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                       South Punjab sees Taliban connection as stigma

By Nasir Jamal 

  Taliban fighters sit with their weapons on the back of a truck in Buner.—Reuter

LAHORE: ‘Wrong address,’ cry out the people in south Punjab as they receive another journalist arriving to look for Taliban and terrorists in their midst

‘You may find them in Punjab, but not here,’ says Mahmood Nizami, a political activist from Taunsa, which touches the tribal areas of Dera Ismail Khan and is less than an hour’s drive from South Waziristan, to its north-west. ‘Our name is being sullied without reason.’

‘If a few people from this part of Punjab are involved in terrorist acts, it doesn’t mean that the entire Seraiki belt is infested with terrorists. If some people from here have links with Taliban in the tribal areas of the NWFP or Afghanistan, it doesn’t give you the right to brand all of us as Taliban,’ he protests, standing in front of the shrine of Shah Suleman Taunsvi.
 
Legend in Taunsa has it that Shah Suleman, who is revered for his stress on education, turned down a request from Syed Ahmed Shaheed Barelvi and Syed Ismail Shaheed to join them in their jihad against the Sikh rule in Punjab in the first half of the 19th century.South Punjab has grabbed the attention of the western media and their governments over the past few months because of the alleged involvement of the so-called Punjabi Taliban — a blanket term for members of banned sectarian/jihadi groups like Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan and Jaish-i-Mohammad arrested in Punjab and the federal capital after a spate of terror attacks.

The alleged links of operatives of outlawed sectarian and jihadi groups from the ‘impoverished’ south Punjab with Baitullah Mehsud’s Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and other militant groups in Fata and Swat are also a cause of concern in the western capitals, as well as for the NWFP government.
 
Americans are worried because the purported liaison between the outlawed sectarian groups (for whom southern Punjab serves as catchment area) and TTP in parts of the NWFP threatens the stability of the country.The NWFP government is anxious because it believes that ‘fresh recruits’ for militant groups challenging its writ are coming mostly from the southern districts of Punjab — D.G. Khan, Bahawalpur, Bahawalnagar, Muzaffargarh, etc.

The arrest on April 5 of two Seraiki-speaking men linked with the killing of 27 people in a suicide attack at the Johar Ali Imambargah in D.G. Khan, which took place exactly two months before, has led to the formation of convenient theories that the militant Taliban groups have already forged a strong alliance with outfits in the southern Punjab.

Investigators believe that the local militants provide logistical support and, in certain cases, human resource, to the Taliban for carrying out their terror operations in Punjab.The police claim that both Qari Mohammad Ismaeel, who had masterminded the D.G. Khan bombing, and Ghulam Mustafa Kaisrani, who had facilitated the Pashtun bomber, belonged to SSP, now operating as Ahle Sunnat-wul-Jamaat, and had close links with TTP in South Waziristan has reinforced this belief.

Even before the arrest of Ismaeel and Kaisrani, the police investigators had found evidence of close collaboration between TTP and the Punjabi militants, especially those belonging to Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, in several other terrorist incidents — the Marriott bombing in Islamabad in September last year and the attack on Sri Lankan cricketers and the siege of the Manawan police training academy in Lahore in March.

Most militants involved in the terrorist acts in the recent months have been identified as being from southern Punjab.The alleged nexus between the Punjabi Taliban and Pashtun militant groups has also led to a convenient theory that the militants in the southern Punjab are regrouping to ‘take over’ some southern districts like D.G. Khan or Muzaffargarh just as they have done in Swat.

DAWN: Sunday, 24 May, 2009