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

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