Maulana Yousaf Shah cracks a wide smile as he rattles off a list of former students turned Taliban leaders, reveling 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.”
Photo: AFP
“We are proud,” he said.
The sprawling campus in Pakistan’s Akora Khattak, about 60km east of Peshawar, Pakistan, is home to about 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.
Photo: AFP
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.
Seminaries like Haqqania “give birth to radical jihadism, produce Taliban and are threatening our country,” Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said, demanding their closure.
Afghanistan’s leaders argue that Pakistan’s approval for the madrasah is proof that it backs the Taliban.
Shah scoffed at the notion the madrasah encouraged violence, but he defended the right to target foreign troops.
“If someone armed enters your house and you are threatened ... then definitely you will raise a gun,” Shah said.
The seminary’s former 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.
Some Pakistani extremists who later attacked their own country have also been linked to the seminary, including the suicide bomber who assassinated former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
“The Haqqania madrasah sits at the heart of one of the most important and influential hardline Sunni clerical networks,” analyst Michael Semple said. “There’s an expectation that large proportions of the Afghan graduates will move seamlessly into accepting positions of responsibility in [Taliban] structures.”
However, Semple dismissed notions the madrasah served as a “terrorist factory” where students received combat training or had a hand in militant groups’ strategic decisions.
Rather, like elite Western universities feeding new talent into corporate boardrooms and political parties, Haqqania’s contribution to insurgencies rests in the bonds forged in its classrooms.
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.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party has also lavished the seminary with millions of dollars in return for its political support.
Madrasahshave long served as vital lifelines for millions of impoverished children in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where social services are chronically underfunded.
Even Pakistan’s military — which has been accused of supporting the Taliban — has said that madrasahs have injected further uncertainty into the region.
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