Pakistani flood disaster gives opening to militants

Hungry, sweat-soaked flood survivors stood ankle-deep in mud, beaming at the sight of bags of cooked rice and clothes being doled out by relief workers from a white van that slowly rumbled through their broken neighborhood.

The help was coming from Falah-e-Insaniat, a wing of the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa militant group, but that didn’t matter much to the dirt-poor residents of this stretch of half-destroyed brick huts and flooded wheat fields. No government agency or international relief organization had shown up, and that made Falah-e-Insaniat their lifeline.

“Falah-e-Insaniat is the only group feeding us,” said Noor Zada, a 27-year-old rail-thin man clutching a 3-pound bag of rice to share with 11 relatives. “The government hasn’t been here at all. We have no other way of getting food. So if Falah-e-Insaniat is providing it, we’re thankful.”

The Pakistani government has struggled to cope with the recent flooding that has killed more than 1,500 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. The United Nations estimates that 13.8 million people have been affected by the floods, a number that eclipses the combined total of people affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 northern Pakistan earthquake and this year’s earthquake in Haiti.

Though aid from the United States and other sources has reached certain areas, scores of flood victims say they have received little if any help. That has created an opening for hard-line Islamist groups to provide a steady stream of relief, particularly in the country’s hardest-hit region, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known as North-West Frontier Province.

For Falah-e-Insaniat, the flood crisis has provided an ideal public relations vehicle. It’s a golden opportunity to build bonds with large numbers of impoverished Pakistanis who can later be counted on when the militant side of the organization needs a hand, experts said.

The role that Falah-e-Insaniat and other hard-line Islamist groups are playing in disaster relief has created a dilemma for the Pakistani government. The groups are helping by reaching flood-stricken areas that the government hasn’t been able to get to because of a lack of personnel and resources, but their access to such vulnerable communities also allows them to spread their militant message.

Western officials say Falah-e-Insaniat’s parent group, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, is a front organization for Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has been accused as the mastermind of the 2008 attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai that killed 166 people. U.S. officials also accuse the group of teaming up with Afghan Taliban insurgents as they battle U.S., NATO and Afghan security forces in Afghanistan.

“The ultimate objective is to bring people into their fold,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based security analyst. “They will generate a lot of goodwill in these areas, and that helps these groups spread out and recruit new people.”

The last time Pakistan’s Islamist extremist organizations sought a sizable humanitarian role in a major disaster was in 2005, when an earthquake centered in the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir killed 79,000 people, left 3 million homeless and destroyed infrastructure across a mountainous tract roughly the size of Connecticut.

The scale of the quake’s destruction overwhelmed then-Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s government. Jamaat-ud-Dawa quickly opened temporary schools and hospitals and provided food and medicine for villages.

“The perception is that they won a lot of sympathy for themselves,” Rizvi said.

Falah-e-Insaniat carries on its relief work even though both Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa were banned by the Pakistani government after the U.S. and the U.N. labeled them terrorist organizations. Jamaat-ud-Dawa skirts the ban by using the Falah-e-Insaniat banner to perform its humanitarian functions.

Banned militant organizations in Pakistan often change names to escape prosecution, experts said.

“There’s no restriction on setting up a new organization,” Rizvi said. “And within government circles, there is sympathy for these groups. There are people in government who don’t believe these groups are a threat.”

Pakistan’s state minister for information, Sumsam Bukhari, denied that banned groups were involved in providing flood relief. “Banned organizations are banned,” he said.

In Charsadda, however, Falah-e-Insaniat’s relief effort was easily visible during a recent visit. At the group’s roadside distribution point, up to 60 workers cooked rice and curry in large vats, speedily parsing out portions into small plastic bags and loading them onto vans for transport to flood-stricken neighborhoods.

The effort, carried out in 95-degree heat, feeds at least 1,500 people every day, said Falah-e-Insaniat worker Hayat Khan.

“We’re here and no one is questioning our presence, probably because people are happy with our work,” Khan said. “Everywhere there’s destruction, but our efforts have helped a lot. The government can relax because we’re helping. We’ve made it easier for them.”

Khan said he and other workers don’t actively scour for new recruits, but they also won’t turn away anyone who wants to join them.

Sayed Saleh Shah Bacha, president of a neighborhood shopkeepers association in Charsadda, said residents have told him they’re ready to come to Falah-e-Insaniat’s aid whenever the need arises.

“People here are now saying, ‘Because no one came to help us except Falah-e-Insaniat, from now on we will help the group whenever they need it,’ ” Bacha said.

alex.rodriguez@latimes.com