The man sitting opposite me doesn’t look violent, but he is certainly capable of violence. Aside from being involved in assorted criminal activity, Hafeezullah, an activist of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, one of many extremist religious groups in Pakistan, is one of the accused in a case rated among the country’s worst incidents of sectarian terrorism - the 1998 massacre of 16 people in a Shia mosque in Muzaffargarh. While he doesn’t admit guilt, he doesn’t deny complicity either. And he has little sympathy for the victims. "Don’t term them innocents, they were enemies of Islam," he contends. "And anybody who is an enemy of my religion deserves to be killed." Apart from the Muzaffargarh killings, Hafeezullah is also wanted by the authorities in dozens of other murder cases, and the government has announced a one million rupee award for information leading to his arrest. Hafeezullah cannot recall the exact number of shootouts he has been involved in, but with chilling precision he recounts the number of people he has murdered in cold blood: 21 to date. He is not troubled by any pangs of conscience. "Once you are in, you are in, and there is nothing to repent. Killing is in my blood now," he says nonchalantly.
Equipped with pagers and mobile phones, armed with heavy machine guns and automatic pistols, and supported by a well-entrenched party network, a new generation of militants has come of age and is ruthlessly pursuing its real and perceived enemies within and outside Pakistan. Hundreds are wanted for myriad crimes - from murder to kidnapping to house robbery, to acts of terrorism. Hafeezullah’s journey began when, as a five-year-old in 1981, his impoverished parents sent him as a boarder to a madrassah for religious education in his home town, Muzaffargarh, in southern Punjab. As he grew older, he started attending religious lectures, learnt first-hand about jihad as he saw his senior colleagues leave for Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation, and finally joined a militant religious outfit - the extremist Sunni Sipah-e-Sahaba, Pakistan (SSP) - himself. Soon thereafter, Hafeezullah was asked to go across the border for combat training. Completely indoctrinated, he readily agreed, "That was the final nail in the coffin. When I returned to Pakistan after the training I was an altogether changed person," he says. However, he claims he became far stronger psychologically as a result of the Afghan experience. "When I was leaving for that totally alien land, I was scared. But after undergoing so much training, by the time I completed my course I had became so strong within that I used to feel I could single-handedly defeat an entire battalion of enemies. Subsequent to the training, I came home, but soon thereafter returned to Afghanistan and fought for two years. However, by then the focus of my organisation had changed - and so had the enemy. After the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1990, the new nemesis was the enemies of Islam within the country," he says. And according to his party high command, these were the Shia "infidels." When he moved back to Pakistan, he and his militant brothers brought the war against the Shias back with them. |