Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Inside Jihad
often from the North-West Frontier Province. HuM was formed by
former members of Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA) after it was put on the State
Department terrorist organizations list in 1994.
The group could not have succeeded without backing from the
Taliban government and its Pakistani patrons. In fact, Afghan sources,
including Muttawakil, who had surrendred himself to US forces after
the fall of the Taliban regime, revealed that the hijackers were taking
instructions from Pakistani intelligence officials present at the airport. 33
The hijacking was followed by an extension of militant operations
well inside India. Ironically, all its jihadist ‘assets’ who had figured in
the incident returned to haunt Pakistan with the turn of events a few
years later.
It was late in the evening on 7 January 2000 when Azhar resurfaced
at Al-Rasheedia mosque in Karachi’s central district. Surrounded by
some two dozen men dressed in camouflage-style uniforms and
brandishing automatic rifles, he triumphantly declared that his freedom
was a defeat for India. ‘I have come here because it is my duty to tell
you that Muslims should not rest in peace until we have destroyed
America and India,’ thundered the militant leader, his head wrapped
in a chequered scarf. Some 10,000 people who had gathered there
after evening prayers greeted him with chants of ‘Allah o Akbar’ (God
is the greatest) and ‘Death to India’. ‘I will not rest in peace until I
wrest Kashmir from India.’ 34 There was no effort from the government
to detain Azhar or even to stop him from making an inflammatory
speech. It was quite apparent that he enjoyed state protection.
Born in 1968 in the southern Punjab district of Bahawalpur, Azhar
was the third of 12 children of a schoolteacher. He grew up in an
intensely religious atmosphere and most of his family members
had been associated with radical Islam. 35 Azhar received his Islamic
religious education at one of Pakistan’s largest and most influential
Islamic seminaries, Jamia Ulumia Islamia, also known as Jamia Binoria,
in Karachi, before joining the institution as a teacher. Run by a trust
established by Islamic scholar Yousuf Binori in the 1950s, the school
had been transformed into a centre for jihad in the 1980s during the
anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan.
The seminary was the bastion in Pakistan of the fundamentalist
Deobandi movement, which developed in the nineteenth century. A
branch of Sunni Hanafi Islam, the creed is named after a great religious
seminary established in 1867 in the Indian village of Deoband near
Delhi. The founders of the seminary drew their spiritual guidance