KARACHI, 15 August 2004 — Pakistan government is seriously considering a proposal to go after jihadi groups associated with the country’s mainstream religious parties, sources said. High on this list is Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s most organized religious party with considerable support among the educated middle class and lower-middle class. “I will not be surprised if the military action against the jihadi cadres of various religious parties starts soon,” said Farooq Sattar, the parliamentary leader of the Muttaheda Qaumi Movement (MQM), an ethnic party now in the ruling coalition in Pakistan. Some MQM members are in senior positions in the government, including the federal Cabinet. “Those who harm the basic interests of the state should be crushed,” said Sattar whose party is considered a bitter political rival of Jamaat-e-Islami. Founded in British India before the creation of Pakistan, the Jamaat supported fundamentalist Afghan leader Gulbadin Hekmatyar during the 10-year war against the Soviets from 1979. When the Taleban took charge of Afghanistan in 1996, the Jamaat was marginalized as it did not have good relations with the militia. The Taleban movement was led by clerics who studied at Muslim seminaries while the Jamaat is dominated by those who studied at secular schools but later became avowed Muslims and are now known as Islamists. The Taleban leaders, who believed that the leadership belongs to the clerics, looked down upon the Jamaat people as new comers to their cause. Relations gradually improved, but the Jamaat was never allowed to play a major role in Afghanistan. Yet the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, did encourage the Jamaat to take part in the war against Indian troops in Kashmir. The Jamaat never directly got involved in the jihad in Afghanistan or Kashmir. However, it did allow young workers to participate, provided they did not use its name. In the mid- to late-1990s, when the jihad in Kashmir was at its peak, people from the Jamaat were running several training camps in Kashmir. The instructors often came from the Taleban-run Afghanistan and also included senior Al-Qaeda operatives. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, was also arrested from the residence of a Jamaat sympathizer, Ahmed Qadoos. The 42-year-old Pakistani denied direct links to the Jamaat or Al-Qaeda but his mother, Mahlaqa Khanum, was the president of the Jamaat women’s wing in Rawalpindi, a city adjacent to Islamabad. Sattar said at least seven other Al-Qaeda operatives also were arrested from the homes of Jamaat workers and sympathizers. Sattar’s party recently played a key role in exposing two brothers, both physicians, who once were members of the Jamaat’s student wing, according to Pakistani intelligence sources, and treated some Al-Qaeda and Taleban members after Sept. 11, 2001. Akmat Waheed and Ajmal Waheed from the southern Pakistani city of Karachi were members of an organization called the Pakistan Islamic Medical Association, which allegedly provided medical assistance to Taleban and Al-Qaeda fugitives at an exclusive facility in Karachi. Pakistani intelligence sources said that the United States is now bringing tremendous pressure on Pakistan to go after the jihadi groups associated with the Jamaat, although so far there is no move to get the Jamaat disbanded. But the Pakistani government fears that any action against the Jamaat could have far-reaching and violent consequences throughout the country. The Jamaat is Pakistan’s largest religious party. It has hundreds of thousands of supporters in every stratum of society. The Jamaat also has links to Muslim religious groups across the world, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. The literature written by the Jamaat’s founder, Maulana Abul Aala Maududi, is popular across the Islamic world. “That’s why Pakistan is still trying to negotiate a way out,” said a senior Pakistani official. “It is trying to convince the Americans that it would be better if it went after individual members rather than the whole lot.”
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