WHAT happened to Qari Saifullah Akhtar? Once a prominent and influential militant commander, he is no more in the spotlight. Similar is the status of the militant group he led — the Harkatul Jihad-i-Islami (HuJI), which is considered the mother of many militant groups in Pakistan and that once had outreach to various conflicts zones across the Muslim world.

Not long ago, Qari Saifullah and his group, HuJI, were as notorious as Lashkar-e-Taiba is today in India and the West. It was found to be involved in many terrorist attacks in India during the 1990s and was declared by many as the most dangerous militant group of the region.

The group was a self-proclaimed ‘second line of defence of every Muslim state’ and had links with militant groups in Central, South and East Asia. It was HuJI which had first hosted the Uzbek militants in Pakistan, who are among the prime targets of the ongoing military operation in North Waziristan.

A few years back, media reports hinted that Qari Saifullah had renounced violence and had adopted the creed of Sufism. Some of these reports quoted his close aides as saying that he had quit jihadist activities and had become a Sufi. Qari Saifullah served as a khadim (devotee) at Syed Nafees-ul-Hussaini’s Syed Ahmed Shaheed Khanqah (a spiritual centre) near Sagian Bridge in Lahore. After the death of Nafees-ul-Hussaini in 2008, he undertook to build a new khanqah, or Sufi retreat, in Ferozewala in district Sheikhupura and was arrested from the same site with his three sons.

The story of Qari Saifullah explains much about the features of militancy in Pakistan.

Qari Saifullah’s tale is useful in understanding the jihadist and other features of militancy in Pakistan. No doubt he has remained a mysterious character in Pakistan’s political and jihadi history. He is considered one of the founders of jihad in Pakistan. He was among the first batch of Pakistani mujahideen who went to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

He served as military advisor to Mullah Omar during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and coordinated the escape of Mullah Omar from Kandahar after the American forces attacked the city in 2001. He was the first Pakistani jihadist leader who was arrested abroad and handed over to Pakistan in August 2004 by the UAE government. He was released in 2006 and rearrested on Feb 26, 2008 in connection with the Oct 18, 2007 terrorist attack on former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in Karachi. Ms Bhutto alleged that Qari Saifullah was a perpetrator of the attack in her book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West.

Qari Saifullah was allegedly involved in a 1995 army plot but his name was mysteriously dropped from the case. He reportedly helped then Major General Zaheer ul-Islam Abbasi and Brigadier Mustansar Billa to hatch a plan called Operation Khilafat that was meant to overthrow Benazir Bhutto’s government and eliminate the top military leadership to bring about an Islamic revolution in the country. The plan was discovered and thwarted. After this unsuccessful coup attempt, Qari Saifullah flew to Kabul and became a military advisor to Mullah Omar.

This was the time when HuJI was facing organisational and structural problems. Many HuJI commanders had parted ways and formed their own groups, for instance, Ilyas Kashmiri who founded Brigade 313. The establishment of Jaish-i-Mohammad in 2000 further weakened HuJI but its operational wing was still strong and considered a trusted force by Osama bin Laden.

After 9/11, HuJI faced the critical challenge of survival. Because of the group’s close links with Al Qaeda and international militant groups, the Pakistani establishment decided to end its strategic and tactical engagement with Qari Saifullah and eliminate his group. Qari Saifullah had fled to Saudi Arabia where he was hosted by a Saudi family. As he had close links with Al Qaeda and was thus afraid of being arrested, he did not stay in Saudi Arabia for long and took shelter in Dubai where he reportedly started some ‘business’, mainly money laundering for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

HuJI’s organisational structure in Afghanistan was badly damaged during the US attack and its leadership decided to go underground for a while. But most HuJI members did not agree with the strategy and preferred to stay in Afghanistan or in the Pak-Afghan border areas to continue jihad. Some formed militant cells in Pakistan with the help of Al Qaeda. Harkatul Mujahideen al Alami and Jundullah were the prominent groups which were formed by HuJI remnants; some others joined the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. The former groups also included members from other banned organisations and they started to carry out terrorist attacks inside Pakistan.

HuJI was the first Pakistani group which had launched attacks on its own soil. Before the Red Mosque siege in 2007, it was the HuJI and LJ factions which were behind most of the terrorist attacks carried out in Pakistan, mainly between 2002 and 2006. These attacks included assassination attempts on Gen Musharraf, former prime minister Shaukat Aziz, and a Karachi corps commander, as well as attacks on the US consulate in Karachi and on various churches. Even the militants that orchestrated the attack on GHQ in Rawalpindi in 2009 reportedly belonged to the Amjad Farooqi group, a breakaway faction of HuJI.

HuJI was a small group but took more than nine years to become non-functional. During that time it not only caused enormous damage to the country through terrorist attacks it also provided trained militants to other terrorist groups. It contributed towards the formation of the Punjabi Taliban groups, which comprised HuJI’s splinter terrorist cells beside others. The HuJI militants also joined the ranks of Al Qaeda and the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan.

Eliminating militant groups is not an easy task. HuJI’s story suggests that even those groups who once served as proxies of state institutions can cause huge damage to the country before becoming non-functional as an entity.

The writer is a security analyst.

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2014