“We should not be called the University of Jihad but University of the Taliban Cabinet,” says Maulana Hamid Ul-Haq, the head of the Darul Uloom Haqqania Seminary–the incubator of local and global terrorists.
“We are proud,” as he started taking names of who is who of top Taliban leadership during an interview with The Independent. The first doctorate degree awardee was the one-eyed founder of the Taliban – Maulana Omar. “He brought peace to Afghanistan and the region,” Haq told the British daily. The seminary's late leader Sami-ul-Haq boasted of advising the Taliban's founder Mullah Omar – earning him the moniker "the father of the Taliban".
His successor Akhtar Mansour who was killed in a drone attack by the US in 2016 was also a student of this madrasa.
Haq proudly said that more than 90 percent of the Taliban ministers have been associated with his madrasa. The most prominent are the most powerful Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, heir of the Haqqani Network and a designated terrorist with a bounty of $10 million. His uncle, the minister for Refugees, Khalil-ur-Haqqani, also a designated terrorist with a bounty of $ 5 million was educated in this madrasa along with Jallauddin Haqqani, founder of the Haqqani Network, a UN designated terrorist organisation.
The head of the Seminary, recalls meeting with Sirajuddin Haqqani, whom he calls “humble”, “well-mannered”, and “visionary”.
“We don’t want to be known as the terror or warrior university. We are proud that a number of our alumni are in the Taliban cabinet, including the Taliban’s minister of education, Abdul Baqi Haqqani and other ministers, including deputy prime minister Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban.”
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Seminaries like Haqqania "give birth to radical jihadism, produce Taliban and are threatening our country", said the former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who has blamed Pakistan for funding this madrasa. The Imran Khan government allocated a whopping Rs 227 million to the seminary in 2018. Khan's party has also lavished the Haqqani seminary with millions of dollars in return for its political support.
Situated in Sarai Akora Khattak – a small town in Nowshera district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, the Haqqani madrasa sits at the heart of one of the most important and influential hard-line Sunni clerical networks. And according to intelligence reports, the majority of the Afghan graduates join the Taliban cadre.
Even the Pakistan military, which has been openly supporting the Taliban and the Haqqani Network admits that madrassas have been the recruitment grounds for the various terror outfits.
“Will they become clerics or will they become terrorists?" Once Pakistani Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa asked this question but he knew the answer.
After the Taliban's announcement of Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, Haq told his students that the Taliban had established “unmatched peace and security in Afghanistan” and should “inspire” a similar change in Pakistan.
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