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

Nursery for Jihad
to have joined al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Many western men, a lot of
them Afro-American, were recruited by the Tablighi Jamaat and its front
organizations and sent to Afghanistan after receiving basic religious
training in Pakistani madrasas and guerrilla training at the camps run by
militant groups, closely affiliated with the religious institutions. Some
of the madrasas had links with international Islamist organizations like
Egypt’s Akhwan-ul Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood), Indonesia’s
Jemmah Islamiyah, Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and the
Philippines’ Abu Sayyaf group, all of whom extended support to al-
Qaeda. 17
Radical madrasas were not restricted to the remote border region
in northern Pakistan. In fact, the country’s largest city and its main
financial centre Karachi, became the hub of militant seminaries.
According to one estimate, more than 200,000 students were enrolled
in around one thousand madrasas in the city. Not all, but many of
them, had links with sectarian or Islamic militant groups. The largest
among them was the Jamia Ulumia Islami or Jamia Binoria. The
sprawling red-brick campus, with tall minarets right in the heart of the
city, served as the backbone of militant Islam and was the breeding
ground for ‘Islamic warriors’. The country’s premier institution for
Islamic learning had also become the citadel of Sunni extremist groups.
The main campus and eight other affiliated madrasas enrolled more
than ten thousand students from Pakistan as well as 30 other countries
including China, Central Asia, Chechnya, Malaysia, the Philippines and
Britain. Students were taught the concept of jihad as a special subject
to prepare them to fight for the cause of Islam. Many of the Taliban
leaders were graduates and took guidance from their former teachers
for running the fundamentalist Islamic state. The students were sent
regularly to Afghanistan for training and orientation during Taliban
rule. At the main gate stood a huge banner exhorting Muslims to join
Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Over the last two decades, thousands of
its students fought in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
Dozens of other smaller and relatively low-profile madrasas spread
across Karachi became the base for al-Qaeda ‘sleeper’ cells in Pakistan.
A lean and shy Ahmed Hadi was an ordinary student at Jamia Abu Bakr
and the last person one would suspect of being an important cog in
the international terrorist network. 18 It was only after Pakistani security
forces raided the seminary in Karachi’s middle-class neighbourhood of
Gulshan-e-Iqbal in September 2003 that his real identity was revealed.
Gun Gun Rusman Gunawan was a leading member of Indonesia’s