After DHA attack, Sindh’s madrassas may be under scrutiny

CID SSP had foiled attempts to recruit from the countryside.

ISLAMABAD: The government has decided to put Sindh’s seminaries under the microscope. The decision comes a day after terrorists blew up the Karachi residence of an key investigator who had thwarted their plans to use madrassa students in Wana.

“Sindh’s seminaries are vulnerable and the situation is turning from bad to worse with every passing day,” said  an official with the ministry of interior who did not want to be named. According to him, intelligence units and other law enforcement agencies have submitted their reports on the gravity of the matter.

The ministry has been sharing the reports with the Sindh home department from time to time, the source said, adding that the Sindh government had been trying, although unsuccessfully, to intercept their movements.

But now the federal and provincial governments are going to work together to rope in the people who run the seminaries. “Seminary managers would have to express willingness [to help].”

To begin with, the focus will be on international students.

Recently apprehended terrorists, who attacked the military in Wana, turned out to be students from madrassas in Sindh.

They were made to believe they were fighting foreign aggressors.

“We kept fighting the military the entire night but in the morning we saw that it was our countrymen [soldiers] who were in front of us, therefore we surrendered,” the official quoted the students as saying.

According to the source, interior minister Rehman Malik had said in one meeting that Pakistan has more than 18,000 seminaries and the government is making an effort to register them.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 22^nd,  2011.