Kaushik Kapisthalam | June 22

Asia Times Online - From Australia to Europe to North America, a spate of arrests, trials and convictions has brought to the world's attention the growing threat posed by jihadis from Pakistan.

On June 5, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested a pair of Pakistani-Americans from the sleepy little farming town of Lodi, California. Hamid Hayat, 23, and his father, Umer Hayat, 47, were later charged with lying to the authorities regarding their connection with jihadi training camps. But the formal FBI affidavit contained the bombshell piece of information that the training camps in question were in Pakistan, not in the notorious tribal areas, but right outside the city of Rawalpindi, which also hosts the Pakistan army headquarters.

While the FBI later put out an amended affidavit, the original statement released to the media named the person running the Rawalpindi terror camp as "Maulana Fazlur Rehman". This was confusing because two prominent people share that name in Pakistan. The first one is the secretary general of Pakistan's opposition Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal Islamic alliance and the head of a pro-Taliban group called Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam. Experts say, however, that the affidavit likely describes another person, Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, a notorious terrorist leader.

Khalil is the chief patron of a group called Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), which was the first Pakistani jihadi group to be banned by the US in 1997, when it was known as Harkat-ul-Ansar. While HuM is supposedly focused on fighting Pakistan's covert war against India in the Kashmir region, it gained prominence in 1998 when Khalil became the first Pakistani leader to sign the fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden calling for attacks on US and Western interests.

In 2003, the US government declassified 32 documents relating to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. These included secret memos from the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). One of the DIA documents noted, "[Osama] bin Laden's al-Qaeda network was able to expand under the safe sanctuary extended by Taliban following Pakistan directives. If there is any doubt on that issue, consider the location of bin Laden's camp targeted by US cruise missiles, Zahawa. Positioned on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, it was built by Pakistani contractors, funded by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] directorate ... If this was later to become bin Laden's base, then serious questions are raised by the early relationship between bin Laden and Pakistan's ISI."

In 1998, US warships in the Arabian Sea launched cruise missiles on "al-Qaeda" training camps in Afghanistan. However, at least one of the targeted camps was a HuM facility, run in conjunction with Pakistani military and intelligence officials. According to the US 9-11 Commission, many HuM volunteers and a few Pakistani intelligence personnel were killed during the missile attack. Soon after the strike, Khalil called a press conference in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad and threatened the US that his men would attack Americans in their homes, just like the Americans attacked them (HuM) in their own backyard. HuM continued to operate training camps in eastern Afghanistan until US air strikes destroyed them during the fall of 2001. In 2003, HuM began using the name Jamiat ul-Ansar.

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