Convulsion in the Military-Jehadi Enterprise

Convulsion in the Military-Jehadi Enterprise
Kanchan Lakshman

Karachi, as the new hub of Islamist radicalism, has been highlighted by Pakistani reportage since the arrests of many Al Qaeda operatives and a series of bomb explosions and terrorist violence in that city. The past week saw more evidence corroborating these trends. Two persons were killed and at least 33 others sustained injuries when two car bombs exploded in succession near the Pakistan-American Cultural Centre and the residence of the US Consul-General in Karachi on May 26. On May 30, the pro-Taliban Sunni cleric and chief of the Binoria mosque in Karachi, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, was killed when armed assailants ambushed his vehicle in front of the mosque. Amidst these incidents, Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghan Ambassador to the United States, reportedly said in Washington on May 25, that the search for Osama bin Laden should be centred in Karachi or Quetta as the chances of his being found there were far greater than in any of the isolated areas where the search was presently focused.

Shamzai's assassination triggered mob violence in several localities of Karachi, including the Jamshed Quarters, Soldier Bazaar, Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Sohrab Goth, Quaidabad and North Karachi. Preliminary reports from Pakistan suggest that the assassination may be a retributive act for the suicide-bombing in the city's Haideri mosque, where 22 members of the Shia community had died earlier on May 7. But responsibility for the killing is far from easy to fix.

Security agencies have, in the recent past, remained curiously tight-lipped on the identification of groups responsible for the various terrorist acts in Karachi and elsewhere in the country. This is not surprising, considering the fact that, while a constable of the Karachi Police is alleged to have been the suicide bomber in the May 7 incident, President Musharraf himself disclosed on May 26 that junior personnel within the Pakistan Army and Air Force were involved in the assassination attempts on him in December 2003 and that most of them are presently under detention.

The perpetrators of the Shamzai assassination may never be definitively identified, but it is useful to look at the trajectory of recent violence in Pakistan. During the last year, there was a series of attacks in quick succession in Quetta and Karachi, targeting the Shias. When the military regime was still coming to terms with the spread of sectarianism, suspected Shia gunmen assassinated Maulana Azam Tariq, leader of the outlawed Sunni group Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) on October 6, 2003, in the capital Islamabad. Some 102 persons were killed in 22 incidents of sectarian violence during year 2003, and the current year (till May 30, 2004) has already seen at least 73 persons lose their lives, with another 394 wounded in just nine incidents. While outlawed Sunni groups like the SSP and its armed wing, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), have been actively targeting Shias since 1989, Shia radicals, including the proscribed Sipah-e-Mohammed Pakistan (SMP), constrained by logistics and the absence of state complicity, frequently target the high-profile Sunni leadership and have assassinated a number of them in the past.

Shamzai, considered a top scholar of Islam with a Ph.D from the University of Sindh, is the third head of the Binoria mosque to have been assassinated in succession. Mufti Habibullah was shot dead in 1998 and Allama Yusuf Ludhianvi in year 2000. Shamzai, however, would not be a natural target for the Shia radicals, as he is not directly implicated in sectarian violence in Pakistan, though he is closely connected with Sunni extremism and the global Islamist terrorist movement.

The Binoria mosque complex has long been the nerve centre of the Military-Jehadi enterprise in Pakistan. Beginning with Gen. Zia-ul-Haq's decision to make Maulana Yusuf Banuri, founder of the mosque, the chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology in 1979, the Binoria complex has been a key element in the Jehad infrastructure in South Asia. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan, along with Shamzai and Maulana Fazlur Rehman, is believed to have organised the Taliban in the early 1990s. Indeed, Mufti Shamzai was considered to be one of the most powerful men in Pakistan during the rule of the Taliban militia under Mullah Mohammed Omar in Afghanistan. Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden are alleged to have met for the first time in the Binoria mosque under the auspices of Mufti Shamzai. Along with the Akora Khattak seminary near Peshawar, the Binoria seminary had imparted doctrinal training to senior Taliban commanders.

That he wielded immense influence over the Taliban/Al Qaeda came to the fore when the Musharraf regime sent a delegation of Ulema (religious scholars), including Mufti Shamzai, to Kandahar in late 2001 to prevail upon Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden to the US. The US administration is later reported to have learnt that the delegation, which included Lt. Gen. Mehmood Ahmed, the then ISI chief, instead of pressurizing Omar to hand over bin Laden, congratulated the Taliban supremo for 'resisting US pressure and encouraged him to continue to do so.'

According to the Lahore-based Daily Times, among the 2,000 odd fatwas issued by Shamzai, the most infamous was the one he gave against the United States in October 2001, declaring jehad after the Americans decided to attack Afghanistan. Earlier, in 1999, he deemed it within the rights of all Muslims to kill Americans on sight. While Shamzai is believed to have been a patron of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), one of his many students, Maulana Masood Azhar, launched the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). Operating under Shamzai's tutelage after his release by the Indian Government in Kandahar on December 31, 1999, following the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Flight IC 814, Azhar set up one of the most lethal terrorist organizations operating in the region, and continues to operate freely from Pakistan, despite a token ban on his organisation. In July 1999, at the height of the Kargil war, Mufti Shamzai, Mufti Jamil Khan and Abdur Razzaq had also issued an edict of jehad against India in Islamabad in response to a request from the HuM. The fatwa reportedly ordered that all seminaries in Pakistan should suspend their classes and send their students to Jammu and Kashmir to participate in the jehad.

Although Shamzai was never accused of direct involvement in the Sunni-Shia violence in Pakistan, it is now becoming increasingly clear that the Deobandi platform that has spawned Jehad in South Asia has an intrinsic sectarian element. Shamzai has long been considered the spiritual head of the various Jehadi groups active in Jammu and Kashmir and Afghanistan, including the Jaish, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Harkat-ul-Jehadi-e-Islami (HuJI), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and its splinter group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen Al-alami (HuMA) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Many of the 'graduates' from Binoria have been at the forefront of terrorist activity in South Asia and Afghanistan.

Incidentally, Masood Azhar's Jaish-e-Mohammed, one of Shamzai's famed progeny, is currently under intense scrutiny within Pakistan for its alleged role in the assassination attempts against Musharraf. Amjad Hussain Farooqi alias Imtiaz Farooqi, a Jaish cadre still at large, has been identified as the organiser of the December 2003 assassination attempts. Farooqi, wanted in the abduction-cum-murder of Daniel Pearl, was also an alleged mastermind behind the suicide car bomb attack at the US Consulate in Karachi in June 2002. Pakistani reports indicate that Azhar 'disappeared' from his hometown, Bahawalpur, before the December 2003 attacks.

The shadow of suspicion for the Shamzai assassination, consequently, falls across a far wider spectrum of motives than a Shia vendetta alone, and there are at least some elements within the Pakistani state structure, and within the opportunistic alliance of Forces within the US led global war against terrorism, who have been increasingly troubled by activities of many within the circle of Shamzai's radicalized fraternity. Shamzai's death notwithstanding, the convulsions within the Military-Jehadi enterprise in Pakistan can be expected to continue.

Courtesy: South Asia Terrorism Portal