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

Frontline Pakistan
1995. One of the hostages was beheaded, another managed to escape,
and the fate of the rest remains unknown. Kashmiri militants privately
acknowledge that the hostages are no longer alive.
On 1 October 1997, the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright,
submitted to the US Congress a list of 30 international terrorist organizations,
which Washington had decided to bring under the purview
of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, 1997. HuA was
one of the groups on the list. After being blacklisted by the US administration
it resurfaced under a new banner, HuM. The new group was
immediately put on the terrorist watch list by Washington. The State
Department report for 1997, released in 1998, accused Pakistani officials
of supporting Kashmiri militant groups, including HuM.
The rise of the Taliban gave a huge boost to Pakistani militant groups
like HuM. Afghanistan became a base for their operations. Their leaders
shared common origins, personnel and especially patrons. Most HuM
activists came from the same seminaries in the Pakistani border region
that the Taliban movement had emerged from. These groups were
heavily backed by the ISI, which also patronized the Taliban. Both
were important in furthering Pakistan’s strategic interests – to extend
Pakistani hegemony over the neighbouring state.
More than 10,000 Pakistani militants were believed to have received
training in camps run by al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups during
Taliban rule. 48 The evidence of their close connection with bin Laden
emerged in August 1998 when scores of Pakistani militants were killed
in a US cruise missile attack on an al-Qaeda camp in the Afghan southeastern
border town of Khost. A day after the attack, Khalil vowed to
take revenge for the death of his activists. ‘The US has struck us with
Tomahawk cruise missiles at only two places, but we will hit back
at them everywhere in the world, wherever we find them. We have
started a holy war against the US and they will find no place to hide,’
he declared.
Khalil was at the meeting in Afghanistan in February 1998 at which
bin Laden announced the formation of an International Islamic Front
against ‘Jews and crusaders’. He was also a signatory of the ruling
issued by the group which had stated that it was the duty of all Muslims
to ‘comply with God’s order by killing Americans and their allies’. 49
On 29 September 2001, Pakistan’s government banned HuM, but
its activists soon regrouped under new banners, Jamaat-al-Ansar and
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen-al-Alami. They retained their links with the
Taliban despite the shift in Pakistan’s policy.