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From the streets of Karachi to the hills of Helmand

* A militant narrates his tale of how a student who failed his exams twice joined the world of the Taliban

By Fawad Ali Shah

KARACHI: Hamza was 18 years old when he was enticed to visit Afghanistan for the “Jihad” against the “Crusaders”.

For the next three years he continuously travelled between Karachi and Helmand in the path of his Jihad.

“One of my friends advised me to join a madrassa,” said Hamza, who is 23 years old now.

He politely started narrating his story while sitting at a ground in the Landhi area.

Hamza is one of the thousands of Karachi’s youngsters, who went to madrassas in order to acquire religious knowledge and understanding but were forced to take a path where they became tools for Jihadi elements.

Though Hamza never excelled as a student, his parents had admitted him to a government school in Gulistan-e-Jauhar, where he is “proud to have failed the exams twice”.

He said some of his friends at the madrassa showed him films of the American forces’ atrocities in Iraq and Palestine. These films motivated him to “take revenge”.

Then “some men” took him and a few of his friends for Jihad training. The youngster, whose father runs a general store in Karachi, does not remember the exact location where he was trained, but says the place was a hilly area “at a distance of an hour from Kohat”.

“There we were offered many courses. There were three-day courses, a one-month course and four months training of guerilla warfare,” he said.

Hamza claims to have used many modern weapons and equipments, and can develop an explosive material.

He opted for four months of training. Though the training started with the introduction of small weapons, later on it became tougher, but the training master used to motivate them with his morning sermons.

“We had to run on the hills for two hours in the morning and then without any rest we attended the class of modern weaponry,” the youngster explained.

Interestingly, the part of the training routine he hated the most was eating 12 boiled eggs every morning. “It was tougher than the running,” he said.

On July 12 2004, he was sent on his first mission to Helmand, where his team attacked foreign troops.

“It was the most unforgettable scene of my life,” said the youngster, who was dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and sporting a beard.

When asked whether militants cross the Pak-Afghan border dressed as army personnel, he did not answer but only offered a smile.

However, he did tell a story about how he and his commanders had befooled the American air force.

“In 2004, the American jets would take around half an hour to reach the battlefield and assist their soldiers,” he said. “One day they arrived when the sun was setting, and we put lights on the trees on a mountain....the fighters bombed those trees thinking that the Taliban were hiding there,” he said with a smile.

He seemed impressed by Arab fighters, saying they were “technically sound, polite and pious”.

“They invented such detonators that the American equipments could not jam them,” he said.

His current visit to Karachi is his second since he joined the Taliban. The financial condition of his family has worsened since then. His father has kicked him out of the family after a quarrel. He thinks his father a “worldly man”, who is “running after money”.

He has still not abandoned what he believes is “fighting for a pious cause”.

“We want Islamic law in the whole world and if the infidels don’t surrender, they will have to die,” said the young man with an expressionless face.

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