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

Frontline Pakistan
from the madrasas. JeM also recruited among emigrant Kashmiris and
Punjabis in Britain. One of them, Mohammed Bilal, a young man from
Birmingham, drove a car full of explosives into an Indian army base
in Srinagar on 25 December 2000. Pakistani and Kashmiri expatriates
in Britain and other countries were the source of funding for the
group. 40
In addition to guerrilla activities in Kashmir, JeM continued to have
close ties to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Several of Azhar’s close
family members were in government jobs in Kabul. Hundreds of JeM
activists received training in camps in Afghanistan, bringing them
into contact with al-Qaeda. The group’s newspaper, Zerb-i-Momin,
became a mouthpiece of the Taliban regime and was widely read
among the officials.
The weekly newspaper, published from Karachi in both Urdu and
English, sold about a quarter of a million copies across Pakistan. It
represented a new breed of jihadist journalism which saw huge growth
during the 1990s. With the rise to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan,
these publications received a massive boost and became very vocal
and proactive in favour of what could be described as ‘Talibanization
of mind and soul’ in Pakistan. More than two dozen publications
representing various militant outfits had a combined circulation of
around one million. They propagated a militant Islamic and antiwestern
world-view. Zerb-i-Momin did not publish pictures of human
faces in line with the Taliban’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.
Instead, it printed images of Islam’s holy places or of weapons. It
regularly published news about al-Qaeda and Taliban activities. Zerbi-Momin
continued its publication even after the proscription of JeM.
The group also published an Urdu-language daily newspaper from
four cities; Islam had a nationwide circulation of more than 100,000.
JeM had expanded its activities in Afghanistan through the Al-
Rasheedia Trust founded by Maulana Abdul Rasheed, a leading
Pakistani cleric associated with Jamia Binoria. The Trust, which had
funded JeM’s jihadist activities, established a network of mosques
and madrasas in Afghanistan. The American administration in 2002
placed the Trust on the list of organizations supporting and financing
terrorism. Pakistan had also frozen its funds and put a ban on it, but
this action was later suspended on the orders of the High Court.
After 9/11, JeM signalled their anger at Pakistan’s break with the
Taliban by raiding the Kashmir state assembly building in Srinagar in
October 2001, killing 35 people and later launched a suicide attack on