy agency,” a common reference to Indian intelligence in Pakistani official communications. This summer, a former commando in Pakistan’s elite Rangers paramilitary unit was also arrested on accusations of running a network carrying out assassinations of accused militants on behalf of RAW.

“Usually, the truth of these things are only fully known decades later, but India has a long history of these types of actions.”

“The general perception in the West is that India can do no wrong and that when Pakistan accuses India of doing these types of things, they’re just being paranoid. But that is not borne out by history,” said Arif Rafiq, a scholar at the Middle East Institute and specialist on Pakistan. “Usually, the truth of these things are only fully known decades later, but India has a long history of these types of actions. When you piece it all together, it seems clear that there is a campaign today by India’s government to take an offensive strategy against these groups.”

The Pakistani government has periodically accused RAW of involvement in bombings and targeted killings inside Pakistan, including attacks against Chinese nationals working in the country and bombings targeting militant leaders wanted by India. These attacks have often been claimed publicly by separatist or extremist groups at war with the Pakistani state, including in the restive provinces of Balochistan and Sindh, that Pakistan accuses of being supported by India. The Indian government, for its part, has denied involvement in these operations or patronage of Pakistan-based militant groups, while accusing Pakistan of supporting Sikh and Kashmiri militants who have fought against it in the past.

This March, the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, published an anonymous article titled, “Who is Behind the Killings of Kashmiri Militants in Pakistan?” The article pointed to the recent killings of several former Kashmiri insurgents living in Pakistan whom the author claimed had been murdered by Indian intelligence in attacks that were left unsolved, attributed to Pakistan-based separatist groups, or deemed by the police to have been robberies gone wrong. Many of the killings targeted people who had been involved in fighting during the peak of the 1990s-era insurgency in Kashmir, but had later settled down to live and work inside Pakistan. 

The article warned that the killings by Indian intelligence may torpedo attempts at rapprochement between India and Pakistan by inviting reprisals from militant groups themselves, stating, “While militant groups that have operated in Kashmir are not as strong as they used to be, they still possess significant capabilities to strike back. The assassination of their former comrades, whether perceived or real, may trigger an angry response, thus endangering peace and stability in the region.” The article also cited a former militant criticizing Pakistan’s military establishment for turning a blind eye to the killing of ex-militants on its soil as the Kashmir dispute has lost priority in Pakistan’s foreign policy.

The anonymously authored article was subsequently pulled from the Atlantic Council website. The article was replaced with a note stating it had been removed “because it did not go through the Atlantic Council’s standard editorial process prior to publication.” 

Rode, the individual named as a target in Pakistani intelligence documents, is the nephew of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the Sikh militant leader of the 1980s separatist insurrection. That family connection has kept him on the radar of Indian authorities, who announced the confiscation of land belonging to Rode in India this fall amid a broader crackdown on diaspora Sikh dissidents and their families.

Rode, who is living in Lahore, was described in a Pakistani intelligence document as having already been surveilled by Indian intelligence agents at a housing complex and gurdwara in the city. Information about his place of residence and the gurdwara that he frequents are included in the report, which suggests that he and another Sikh activist are at imminent risk from Indian agents or locals acting under Indian instruction. The documents warn Pakistani officials to use “heightened vigilance” and “foolproof security measures” to guard them. 

According to family members, threats to Rode have increased in recent years, forcing him to go deeper into seclusion. His son, Bhagat Singh, says that surveillance photographs of his father’s car and residence had previously been sent to Pakistani authorities by Indian intelligence, as part of a demand by India to Pakistan to turn him over.

Singh said that he himself had been placed on Canada’s no-fly list after the Indian government accused him of involvement in planning terrorist attacks in India. Singh, who is seeking legal means to remove himself from the list, strongly rejects these accusations, saying that they are part of an international campaign by the Indian government to silence dissidents in its diaspora.

“The Sikh diaspora holds protests and lobbies Western governments to speak up against the Indian government, and it is for this that we are being targeted,” Singh said. “They don’t have to prove anything in court when they make these accusations. They simply label anyone as a terrorist who fights for their rights or says that they don’t want to live under their rule anymore after what has been done to them.”

“They don’t have to prove anything in court when they make these accusations. They simply label anyone as a terrorist who fights for their rights.”

Though the Khalistan movement has been mostly suppressed in Indian Punjab, supporters have continued to rally for the cause in the diaspora, including from Pakistan and Western countries. As a result of recent protests in Western countries, some of which have resulted in vandalism and threats to Indian consular staff, the Indian government has angrily accused foreign states of nurturing the Khalistan movement in exile. Many Sikhs themselves reject what they say is an attempt by the Indian government to extend its political authority over them even as they live and gain citizenship in foreign countries.

“The diaspora is an extension of people from Punjab,” said Harinder Singh, senior fellow at the Sikh-related public education organization the Sikh Research Institute. “When dissent is being crushed, even at the level of using extrajudicial killings inside Punjab, the people who manage to escape will of course find ways to talk about these issues from abroad.”

In addition to high-profile suspected murders in Western countries, recent years have also seen at least two killings of supporters of the Khalistan movement in Pakistan. In May, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, the leader of a Pakistan-based Sikh militant organization was shot to death by an assailant on a motorcycle while out for a walk near his home in Lahore. His killing came two years after the murder of another Sikh activist in Pakistan named Harmeet Singh, who was also shot to death in Lahore near the same gurdwara frequented by Rode.

“India has been carrying out activities like this in South Asia for years. The only difference is that today they have been discovered doing it in a Western democracy,” said Harinder Singh. “Despite many hypocrisies among Western democracies, one thing that they still do take very seriously is a foreign power taking the lives of their own citizens.”

Following the assassination of Nijjar in Canada this summer, Pakistan again publicly alleged that India was running a “network of extra-territorial killings” that had now gone global. The Indian government has responded angrily to accusations from Canada and other Five Eyes countries that it is running a transnational assassination program. 

But as more details on the scope and nature of its operations come to light, the crisis over the killing of Nijjar, and potentially other Sikh dissidents, seems unlikely to disappear. The targeting of Rode and other Sikhs in foreign countries suggest that India is taking a more aggressive stance in targeting perceived enemies across borders, including through violent means.

“These killings show that India feels emboldened and that it has the geopolitical space to take these kinds of risks. There has never been an instance where it has been held to account for its excesses,” said Middle East Institute’s Rafiq. “Frankly, nobody would care if they were only killing people in Pakistan. It’s only until something happens on the other side of the world that people start paying attention.”

The post Secret Intelligence Documents Show Global Reach of India’s Death Squads appeared first on The Intercept.

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The surprise attack by Hamas militants against Israel last Saturday now looks set to trigger a war potentially more destructive than any that the region has seen in years. Reeling from a series of armed assaults by the militant group that are believed to have killed around 1,300 Israelis, including many civilians, Israel’s newly formed unity government said that it is preparing for a decisive battle in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli leaders have now vowed to “wipe out this thing called Hamas” and end its existence as a military and political entity in Gaza. The Israeli government has issued warnings of an imminent ground invasion, telling 1.1 million Gazans to evacuate the northern part of the territory which includes Gaza City.

“Israel does not have an endgame in Gaza.”

The fate of Hamas may well be sealed, but that outcome will place Israel in a very dire situation as well, one that it has long sought to avoid. By forcing it to fight a grueling battle and then maintain a presence in the Gaza Strip, Israel will have to serve as an occupying power on the ground, ruling directly over millions of Palestinians in Gaza. It will prove extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the Israeli military, already gravely stretched to defend its borders while controlling the lives of millions under military occupation in the West Bank, to maintain such a grip on Gaza.

While Israel’s overwhelming capabilities will likely succeed militarily against Hamas, strategically the assault looks likely to inflict grave damage on Israel. With its forces stretched, Israel’s hold on security could become more tenuous, including in sensitive areas of the West Bank and Jerusalem, home to holy sites from three major world religions. A bloody quagmire could quickly dispel the good will extended to Israel and rally international opinion against it.

“Hamas must have calculated that militarily they cannot win this battle, even if they find a way to survive in some form, but in the end Israel does not have an endgame in Gaza,” said Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East and North Africa program director at Crisis Group. “Either Israel leaves Hamas in place to govern Gaza, brings in the Palestinian Authority, which is weak and likely incapable, or they will have to do it themselves. A new occupation is the last thing that Israel wants. They want the West Bank, not Gaza.”

“People say now that there is nowhere for Hamas to go, and that this is the end of Hamas,” he said. “But it is Israel that is going to be stuck in Gaza.”

Gaza is home to 2 million people who have been governed by Hamas and have lived the past decade and a half under an Israeli blockade. While Hamas is an enemy, this situation served Israel well. Hamas rule over Gaza has politically divided the Palestinian national movement, while giving Israel a pretext to keep Gazans boxed in and isolated from the rest of the world. The picture has been so favorable that Benjamin Netanyahu, then the prime minister and now again in office, was quoted as saying in a 2019 meeting of his right-wing Likud party, “Those who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas.”

That sordid arrangement now seems to be at its end. The day after this war ends, Israel will find itself in the position of being responsible for ruling the Gaza Strip. Compounded with the ever-more-shaky military rule of 3 million Palestinian in the West Bank, that responsibility may prove difficult or even disastrous for Israeli security forces. The redeployment of Israel Defense Force resources away from Gaza to protect radical settlers in the West Bank is already being blamed by many Israelis for the terrifying events that the country witnessed last week.

Expulsion

Some Israeli officials dream of simply expelling the population of Gaza, but that outcome is unlikely. Recent attempts to broker the creation of so-called humanitarian corridors to Egypt for Gazans to flee the conflict have been rejected by the Egyptian government, who have called for Palestinians to “remain on their land.” While the corridors have been described as an act of generosity to civilians, such measures are suspected by many Palestinians, as well as others in the region, of being a means of liquidating a future Palestinian state by pressuring the population to leave their homes with no prospect of return.

“We need to understand what the Israeli government is preparing right now in the context of ethnic cleansing.”

“There are millions of civilians in Gaza and no one can hold them responsible for seeking safety,” said Tareq Baconi, the board president of the think tank Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. “But on all dimensions, we can see that the creation of humanitarian corridors is intended to serve as a means of ensuring expulsion.”

Roughly 70 percent of the Gaza’s population consists of refugees previously displaced from other parts of what is now the state of Israel. For Palestinians, who are now a refugee diaspora of millions spread in countries around the region and the world, the prospect of being expelled once more from the tiny strip of territory that they still hold in their historic homeland is an unappealing one.

Baconi said, “We have seen many times before what happens to Palestinians when they are expelled from their homes. We need to understand what the Israeli government is preparing right now in the context of ethnic cleansing.”

A ground operation to destroy Hamas will be likely to grind on for months, inflicting a significant death toll on the civilian population in the process. Nearly half of Gaza’s population are children, who were born under the Israeli blockade and have mostly never left the territory in their lives. As scenes of dead and wounded Palestinian civilians began to overtake those of Israelis killed in Hamas’s massacres, public and international pressure may begin to turn support away from the Israeli assault.

“When a war like this begins and casualties start to mount, there is always the question of what level support can be maintained domestically. Israel doesn’t have to worry as much in this instance because the scale of the Hamas attack was so shocking to Israelis that even the more dovish ones will not object to such a conflict,” said Rajan Menon, director of the Grand Strategy program at the D.C.-based think tank Defense Priorities. “But it could take weeks and months of fighting in a very dense urban area controlled by an armed group that has anticipated this attack and is ready to make you bleed as they go down. It could take a very, very long time.”

“Israel may turn Gaza into rubble, but it would create a humanitarian catastrophe of the first magnitude.”

“No Exit”

As soon as Hamas militants broke through the security barrier around Gaza and began to attack communities in southern Israel, gory footage of killings and abduction of Israeli civilians began to emerge on social media. These accounts appear to have been mostly recorded and shared by the fighters themselves, or by Israelis who were trapped in the areas under attack.

The grainy cellphone videos of atrocities were a stark contrast from is being shared on official Hamas channels. On its Telegram account, Hamas has continued to share a sanitized narrative of the attack that depicts it as a professional military operation largely targeting Israeli security forces.

In response to public outcry over the massacres in Israeli communities near Gaza, Hamas leaders have pivoted between denying that any civilians at all were killed in the assault and blaming the killings on other militants based in Gaza whose fighters they claim exploited the chaos to carry out freelance operations on their own.

“This is the conundrum that Israel faces: It never wanted to do this, but Hamas is forcing it.”

The miscalculations and errors that lay behind the assault may have gone even deeper.

A diplomatic source in the region, speaking to the Middle East-focused publication Al-Monitor, claimed that Hamas itself was stunned by the scale and ferocity of the violence that it had unleashed. “They hoped to kill some Israelis, embarrass the IDF and return to Gaza with two or three kidnapped Israelis,” said the source. “Instead, they roamed inside Israel for more than a day, killing over a thousand Israelis and getting stuck with something like 200 abductees.”

As they described it, instead of gaining leverage with Israel to win demands to build a port in Gaza and free Hamas prisoners in Israeli jail, the group now feared that because of what had transpired it would have to contend with fighting the entire Israeli military in Gaza.

This war, now in its early phases, will likely result in the destruction of Hamas military infrastructure and its leadership inside Gaza. In addition to 1,300 Israeli civilian and military deaths, thousands more Palestinian civilians are likely to die in the fighting ahead.

Whether it intended or not, Hamas’s shocking actions, by forcing Israel to become an occupying power over the Gaza Strip once again, may wind up as a Pyrrhic victory. With Hamas is on its way into the abyss, it appears to be dragging Israel down with it.

“This is the conundrum that Israel faces: It never wanted to do this, but Hamas is forcing it,” said Hiltermann. “Israel feels that they have to respond to Hamas and re-establish dominance after what has happened, but they have entered into a situation where there is no exit.”

The post Hamas Is Dragging Israel Toward the Abyss appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The political crisis sparked by former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s removal from power in 2022 has since given way to a major crackdown on what remains of his political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. The campaign by the military has included a wave of killings and detentions targeting Khan’s supporters, including journalists believed to be aligned with his movement.

The impact has not been limited to those with ties to only Pakistan itself. Some of those caught up in the dragnet are American and British citizens and residents, detained in Pakistan after repression escalated in response to a series of demonstrations against the military this past May.

Pakistan is widely seen to be devolving into a police state, with thousands arrested on politicized charges over the past few months. Exact numbers of foreign nationals detained in this sweep are unclear, but at least one dual citizen, a Pakistani American named Khadijah Shah, is known to be in custody of the military.

This June, in response to questions about her case, the U.S. government announced that it had requested consular access to Shah from the Pakistani government. Shah is a high-profile Pakistani American fashion designer, and her case has received an exceptional amount of media coverage. The U.S. government has said little about her fate. As for other U.S. citizens in Pakistan, the U.S. hasn’t spoken of any attempts to determine whether other Americans may be detained there. (A State Department spokesperson said, “Consular officers have visited Ms. Shaw three times since her arrest. The last visit was on July 27, 2023. We continue to monitor Ms. Shah’s case closely.”)

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Some Pakistanis with ties to the West say there are likely many other Pakistanis with foreign citizenship and residency in custody. Shahzad Akbar, formerly a legal activist in Pakistan and later an anti-corruption minister in Khan’s government, fled the crackdown to the United Kingdom, where he lives as a resident. Akbar said that many more American and British Pakistanis are likely in prison in Pakistan over the crackdown, with their families fearful of coming forward due to possible repercussions toward their loved ones.

“The line that we have heard from foreign governments is that what is happening is Pakistan’s internal matter, even though many of those detained have been foreign nationals of Pakistani descent,” Akbar said. “But when you know what is happening is political repression of dissidents, your own intelligence confirms this, and your citizens are impacted, you cannot merely dismiss it as an internal matter.”

“The line that we have heard from foreign governments is that what is happening is Pakistan’s internal matter, even though many of those detained have been foreign nationals of Pakistani descent.”

A State Department spokesperson said, “We have no higher priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens overseas. We are in close contact with Pakistani authorities on this issue and expect them to afford all detainees fair and transparent treatment in accordance with Pakistan’s laws and international obligations.”

Akbar’s own family has been impacted by the crackdown. This May, his brother in Pakistan was arrested by security forces to pressure him to return to the country from the United Kingdom. “My brother was detained in the middle of the night on May 28,” said Akbar. “Dozens of armed paramilitaries and counterterrorism police surrounded his house, broke down the door, and took him into custody.”

Akbar said the security forces wanted him to testify against Khan about the corruption charges that the former prime minister is currently imprisoned for.

“I have been receiving messages through backchannels since then telling me that, if I want my brother back, I should return to Pakistan from the U.K. and testify against Imran Khan,” he said.

Akbar refused the demand to return and denounce Khan. His brother remains in custody without charge.

“I’m a professional,” he said. “I was hired by the government to perform a role. I’m not even a member of any party. I never thought things would come to the point that the military would kidnap my brother and hold him hostage with no chargeable offense just to put pressure on me.”

U.S. Pressure to Oust Khan

The United States and British governments have both deemed the crisis over Khan’s removal an internal affair of the Pakistani government, even as the crackdown on his party has extended into a general attack on Pakistan’s civil society.

A statement by Human Rights Watch earlier this year criticized the Pakistani government over the detentions of political activists following the May uprising. “Many have been charged under vague and overbroad laws prohibiting rioting and creating threats to public order,” the group said.

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In addition to extrajudicial detentions, the government has also been accused of torturing detainees in custody.

The issue of Pakistanis with dual nationality and residency caught up in this dragnet is particularly significant given the U.S. government’s own apparent role in helping trigger the crisis. The Intercept reported earlier this month on a classified Pakistani government cable, long referred to by Khan in public appearances before he went to prison. The document recounts a meeting where U.S. diplomats threatened their Pakistani counterparts with “isolation” if Khan remained in power and promising rewards should he be removed in a 2022 no-confidence vote.

Since the vote was passed, Pakistan’s economy and political system have been thrown into an escalating crisis that has now resulted in the country veering toward full-fledged military dictatorship. This week, Pakistan’s president added a new twist to the saga after he denied signing off on a set of laws — a constitutional requirement — that would have granted sweeping new authoritarian powers to the Pakistani military.

The post No One Knows How Many Americans Are Imprisoned in Pakistan’s Crackdown on Dissent appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.