Pak madrassa connected to Taliban, Haqqani network

Peshawar: Darul Uloom Haqqania madrassa, one of Pakistan’s largest and oldest seminaries and dubbed as a university of jihad’ by its critics for helping sow violence across the region for decades, has educated more Taliban leaders than any school in the world and its alumni now hold key positions in Afghanistan, according to a media report. The seminary in Pakistan’s restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has had an outsize effect in Afghanistan. The seminary’s alumni founded the Taliban movement and ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s.

The school has argued that the Taliban should be given the chance to show they have moved beyond their bloody ways since they first ruled Afghanistan two decades ago, The New York Times reported on Friday.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, 41, who led much of the Taliban’s military efforts and carries a USD 5 million bounty from the US government on his head, is the new acting interior minister of Afghanistan and an alumnus. So is Amir Khan Muttaqi, the new foreign minister, and Abdul Baqi Haqqani, the higher education minister, the report said.

Pakistan has long had an uneasy relationship with madrassas like Haqqania. Leaders who once saw the seminaries as a way to influence events in Afghanistan now see them as a source of conflict within Pakistan