Another peek inside Pakistan’s jihad factories — mixed with some of the usual mainstream media twaddle, but still containing some useful information. “Welcome to the ‘jihad factory.’ It’s still in production: SONYA FATAH meets Islamic firebrand Sami ul-Haq on his home turf — the school where he trained most of the top Taliban,” from the Globe and Mail:
AKORA KHATTAK, PAKISTAN — In the 16th century, a Muslim warlord who had come to be known as Sher Khan, the original Lion King, began building the Sadak-e-Azam, or royal road, to link the four corners of his vast empire. Before it was finished, he died in an accidental gunpowder blast, but the great thoroughfare continued to grow, and today, known as the Grand Trunk Road, it stretches 2,500 kilometres from the gateway to Afghanistan across Pakistan and India to Bangladesh.
The Lion King was an Afghan, and he relied on the Grand Trunk to give his fighters the mobility they needed to keep his domain intact. More than 450 years later, those in charge of a sprawling complex of domes and spires that sit beside the road just east of its starting point, the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, are hoping their followers can do something even more dramatic — bring about an Islamist revolution. And many people around the world now wonder just how far they are willing to go to achieve it.
As investigators try to uncover who was behind last week’s apparent attempt to blow up as many as 12 U.S.-bound passenger planes over the Atlantic, they say they keep uncovering evidence that points toward Pakistan, especially its remote and often lawless provinces bordering on Afghanistan.
Peshawar is the capital of the North Western Frontier Province which, along with the neighbouring province of Baluchistan, is where so many of the “homegrown terrorists” being found in Muslim communities around the world have their family roots. This region is where they are believed to come to learn the art of war, and where Islamic militants are believed to be slipping back and forth across the border to attack the Canadian, American and British troops fighting to avert a Taliban comeback.
Read it all.