Author: Refet Kaplan
Publication: AP
Date: October 12, 2001
Children at the Afghan Public School
on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Abdul Khalid,
22, a small-time smuggler who lives in a refugee shantytown here, has a
new purpose in life: kill Americans. "I have been here for several years,
but now I have to go and fight because Islam is under attack," argues the
one-time Jalalabad resident. "And I have a group of 28 others here who
are going with me. We just need someone to tell us how it's done."
Khalid's is one voice in a growing,
but still minority, chorus of young men and boys here who swear they are
ready to take up the Taliban's cry for jihad, or holy war.
These young zealots seek out and
find their way into a murky but well-established recruiting and training
pipeline that takes groups of religious students and unemployed refugees
and ships them off to an unknown fate in Afghanistan with little more than
their identity papers and two days' change of clothes.
"About 20 days ago, 120 people from
our group left for Afghanistan, and there are many more from here on the
way," said Barkat Ullah, 21, a student at a religious school run by the
Madinah Mosque in Peshawar. "I am going myself as soon as I can."
Many of the recruits come from the
ranks of Pakistan's extensive system of religious schools, or madrassahs.
The madrassahs formally train students in the theological concepts of jihad,
but they don't actually order them to join the ranks.
"How many students volunteer is
up to them. We can't stop it," said an administrator at the Darul Uloom
madrassah, which is run by the same religious order that instructed many
of the current Taliban leaders. "We have exams this week, but after that
they may be going.
"We have 1,029 students now, and
I expect 400 to 500 of them to eventually go fight," the administrator
said.
Those genuinely determined to sign
up - and many are not, it should be noted - must get themselves to the
offices of a religious association or a political group that is actively
engaged in jihad recruiting. There are dozens of such associations across
Peshawar, but only a few are directly involved in signing up fighters for
the Taliban.
Once they find the right office
and sign up, the recruits are usually told to go home and wait. After a
week or more, they are contacted and told to appear at a certain place
and time - without most of their personal possessions.
The recruitment offices are not
hard to find, despite Pakistan's claims that many of them have been shut
down. Many are in some of the Peshawar's more run-down areas.
One such office was located in an
alley just a few yards from a spot where three men were mixing up their
day's supply of opium, which they said they had purchased in the neighborhood.
A few blocks away, on the fifth
floor of a modern commercial building, a young man armed with an automatic
weapon stood guard at the door of the office of J'aish Mohammed, or Mohammed's
Army. Behind the guard was a poster outlining a checklist of what recruits
need to bring along on their journey: An ID card and relevant phone numbers
or addresses - "you'll be completely out of contact, and we will contact
your family for you," explains the poster. Two days' change of clothes.
Don't bother bringing tobacco, snuff, drugs.
The officials at J'aish Mohammed
and the other recruitment offices refused to speak with a reporter, saying
they risked being closed down by the Pakistani authorities.
The process of finding these centers
and actually enlisting can be somewhat intimidating, of course, and is
enough to scare away many prospective jihadis. A number of madrassah students
offered what seemed to be convenient excuses for staying out of the fight,
at least for now.
"I would go today, but my mother
isn't well and I must be here with her," said one 20-year-old Afghan who
has lived in Pakistan for the last 10 years. "My brother is a commander
in Mazar-I-Sharif and wants me to go there, but what can I do?"
Sultan Siddiqui, a Pakistani journalist
and an expert in Taliban activities in the region, says it's not the throngs
of madrassah students openly parading and bragging about jihad who will
eventually join the ranks of the Taliban.
It's the quieter ones you have to
worry about, he said. "The ones running around talking about it are just
talking. Not many of them will go," he said.
But Siddiqui said that more young
men are signing up for jihad since the U.S. bombing campaign began a week
ago.
"The flow of fighters going from
Pakistan to Afghanistan is much larger than the other way around," he said,
discounting reports that large numbers of Taliban fighters had abandoned
their positions to seek shelter in Pakistan.
"There may be some defections, but
they are going to other groups rather than fleeing the country.
"The Taliban are telling them the
fight has yet to begin, and that now is the time to join the war and help
defeat the world's remaining superpower."