Killing of influential ‘Father of the Taliban’ a mystery
Maulana Samiul Haq, the Pakistani religious scholar known as the “Father of the Taliban”, was buried in his home town of Nowshehra in north-west Pakistan yesterday, a day after he was fatally stabbed at his residence in the northern city of Rawalpindi.
A large crowd including religious and political leaders were present as Haq was laid to rest beside his father, Maulana Abdul Haq, inside his seminary in Akora Khattak town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The identity and motive of Haq’s attacker were not clear.
“The death remains mysterious and there is no claim of responsibility,” Pakistan’s Information Minister Fawad Chaudhary said.
Born in December 1937, Haq ran the Darul Uloom Haqqania religious school attended by many Afghan militants who fought against the Soviet invasion and later formed the Taliban, including the group’s late founder Mullah Omar.
Haq remained supportive of the group after the 2001 USled invasion that toppled them from power, telling Reuters in 2013 that peace in Afghanistan would not be possible until foreign troops left.
“As long as they are there, Afghans will have to fight for their freedom,” he said.
Haq remained an influential figure whose views carried weight among Taliban fighters on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. Last month he was approached by Kabul to act as a mediator in setting up peace talks between the Afghan Taliban.
In 2014 he was chosen to be one of the representatives of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan when Islamabad tried to hold peace talks with the insurgent group.
The attempt failed and the military launched a sweeping operation against the Pakistani Taliban after they attacked an army-run school in Peshawar in December 2014, killing more than 130 children.
Haq also guided former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, the army chief who held power from 1999 to 2008, on getting the best deal from Washington for co-operating with the US war on terror in Afghanistan.
He opposed US drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas and in 2011 helped to form and led an alliance of more than 40 religious groups known as Defa-e-Pakistan, or Defence of Pakistan, which repeatedly put pressure on the government to cut off Nato’s supply routes to its forces in Afghanistan but never succeeded.
Haq was also active in Pakistani politics, serving several terms as a senator between 1985 and 1997 and later from 2003 to 2009, and maintained good relations with country’s security forces.
He was the head of his own faction of the Jamiat Ulema-eIslam political party. He was also the founding member of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal United Council of Action, an alliance founded in the 1990s of the religious parties.
Haq resigned his government position in 1991 after becoming embroiled in a sex scandal with a dancer.
Despite his links with radical insurgents, Haq was a supporter of the polio immunisation drive in Pakistan, one of only three countries where the disease is still endemic, and issued an edict in support of the campaign in December 2013, at a time when militants were killing vaccination workers in north-west Pakistan.
His seminary, a sprawling campus covering several hectares with more than 2,000 students, was founded in 1947 by his father and has received funding from the various governments.
Haq leaves behind nine children from two marriages. His son Hamidul Haq, will succeed him as head of the seminary.