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60 Taliban leaders escaped to Mideast via Karachi?

* Swat Taliban facilitated by TTP sleeper cells in Karachi
* Karachi TTP not allowed to carry out attacks, only provides logistics support, hires recruits

By Fawad Ali Shah

KARACHI: Around 60 of the Taliban’s second-cadre leaders – who fled Swat during the army’s ‘Operation Rah-e-Rast’ – used Karachi as a transit route to head out to Middle East countries, Daily Times has learnt.

When armed activists of Sindh’s nationalist parties blocked roads on the Punjab-Sindh border in a bid to stop the influx of internally displaced persons – fearing that several of them could be Taliban in disguise – the Taliban’s second-cadre leadership travelled to the provincial capital by trains and then flew to Middle Eastern states via Karachi airport.

Reliable sources told Daily Times that sleeper cells of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in Karachi facilitated at least 60 leaders of the Taliban and arranged for tickets to the Middle East.

Some of those who travelled to the Middle East were close to Taliban leaders Muslim Khan and Maulana Fazlullah and were part of the TTP’s decision-making processes because of their influence.

A major chunk of the population of Malakand work as labourers in the Middle East. Early in the 1990s when Sufi Muhammad organised the Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM), several people joined his organisation. After the 9/11 attacks, Sufi Muhammad took around 10,000 TNSM activists to fight American forces in Afghanistan. He was arrested on his return from Afghanistan. The TNSM lost its hold, and several of its activists left for the Middle East to find work.

However, after the Taliban resurgence, most of the leaders – some of whom were close aides of Sufi Muhammad – came back and joined hands with the Taliban to pursue a “pious cause”, collecting funds for the TTP and fighting for the extremist group.

However, when the military launched an operation in Swat to flush out the Taliban this year, the group became disorganised, and those had arrived from the Middle East initially shifted to IDP camps in Peshawar.

Fearing they would be caught, they then travelled in small groups to Karachi by train along with their visas and other documents, said the sources, adding that they later fled to Gulf states. The Karachi wing of the TTP – an entity said to be well organised – facilitated all of them.

Karachi TTP: According to the sources, the Karachi TTP hosts Taliban from other provinces, and provides logistics support and recruits new members. However, the Karachi TTP has no operational wing, meaning it does not have permission to carry out any attacks.

In an interview with Daily Times, Abu Talha – name changed on request – sitting in a mud house, surrounded by five people, two of them clean-shaven, introduced himself as the leader of the Taliban in Karachi, and said that it was “the duty of every Muslim to facilitate other Muslims”.

He claimed that the Taliban in Karachi were “as organised as anywhere else”.

Agreeing with the ideology of Hakeemullah Mehsud, he said his group would launch a struggle for Sharia even at the cost of thousands of lives. He said that the Karachi Taliban were not allowed to carry out operations.

Professor Khadim Hussain, who has been researching issues of related to Taliban and militarisation, strongly believes that Karachi is the hub of Taliban activities and in the existence of sleeper cells in the city.

“Most of the Taliban leaders in Malakand and Southern Punjab come from seminaries in Karachi,” claimed Hussain.

“After a research, we found that a major chunk of the leaders and foot soldiers in Malakand migrated to Karachi in a systematic manner after the military launched an operation,” he said. “We found that the commander of Pir Baba in Buner, Shahid, migrated to Karachi along with his accomplices after the operation,” he said. Law enforcement and security agencies in the city also admit that Taliban sleeping cells exist in the city.

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