Post-Mortem Analysis: The Assassination of Taliban Godfather Sami ul Haq

Post-Mortem Analysis: The Assassination of Taliban Godfather Sami ul Haq

Among jihadist circles in Pakistan, few ideologues managed to attract such widespread respect and charisma as Maulana Sami ul Haq. His credentials include Islamist jihadist writings, fatwas against Western forces, teaching and running his own grand madrasah, active participation in politics, running his own Islamist political party, and of course, vehement support for al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. In this respect, no Islamist ideologue could have such a profound and prolific profile, with the exception of Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai (another well respected ideologue). For Pakistani jihadists, he was a larger than life figure. On November 2, 2018, he was killed by his personal assistant for mysterious reasons that still have not been disclosed by the authorities. Extremist circles have not accepted his death as a result of a personal feud, and instead consider it a grand conspiracy against the Islamist movement in Pakistan.

Background

Since Deobandism’s founding in 1867, the ultra-orthodox movement has attracted a number of clerics and followers from the North-West Frontier Province, which in 2008 was renamed the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province in modern Pakistan. The region is the hinterland of the Pashtun ethnic community and known for its strict adherence to conservative and orthodox versions of Islam blended with the traditional, pre-Islamic, Pashtunwali code.

Sami’s father Molvi Abdul Haq (1912-1988) was one of those Pashtun clerics who went to study at the Dar ul Uloom Deoband madrasah (in the Saharanpur district of the United Provinces, today known as the state of Uttar Pradesh) in British India, and later opened his own madrasah called the Dar ul Uloom Haqqania in 1947 in the Akora Khattak area, in the suburbs of the Nowshera district, in KPK. The Dar ul Uloom Haqqania was to become the spiritual headquarters of many violent Islamist movements in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and became known as the “University of Jihad” (Radio Free Liberty, March 18, 2018). Abdul Haq also served as a faculty member of Dar ul Uloom Deoband before Pakistan’s independence in 1947 (Official Website of Haqqania, Accessed on March 11). He not only founded the madrasah, but also became its first principal. After his death in 1988, the school passed to his son, Sami ul Haq, who also remained the principal until his death in 2018.

Sami ul Haq was born in 1937 in Akora Khattak, the ancestral village of his father. He was raised by his father on strict Deobandi lines and studied at his madrasah at Akora Khattak, where he completed his Dar-e-Nizami course (the seven-year-long course to become an Alim, an Islamic legal scholar) (Khyber.org, Accessed on March 11). Like his father, who remained a high-ranking leader of the Islamist political party Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (a successor party to Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind in India) in Pakistan, Haq founded his own faction of JUI after differences developed between him and Fazal ur Rehman, the leader of JUI and the son of Mufti Mehmood, a contemporary of Haq’s father.

Influence and Political Career

Haq played an active role in Islamist politics of Pakistan, though unlike the JUI (Rehman) faction, his political party remained a fringe group and did not manage to gather as many seats as Rehman’s party in general elections. Despite this shortcoming, his role could not be ignored because of the chain of religious seminaries he established across Pakistan, which he did while remaining a part of several coalitions of successive governments during the 1990s and 2000s. Interestingly, Rehman himself studied at the Akkora Khattak madrasah and considered Haq his teacher (Express Tribune, November 2, 2018).

Haq joined hands with the military regime of Islamist military dictator General Zia ul Haq in the early 1980s, and seconded Zia’s use of violent, Islamist, non-state actors in Afghanistan against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In this respect, he agitated JUI-F leader Fazal ur Rehman, who joined the anti-Zia opposition alliance, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD), in 1981. Haq was also elected to the Majlis-e-Shura, a hand-picked National Assembly during Zia’s martial law regime. In his post-military-rule political career, he was twice elected to the Senate, the upper house of Pakistani legislature. [1]

Haq was an upfront Islamist and never hesitated to support ideologically aligned terrorist groups operating in the region. When General Pervez Musharraf’s military regime started to crackdown on Islamist militant groups following the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Haq joined the anti-Musharraf Islamist parties’ alliance, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA). The Islamist political parties’ alliance managed to form governments in KPK and Baluchistan provinces in the 2002 general elections (Global Security, Accessed on March 11). The MMA did not last very long and in the 2008 elections, Haq parted ways with other Islamist parties and the alliance collapsed. Meanwhile he joined another alliance, Dafa-e-Pakistan Council (DFC), and was selected as its president. The DFC was an alliance of like-minded Islamist political parties and terrorist groups, and worked as a coalition to support Islamist causes. It considered itself as a bulwark against American interests in the country.  The DFC organized protests against Pakistan’s decision to allow NATO routes to Afghanistan, and promoted anti-Western and Indian policies (Express Tribune, February 3, 2012). Many of the members of the alliance were leaders of proscribed Islamist terrorist groups such as Hafiz Saeed of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Fazal ur Rehman Khalil of Harkat ul Mujahedeen, and others.

Haq’s political career was also marred by interactions with violent Islamist groups, especially the Afghan Taliban, as many of the group’s leaders had graduated from his madrasah. During the Afghan War (1979-1989), he supported the mujahedeen groups against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His madrasah graduates played pivotal roles as many of them became part of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet and Afghan government forces until the withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1989. He continued to remain a respected figure among Deobandi jihadist organizations in Pakistan, such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Harkatul Mujahedeen, Harkatul Jihad-e-Islami and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Haq was influential in Pakistani politics because of his reputation in jihadist circles, and he was asked several times to negotiate with the TTP on behalf of the government. The ruling provincial government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) donated approximately $2 million (277 million Pakistani rupees) to his madrasah as a political move to acquire his support for the 2018 general elections (Dawn, February 23, 2018). The donation of such a large sum remained an issue of debate in Pakistani politics for quite some time.

Apart from his political influence, Haq was the center of some controversies, including his relations with a local brothel in the early 1990s, and of course his mysterious death at the hands of his own servant in November 2018.

In Jihad

As mentioned earlier, top militant mujahedeen commanders, including Younis Khalis of Hizb-e-Islami and Mohammad Nabi Sher Mohammadi, were graduates of his madrasah and trained under his direct tutelage. He continued to support jihadist causes in the region after the end of the Afghan War. Various renowned authors such as Ahmed Rashid described Haq as the father of the Taliban because of the crucial role his madrasah students played during the Afghan conflict and in the establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, i.e. the Afghan Taliban regime, in 1996 after the fall of Kabul. At critical times when the Taliban lost battles against the Northern Alliance forces, he closed down his madrasahs and sent all of his students to the war front. He also helped mobilize war efforts by collecting donations for the Taliban domestically and from Islamist donors in the Middle Easter. When the Afghan Taliban took over the country and established their government in most parts of Afghanistan, at least eight of their cabinet members were Haq’s students, as were scores of Taliban governors, Sharia court judges, military commanders, and local leaders. As far as the Pakistani jihadist landscape is concerned, Sami refused to condemn the Pakistani Taliban and their acts of terrorism in Pakistan. His influence was such that when his madrassah was connected to the assassination of Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, no action was taken against him by the government of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party. Some law enforcement officers believed that the plot to assassinate her was hatched at the madrassah by some students who later moved on to join TTP (Dawn, February 26, 2015). The current TTP Emir, Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud, admitted in his book that the perpetrators were the same people pointed out by the investigating officers.

Works

Haq was a prolific Islamist writer and authored more than 20 books. He wrote on a range of issues, from stories about early Islamic warriors to the ideology of the Afghan Taliban. His most popular writings included Carvan-e-Akhrat, Millat-e-Islamia ka Muaqaf on Qadyaniayt (co-authored with Taqi Usmani), Khatbat-e-Mushareer (10 volumes), Qumai Assembly me Islam ka Marka, Saleebi Dahshatgardi, and Alim-e-Islam (in the context of the 9/11 attacks). He also started publishing a monthly journal, Al-Haq, and remained its editor-in-chief until his death. Al-Haq could be considered one of the first jihadist journals in Pakistan. Haq’s last notable book was Afghan Taliban War of Ideology: Struggle for Peace which was published in 2015. Haq explained and justified the Afghan Taliban’s efforts to bring peace to the region and the movement’s virtues.

Conclusion

The mysterious assassination of Haq was a shock to Islamist circles in Pakistan. Initially it was thought that he was killed by the Afghan government’s intelligence agencies, but it later emerged that the killing was the result of a personal disagreement. No conclusive cause of his death was announced by the investigating officers and it remains a mystery to this day despite the case’s high-profile nature. Unlike Fazal ur Rehman, who survived three assassination attempts in suicide bombings by the Pakistani Taliban, Haq was never the target of any such assassination attempt, and continued to be respected by both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups operating in the region.

Haq became involved with successive governments in Islamabad in order to work as a peace broker between the Pakistani Taliban and government. Even U.S. ambassadors and the Afghan government requested his assistance in bringing the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table. Had he not died, he might have played a role in both the current and future negotiations with the Afghan Taliban.

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