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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<strong>Frontline</strong> <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong><br />
described as a ‘great Muslim warrior’. One of the objectives of the<br />
assembly was to press <strong>Islam</strong>abad not to comply with UN sanctions<br />
against the Taliban. Interestingly, the military government, which had<br />
banned political parties holding public rallies, did not try to stop the<br />
conference. No action was taken against the militants for the public<br />
display of weapons. <strong>The</strong>y obviously had the backing of the intelligence<br />
agencies. <strong>Islam</strong>ic seminaries and clerics had never been as numerous<br />
and so powerful in <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>.<br />
<strong>Islam</strong>ic seminaries also became a transit point for foreign militants<br />
aspiring to join al-Qaeda and the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Very<br />
few people had heard about the primitive fundamentalist Madrasa-i-<br />
Arabia outside the remote corner of north-west <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> until its name<br />
sprung on the international scene in connection with the American<br />
Taliban, John Walker Lindh. <strong>The</strong> young American was wounded in<br />
battle and captured by US-supported Northern Alliance forces in the<br />
Afghan northern province of Kunduz in December 2001. 12<br />
It was in this isolated and spartan school where there were no<br />
amenities that the 19-year-old American learnt his lesson in <strong>Islam</strong>ic<br />
sharia and jihad. A new convert to <strong>Islam</strong>, he spent some six months in<br />
this austere madrasa housed in a one-storey building before leaving<br />
for Afghanistan in May 2001 to join the Taliban. 13 Lindh, who had<br />
grown up in upper-middle-class surroundings in California, chose the<br />
school to properly understand <strong>Islam</strong>. Mufti Mohammed Iltimas, the<br />
white-bearded head of the school, remembered him as a hard-working<br />
student who was determined to memorize every word of the Qur’an.<br />
He slept on a rope bed in a place where there was no hot water and<br />
no electricity after 10 pm. 14<br />
Lindh’s introduction to the madrasa came through a <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i<br />
missionary he met in California in 1998. A Pashtun, 15 Khizar Hayat,<br />
who had travelled to America on a preaching mission, was closely<br />
linked with the local militant organizations. Even though he was much<br />
older than the other boys, Lindh was granted admission to the school.<br />
Lindh, who went by the name Suleyman al-Faris, was not in <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong><br />
to engage solely in scholarly pursuits. During his stay in the madrasa,<br />
he frequently met visiting Taliban activists. In May 2001, Hayat took<br />
him to the office of a pro-Taliban <strong>Islam</strong>ic militant group, HuM, where<br />
he enrolled for guerrilla training. 16<br />
Lindh was sent to a HuM camp near <strong>Islam</strong>abad. After learning the<br />
use of firearms, he was dispatched to Afghanistan to work with the<br />
Taliban. He was not the only American and not the only westerner