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

Inside Jihad
in 1990, which was seen by the Islamists as the ‘triumph of jihad’,
hundreds of militants fanned out in 1990 to new destinations.
Khalil was a student at a madrasa, Jamia Naumania, in Pakistan’s
North West Frontier Province when, at the age of 16, he was induced
into jihad. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the madrasa he
attended had become the centre of jihadist activities by a fatwa calling
Muslims to join the war against communism. Without telling his parents,
Khalil left home in Dera Ismail Khan in 1981 to join the mujahidin in
Afghanistan. 46 For three years he had no contact with his family. He
fought alongside an Afghan mujahidin group led by Younus Khalis
and Commander Jalaluddin Haqani in the eastern Afghan provinces
of Khost and Paktika. 47 It was also the period when he first came into
contact with bin Laden. Their relationship proved to be long lasting.
In 1984 Khalil, along with another militant leader Saifullah Akhtar,
founded Harkat-al-Jihad-al-Islami (HJI), the first Pakistani-based
jihadist outfit. But just a few years later he broke away to form his own
group, Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA). By 1990, HuA had emerged as one of
the most feared militant groups fighting in Kashmir. A large number
of its cadres came from the Deobandi madrasa network in the North
West Frontier Province. Espousing pan-Islamic ideology, the group
believed in violent means to liberate Kashmir from India and make it
a part of Pakistan.
About sixty per cent of HuA’s initial 1,000 members came
from northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. In later years, the ethnic
composition of the organization changed with new recruits coming
from Pakistani-controlled Azad Kashmir as well as Punjab and Karachi,
many of them school drop-outs and jobless youths looking for some
meaning in their lives. Many of them were inducted by roaming jihadist
recruiting cells who, after delivering sermons in local mosques, invited
the worshippers to join the jihad. Although HuA and later HuM, which
it merged with, believed in Taliban-style fundamentalist Islam, it did
not require its cadres to go through the same kind of religious training
as conducted by LeT.
In its April 1995 report to Congress, ‘Patterns of Global Terrorism’,
the US State Department associated HuA with terrorist activities for
the first time. The report said that HuA had several thousand armed
members, trained in the use of light and heavy machine guns, assault
rifles, mortars, explosives and rockets. The same report also accused
the group of having links with the hitherto little-known ‘Al-Faran’
organization which had captured western tourists in Kashmir in July
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