Pakistani political groups patronise madrassas that participate in terror activities
by Khaled Ahmed
The Darul Uloom Haqqania of Akora Khattak at Nowshehra near Peshawar in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is in the news after the provincial government run by Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf gave the madrassa Rs 300 million to “modernise” its educational programme. The seminary is known as the madrassa of the Taliban: Many in the Taliban cabinet in Kabul were its graduates. Its boss, Maulana Samiul Haq, is the go-to authority if you are in trouble with the Taliban, both the Pakistani and Afghan varieties.
Pakistani author-journalist, Zahid Hussain, wrote the in daily Dawn: “I remember watching a graduation ceremony at the seminary in 2003. There were thousands of students along with their teachers and religious leaders..chanting ‘jihad, jihad’ as a message from the Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Mohammad Omar was being read out.” Haqqania was one of the many seminaries that served to Talibanise Pakistan. There was also the university-level, Jamia Banoori in Karachi, run by Mufti Nizamudin Shamzai, who shared power with Islamabad in running its Afghanistan policy. Guilty, together with Haqqania, of announcing a fatwa against the Shias, Jamia Banoori was generously funded by Saudi Arabia.
While Haqqania-trained Afghans, Uzbeks and Chechens, madrassas in Karachi became base-camps for warriors from Indonesia, Bangladesh and Malaysia. Punjabi anti-Shia terrorists began their careers in South Punjab’s Jamia Kabirwala before being sent to Jamia Banoori in Karachi for the top degree.
In Islamabad, Al-Qaeda used the seminary of Lal Masjid as the resting and recuperation point for its killers traveling south. Lal Masjid offended Pakistan’s closest friend, China, when its vigilantes kidnapped Chinese nationals from a massage parlour. You can guess who lost the operation launched against the madrassa on a Chinese complaint:Pervez Musharraf’s government fell within months as residents of Islamabad rallied around the mosque.
Maulana Samiul Haq has been writing magisterial articles, in his magazine Al Haq,on the nature of jihad being waged by Al-Qaeda. The other Haqqani clan from Afghanistan – once the bone of contention between Pakistan and the US and the reason Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani mistrusts Pakistan — has been training its youths in the Haqqania seminary. Al Haq’s back files sing praises of the world’s most notorious killers including the 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and the real founder of Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The madrassa has played host to some of the most notorious killers and Al Haq’s files are a good source if the government of Pakistan was ever interested in finding out what the Haqqania seminary is all about. By the time it was discovered that the killers of Benazir Bhutto, sent by the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, had actually stayed the night at Haqqania, it was probably too late. A spokesman of Haqqania denied that recently but there was a time when the boss owned up to the fact.
When the then Pakistani army chief General Parvez Kayani told Imran Khan that he could not take on the Al-Qaeda-Taliban combine in North Waziristan because he feared the “blowback” from such an operation, the impotence of the state was clearly expressed. When Khan made this public, Kayani – who had retired by then – denied it. The upshot was that in 2013, the new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, got all the parties to agree, that instead of fighting the terrorists, Pakistan must seek peace with them. Samiul Haq actually took the credit of persuading the prime minister to smoke the peace pipe instead of fighting terrorism for which Pakistan was receiving international funding.
Khan and his Tehreek-e-Insaf – ruling in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa – intensified its anti-Americanism and won enough stripes with the terrorists to be nominated by the Taliban as its wakil (spokesman) at the peace talks. Khan was supporting Kayani’s blockade of NATO supplies through Pakistan, but was wise enough to excuse himself from being the wakil of Taliban.
But there was a time when Al Haq didn’t like Khan so much. The Taliban too were sceptical. Hadn’t he married a Jewish woman? Once again, last month, Pakistan’s adviser the prime minister on foreign affairs Sartaj Aziz declared – despite the army’s operation in North Waziristan – that Pakistan couldn’t take on the Taliban because of the feared “blowback”.
