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