Extremists Fill Aid Chasm After Quake

[Rose Siding]

snip>
Jamaat ul-Dawa is one of several hard-line Islamic groups that have assumed a prominent role in relief operations following the devastating Oct. 8 earthquake in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and adjacent areas.

Other groups with a visible presence on Saturday in Muzaffarabad, the largest town in the area, were the charitable wing of Jamiat-i-Islami, an Islamic political party with ideological links to the Palestinian militant group Hamas; and the Al-Rasheed Trust, a Karachi-based charity whose U.S. assets were frozen by the Bush administration in 2003 on grounds that it channeled funds to al Qaeda. The group has denied the charge and says it is focused purely on social welfare.

The groups' effective and visible relief work, analysts say, has bolstered their prestige, possibly at the expense of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, and the army, whose initial response was widely criticized as slow and disorganized.

"Definitely they will gain," Ershad Mahmud, an analyst on Kashmir at the Institute for Policy Studies in Islamabad, said of Jamaat ul-Dawa. "They have diverted their whole network toward the relief operation."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/15/AR2005101501392.html

[confludemocrat]

1. Saw that very evidence on TV 5 this morning

a masked man, one of a few people (no gvt, no army, no NGOs, nobody except Swiss TV) to arrive to help unearth crushed, dead people in more rural villages of Kashmir anouncing that he was Taliban.