Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
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Inside Jihad<br />
in 1990, which was seen by the <strong>Islam</strong>ists as the ‘triumph of jihad’,<br />
hundreds of militants fanned out in 1990 to new destinations.<br />
Khalil was a student at a madrasa, Jamia Naumania, in <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>’s<br />
North West Frontier Province when, at the age of 16, he was induced<br />
into jihad. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the madrasa he<br />
attended had become the centre of jihadist activities by a fatwa calling<br />
Muslims to join the war against communism. <strong>With</strong>out telling his parents,<br />
Khalil left home in Dera Ismail Khan in 1981 to join the mujahidin in<br />
Afghanistan. 46 For three years he had no contact with his family. He<br />
fought alongside an Afghan mujahidin group led by Younus Khalis<br />
and Commander Jalaluddin Haqani in the eastern Afghan provinces<br />
of Khost and <strong>Pak</strong>tika. 47 It was also the period when he first came into<br />
contact with bin Laden. <strong>The</strong>ir relationship proved to be long lasting.<br />
In 1984 Khalil, along with another militant leader Saifullah Akhtar,<br />
founded Harkat-al-Jihad-al-<strong>Islam</strong>i (HJI), the first <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i-based<br />
jihadist outfit. But just a few years later he broke away to form his own<br />
group, Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA). By 1990, HuA had emerged as one of<br />
the most feared militant groups fighting in Kashmir. A large number<br />
of its cadres came from the Deobandi madrasa network in the North<br />
West Frontier Province. Espousing pan-<strong>Islam</strong>ic ideology, the group<br />
believed in violent means to liberate Kashmir from India and make it<br />
a part of <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>.<br />
About sixty per cent of HuA’s initial 1,000 members came<br />
from northern <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> and Afghanistan. In later years, the ethnic<br />
composition of the organization changed with new recruits coming<br />
from <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i-controlled Azad Kashmir as well as Punjab and Karachi,<br />
many of them school drop-outs and jobless youths looking for some<br />
meaning in their lives. Many of them were inducted by roaming jihadist<br />
recruiting cells who, after delivering sermons in local mosques, invited<br />
the worshippers to join the jihad. Although HuA and later HuM, which<br />
it merged with, believed in Taliban-style fundamentalist <strong>Islam</strong>, it did<br />
not require its cadres to go through the same kind of religious training<br />
as conducted by LeT.<br />
In its April 1995 report to Congress, ‘Patterns of Global Terrorism’,<br />
the US State Department associated HuA with terrorist activities for<br />
the first time. <strong>The</strong> report said that HuA had several thousand armed<br />
members, trained in the use of light and heavy machine guns, assault<br />
rifles, mortars, explosives and rockets. <strong>The</strong> same report also accused<br />
the group of having links with the hitherto little-known ‘Al-Faran’<br />
organization which had captured western tourists in Kashmir in July<br />
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