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

Frontline Pakistan
from Shah Wali Ullah, an eighteenth-century Islamic scholar who
endeavoured to bind together different Islamic schools of thought.
The movement, which was purely a South Asian phenomenon, sought
to revive puritan Islam, but became radicalized with the call for jihad
against the Soviet occupation of Muslim Afghanistan.
The first squad of Pakistani jihadists came from this institution
in 1980, 36 and in the next two decades thousands of its students
participated in ‘holy wars’ in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Many of the
Taliban leaders were graduates of this institution. They would often
consult Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a widely respected cleric and dean
of the school, on matters relating to Islamic sharia.
Azhar’s journey into jihad started during his stay in Jamia Binoria. In
the mid 1980s he went to Afghanistan to fight along with the mujahidin
in the eastern Khost province. There was no going back for him from
there. It was in Afghanistan that he decided to dedicate his life to
the cause of jihad. He joined HuM, one of the most powerful jihadist
groups involved in the Afghan war. Because of his weak physical
condition he was assigned propaganda and organizational work. With
his fiery speeches he soon made his mark on the movement. Audio
cassettes of his speeches were used to motivate Muslims to join the
jihadist cause. He was also a powerful writer and in the 1980s edited a
magazine called Sadai Mujahid (‘Voice of Mujahid’). He soon rose up
the group’s leadership ladder.
One of his tasks was to mobilize support in other countries and,
during the 1990s, he made trips to several European and African
countries. Some reports suggest he followed Osama bin Laden to
Sudan in 1992 and fought in Somalia along with Arab fighters, most of
them former Afghan war veterans, for the local warlord, Aided. He was
also said to have been involved in the training of militants in Yemen
before he was sent to organize the party’s jihadist network in Indiancontrolled
Kashmir. 37 Captured by Indian forces in February 1994 for
travelling on a forged Portuguese passport, he was tried on terrorism
charges. He was acquitted in that case, but remained in jail for more
than six years. He made an attempt to escape by digging a tunnel, but
was caught and put in a high security prison in Srinagar. During his
six-year detention in Indian jails, Azhar, still in his mid thirties, wrote
numerous articles on jihad, often referring in his writings to Africa.
It was in July 1994 that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, then a student
at the London School of Economics, was sent to Delhi by the HuM
leadership with a mandate to kidnap a group of western tourists and