As discussed in my first post in this series, Saddam tasked his minions with hunting Americans throughout the Muslim world and especially in Somalia in 1993. The Iraqi Intelligence Service identified eleven groups with which it had relations and that were capable of carrying out the mission. One of the groups identified was the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam party, otherwise known as the JUI, in Pakistan. According to a U.S. Government translation, here is what the IIS had to say about its relationship with the JUI in its January 25, 1993 memo:
The JUI has been one of the strictest Islamist parties in Pakistan. It is as far from secular as you can get; its goal has been to turn Pakistan into a theological state. Moreover, the JUI has practiced an extremist brand of Islam for decades. Yet, according to this IIS document, the JUI was receiving aid from both Iraq and Libya–two nominally secular states headed by ruthless dictators who one would not think of as especially religious, to say the least. Not only was the JUI receiving aid from Iraq, the IIS reported a “close relationship” with the group’s secretary since the early 1980’s and his willingness “to perform any mission that he would be assigned.” Since this was written in the context of Iraq’s quest to launch anti-American terrorist operations in Somalia and elsewhere, “any mission” would presumably include just such a task. However, it is not known if the JUI ever contributed to such attacks in any way, and it might well not have. What the IIS memo does not note is that the JUI was then training future cadres of Taliban members. Indeed, the JUI is widely considered the mother organization for the Taliban. The U.S. government’s translation of the IIS document notes that the JUI is headed by “Mulana Fadil Al-Rahman.” There are a number of alternative spellings of Rahman’s name floating around, but a more common English translation of his name is Maulana Fazlur Rahman. But, as Steve Schippert has previously noted, you can just call him the “godfather” of the Taliban.
In his aptly titled book, Taliban, Ahmed Rashid notes that in the early 1990’s the Taliban’s “closest links were with Pakistan where many of them had grown up and studied in madrassas run by the mercurial Maulana Fazlur Rahman and his Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI)…” In an alliance of strange bedfellows, Rahman and his JUI allied with Benazir Bhutto’s party, the secular Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), for the 1993 Pakistani elections. Both were then voted into power as part of the ruling coalition. Rahman became, according to Rashid, the “Chairman of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee for Foreign Affairs,” which allowed him to travel to the United States and Europe, where he could “lobby for the Taliban and Saudi Arabia.” Rahman even organized the first contacts between the Saudis and senior Taliban officials in the mid-1990’s. Rashid tells us the “first Saudi contacts with the Taliban were through princely hunting trips,” which were organized by Rahman in 1994-95. Rashid explains: “The Arab hunting parties flew into Kandahar on huge transport planes bringing dozens of luxury jeeps, many of which they left behind along with donations for their Taliban hosts, after the hunt. Saudi Intelligence chief Prince Turki then began to visit Kandahar regularly. After Turki visited Islamabad and Kandahar in July 1996, the Saudis provided funds, vehicles and fuel for the successful Taliban attack on Kabul.” In more recent times, the JUI and Rahman have been near the center of the storm in Waziristan. The JUI also plays a leading role in Pakistan’s Islamist political coalition, the “MMA.” In the bizarre, labyrinthine underworld of the international terrorist network, strange bedfellows are commonplace. Common enemies are often enough to drive disparate forces together. Thus, the details of how the network actually works often do not match up to our cheap misconceptions. That’s why the idea that Saddam could not work with al Qaeda because of ideological differences was always hollow. As the IIS noted in 1993, Iraq was giving aid to and had a “close relationship” with the JUI, a group that would give rise to the Taliban. Just a few years later, the Saudis would become the JUI’s chief backer. The terror network contains many strange bedfellows indeed.
