The Harkat-Ul-Jihad-Al-Islami (HUJI) Of Pakistan

The HUJI, which has beenincreasingly active in south India, came to the notice of theinternational community in 1995 when its Amir Qari Saifullah Akhtarwas arrested by the Pakistani authorities on a charge of involvement with agroup of Pakistani army officers headed by Brig.Zahir-ul-Islam-Abbasi in tryingto organise a military coup. Brig. Abbasi used to be the New Delhi station chiefof Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the Pakistani High Commissionand was expelled by the Government of India in 1988.The arrested Army officersand the Qari were accused of planning to have Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, then PrimeMinister, and Gen.Abdul Wahid Kakkar, the then Chief of the Army Staff,assassinated and capture power. While the arrested officers were tried before acourt-martial and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, the ISI did notprosecute the Qari for reasons which were not clear.

He was released. After hisrelease, he settled down in Kandahar and emerged as a key adviser of MullaMohammad Omar, the Amir of the Taliban. The HUJI, under his leadership,participated in the fight against the Northern Alliance led by the late AhmedShah Masood. Its volunteers also participated in the jihad in the CentralAsian Republics and Chechnya. It came to be known as the Punjabi Taliban.

The HUJI of Pakistan and theHarkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) led by Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil merged for sometime and operated under the name Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA). They split and startedoperating again as two different organisations after the US State Departmentdesignated the HUA as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation in October,1997. This wasdone because of suspicion of the involvement of some of its cadres in thekidnapping of some Western tourists in Jammu & Kashmir in 1995 under thename Al Faran.

When the US started its militaryaction in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 terroriststrikes in the US, Qari Saifullah Akhtar and his followers crossed over intoPakistan and dispersed to different places. The HUJI was suspected to have beeninvolved in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, atKarachi along with the HUM (Al-Alami meaning International) inJanuary-February,2002, and in the two attempts to kill President General PervezMusharraf at Rawalpindi in December, 2003, along with the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM)and some lower level officers of the Army and the Air Force.

The Qari ran away to Dubai toescape arrest. His presence there was detected by the Dubai authorities inAugust,2004. They arrested him and handed him over to the Pakistani authorities,but he has not been prosecuted in connection with any of these incidents.

Commenting on his arrest andhand-over by the UAE authorities, the Daily Times of Lahore wrote on August 9, 2004, as follows:

• "Qari (Saifullah Akhtar) fled Afghanistan after the American invasion in late 2001, taking shelter in South Waziristan before he was spirited out of Pakistan. He led an outfit belonging to the Deobandi mainstream. It was in many ways the ‘mother organisation’, parallel to Sipah Sahaba, from which branched out other better-known jihadi groups. His Harkat was inspired by the Afghan religious leader Nabi Muhammadi (who died in Islamabad as a leader of one of the seven jihadi organisations that fought against the Soviet Union) whose warriors were to emerge dominant as the Taliban in Afghanistan.
  
  
• "Like Maulana Masood Azhar of Jaish-e-Muhammad, Qari Saifullah Akhtar — born in 1958 in South Waziristan — was a graduate of the Banuri Masjid (Binori Mosque) in Karachi. He was a crucial figure in Mufti (Nizamuddin)Shamzai’s (since dead) efforts to get Osama bin Laden and Mullah Umar (Amir of the Taliban) together as partners-in-jihad. Qari Saifullah Akhtar first came to public view when he was caught as one of the would-be army coup-makers of 1995 led by Major-General Zaheerul Islam Abbasi, but saved his skin by turning ‘state witness’. (Some say he was defiant but was still let off.) After that, he surfaced in Kandahar and from 1996 was an adviser to Mullah Umar in the Taliban government. His fighters were called ‘Punjabi’ Taliban and were offered employment, something that other outfits could not get out of Mullah Umar. His outfit had membership among the Taliban too. Three Taliban ministers and 22 judges belonged to his Harkat.
  
  
• "In difficult times, the Harkat fighters stood together with Mullah Umar. Approximately 300 of them were killed fighting the Northern Alliance, after which Mullah Umar was pleased to give Harkat the permission to build six more ‘maskars’ (training camps) in Kandahar, Kabul and Khost, where the Taliban army and police also received military training. From its base in Afghanistan, the Harkat launched its campaigns inside Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Chechnya. It finally became the biggest jihadi militia based in Kandahar located in the middle of the Taliban-Al Qaeda strategic merger.
  
  
• "The Harkat called itself ‘the second line of defence for all Muslim states’ and was active in Burma, Bangladesh and Sinkiang. Because of their common origin in the Banuri seminary, Harkat al-Jihad al-Islami and Harkatul Mujahideen were merged in 1993 for the sake of "better performance" in Kashmir. The new outfit was called Harkatul Ansar, the first to be declared as a terrorist organization by the United States after one of its commanders formed an ancillary organization, called Al Faran, and kidnapped and killed Western tourists from Kashmir in 1995. Qari Saifullah Akhtar fled from Kandahar after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001 and hid in South Waziristan.
  
  
• "Qari Saifullah’s outfit was truly international. When the Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami men were seen first in Tajikistan, they were mistaken by some observers as being fighters from Sipah Sahaba, but in fact they were under the command of a Punjabi commander, helping Juma Namangani and Tahir Yuldashev resist the Uzbek ruling class in the Ferghana Valley. Out of the two Uzbeks being sheltered by Mullah Umar in Afghanistan, one (Namangani) was killed and the other (Yuldashev) was recently wounded during the Wana Operation in South Waziristan. The Harkat used to be entrenched in Karachi, looking after its Burmese warriors. They were located inside Korangi and the area was sometimes called mini-Arakan. The Harkat opened 30 seminaries for themselves inside Korangi, there being 18 more in the rest of Karachi. In Korangi, the biggest seminary was Madrasa Khalid bin Walid where 500 Burmese were once under training. They were later trained in Afghanistan and directed to fight against the Northern Alliance and against the Indian army in Kashmir.
  
  
• "Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami had branch offices in 40 districts and tehsils in Pakistan, including Sargodha, Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan, Khanpur, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Mianwali, Bannu, Kohat, Waziristan, Dera Ismail Khan, Swabi and Peshawar. It also had an office in Islamabad. Funds were collected from these grassroots offices as well as from sources abroad. The militia had accounts in two branches of Allied Bank in Islamabad. Qari Saifullah’s repatriation signals the closing of the Saudi channel of escape for the Deobandi jihadis. But Qari Saifullah was not the only one hiding in that region. There were other less known personalities with contacts who could go at will to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to bide their time when the political heat increased in Karachi and their ‘handlers’ told them to take a sabbatical. For Qari Saifullah Akhtar the sabbatical is now over.
  "The timing of Qari Saifullah’s repatriation is significant. It happened after the arrest of Al Qaeda operative Muhammad Khalfan Ghailani from Gujrat along with Al Qaeda’s computer genius Muhammad Naeem Nur Khan. It is said that the Pakistani agencies recruited Khan as a double agent and were thus able to communicate with Al Qaeda through him. Because of a premature disclosure of Khan as a double agent in the United States, the slowly tightening noose around Al Qaeda in the UK had to be quickly sprung. The home-coming of Qari Saifullah Akhtar could well be connected with the revelations made in Gujarat."