Madrassas in Pakistan teach value of death

By ABACEEN NASIMI

KABUL, Afghanistan — The school seemed normal enough at first.

“For a year, they gave us religious lessons, and they would also preach jihad,” said the young man originally from Helmand province in Afghanistan of the madrassa he attended in Pakistan.

Slowly, however, the lessons began to change and the school’s true mission became clear.

“They started to tell us that we should go to Afghanistan and fight,” said the youth, who asked that his name not be used because he feared reprisals from his former classmates. “They were preparing suicide bombers.”

Only when he returned home for a brief visit and witnessed an attack did he decide to withdraw from the school.

“I saw how innocent people suffered in those attacks,” he said. Still, he said, “I thought about my fellow students back at the madrassa. I could understand the suicide bomber.”

With the education system in troubled Helmand province all but collapsed, an increasing number of young men are being sent by their parents to religious schools in nearby Pakistan to continue their education. While many are legitimate, others are little more than terrorist training grounds.

Opium poppy production

Helmand is especially fertile ground for such recruits. The province is not only one of the epicenters of the Taliban insurgency, but also leads the world in opium poppy production. The nexus of the drug trade and the insurgency means normal life has all but ceased in the area.

Many schools in the province have been forced to close over the past three years. According to the provincial Department of Education, about 54,000 school-age children regularly attend classes this year, less than half the number that attended school a year ago, and only one-fifth of an estimated 245,000 school-age youths in the province.

According to Sher Agha Safi, the head of Helmand’s education department, schools are currently operating in only three of Helmand’s 13 districts.

Only a few madrassas operate in the entire province, he said.

“We would like a madrassa in each district,” said Safi.

So, while families might like to keep their sons closer to home for their education, they have no choice other but to allow them to travel to Pakistan.

While Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand, has promised to address the problem of higher education in his province, it remains a relatively low priority given the current security concerns.

“Those students who are in Pakistan are being misused,” Mangal said. “Pakistan is brainwashing them and using them for suicide attacks. I call on all Helmandis to take their children out of Pakistan.”

A high-ranking official in the education ministry, who asked that his name not be used because he is not authorized to speak to the press, said that Pakistani madrassas had been training radicals since at least the 1990s.

“It is true that jihadists are being recruited in Pakistan,” he said. “I was a madrassa student in Karachi in the mid-1990s, and there were foreign students — Arabs, Chechens — training there then.”

Not that operating a madrassa in Helmand province doesn’t have its own difficulties.

“There are problems if you stay in Helmand,” said one father, who asked that his name not be used out of fear of reprisals. “The Taliban come to the madrassas and try to put pressure on the students to join them, to fight against the foreigners and the Afghan government. They say that the students should kill anyone who benefits from the government, no matter whether he is a doctor, a teacher, an engineer, just kill them.”

Parental choice

So, parents face a choice: Keep their sons at home to be recruited by the Taliban or send them to Pakistan to be trained as a suicide bomber.

“I sent one of my sons to Pakistan,” said another parent who asked not to be named. “I had to, because the Taliban were coming and trying to take him away. So I sent him to school in Pakistan, where he was trained to become a suicide bomber.”

X Abaceen Nasimi is a reporter in Afghanistan who writes for The Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organization in London that trains journalists in areas of conflict. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.