Pakistan: State-supported Islamic seminary boasts of how many jihad terrorists are among its alumni

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“‘We are proud’: Pakistan’s ‘university of jihad’ lauds Taliban alumni,” AFP, November 16, 2020


AKORA KHATTAK: Maulana Yousaf Shah cracks a wide smile as he rattles off a list of former students turned Taliban leaders, revelling in their victories over superpowers on Afghanistan’s battlefields after graduating from Pakistan’s “university of jihad”.

The Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary has churned out a who’s who of Taliban top brass – including many now on the hardline group’s negotiating team holding talks with the Kabul government to end a 20-year war.

“Russia was broken into pieces by the students and graduates of Darul Uloom Haqqania and America was also sent packing,” beamed Shah, an influential cleric at the seminary that critics have dubbed the “university of jihad”.

“We are proud.”

The sprawling campus in Pakistan’s Akora Khattak, about 60km east of Peshawar, is home to roughly 4,000 students who are fed, clothed and educated for free.

It has sat at the crossroads of regional militant violence for years, educating many Pakistanis and Afghan refugees – some of whom returned home to wage war against the Russians and Americans or preach jihad.

Despite its infamy in some quarters, it has enjoyed state support in Pakistan, where mainstream political parties are heavily boosted by links with religious factions.

This month, Darul Uloom Haqqania’s leaders boasted of backing the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan in a video posted online – outraging the Kabul government, which is battling a surge in violence across the county as the US prepares to withdraw troops.

Seminaries like Haqqania “give birth to radical jihadism, produce Taliban and are threatening our country”, Sediq Sediqqi, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s spokesman, told AFP, demanding their closure….

‘Father of the Taliban’

The seminary’s late leader Sami-ul-Haq boasted of advising the Taliban’s founder Mullah Omar – earning him the moniker “the father of the Taliban”.

Haq later sent students to fight for the movement when it issued a call to arms during its rise to power in the 1990s.

The Haqqani network, the Taliban’s ultra-violent faction, is named after the madrassa where its leader once taught and subsequent leaders studied….

Semple however dismissed notions the madrassa served as a “terrorist factory” where students received combat training or had a hand in militant groups’ strategic decisions….

Graduates insisted they received no military training at Haqqania and were not obliged to join the fight in Afghanistan, but admitted jihad was discussed openly, including in “special lectures” by Afghan instructors.

“Any student who wanted to go for jihad could go during his vacations,” said cleric Sardar Ali Haqqani, who graduated from the seminary in 2009….

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party has also lavished the Haqqania seminary with millions of dollars in return for its political support….

“Will they become (clerics) or will they become terrorists?” asked Pakistan military chief Qamar Javed Bajwa in 2017 of the estimated 2.5 million students enrolled at the tens of thousands of madrassas across Pakistan….