A Gentleman's Game by Greg Rucka

faster.”
    Lankford hesitated, frowned, then gave her a grudging nod of comprehension.
    Chace gathered the second pile, dropped it with Poole, then returned to her desk.
    “Harakat ul-Mujihadin, Abdul Aziz faction,” she told them. “No positive ID yet, but it’s the working theory. D-Ops wants anything useful, anything vaguely operational. Start reading.”
    Without a word, Poole and Lankford dove into the folders.
    Chace took her seat, wooden and designed, it seemed, by one of England’s crueler chiropractors, and began working through her own pile. Most of the information was already known to her, and the files served as a refresher course more than anything else.
    The HUM began as the Harakat ul-Ansar, formed in central Punjab in Pakistan in the early 1980s by Islamic religious elements. The group almost immediately began sending fighters into Afghanistan to assist the Afghani Mujihadin in their war against the Soviet occupation. Fighters were recruited from both central Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and the CIA estimated up to five thousand troops had entered Afghanistan to join the fight by 1987, with recruitment funding coming from Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, including the bin Laden family.
    As the war in Afghanistan progressed, more recruits were drawn from Muslim communities in other countries, including Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines, and of course Kashmir. Recruits were trained in camps set up in the Paktia province of Afghanistan and run by Hezb Islami (Khalis) Afghan Mujihadin leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who later went on to join the
taleban
leadership as Minister of Tribal Affairs.
    The file noted that Haqqani was still alive and at liberty, presumably hiding in the mountains of western Pakistan.
    Following its initial entry into the conflict, the HUM established its own camps in Afghan territory, and Chace found herself leafing through old satellite surveillance shots, views of tents and training courses, and clusters of men engaged in all manner of paramilitary training. The camps were constructed just across the Miran Shah in the NWFP, and declassified Russian intelligence stated that some of the Soviet army’s fiercest opposition had come from HUM-trained soldiers.
    After the Mujihadin taking of Kabul in 1992 and the establishment of the
taleban
government, the HUA merged with the Harakat ul-Jihad-al-Islami, another Afghani partisan organization, and took the new name Harakat ul-Mujihadin, now directing its energies to defending the rights of Muslims all over the world. It expanded operations to those same countries it had drawn recruits from, and added Chechnya, Bosnia, and Tajikistan for good measure.
    In the aftermath of the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Americans launched cruise missile attacks at the HUM training camps, and then again during the Coalition action in Afghanistan, virtually destroying the groups’ training infrastructure and scattering its various elements. D-Int’s assessment, and here Chace found a corresponding CIA analysis, was that the HUM had been driven out of Afghanistan entirely and pursued underground in Pakistan. Given the activity in the region, and the HUM’s ideological similarities to other radical Islamist—read Wahhabist—organizations, it was likely that those HUM elements still surviving had been absorbed into other militant groups throughout the region.
    It was out of these surviving elements that the Abdul Aziz faction was believed to have been born, founded by Sheikh Abdul Aziz Sa’id, an Arab of unknown origin who had been linked to Muslim extremist organizations throughout the Middle and Far East. Abdul Aziz was suspected of supplying material and support to al-Qaeda operatives in northern Africa, as well as providing the Semtex used in the recent Jamaat al-Islamiyya bombings in Micronesia.
    As with all such organizations, information on HUM finances was hard to come by. It