SEP 13 – A report filed by McClatchy Newspapers Pakistan-based special correspondent Saaed Shah claims that the banned militant outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), is setting up a huge new base in the outskirts of Bahawalpur.

“Pakistani authorities have turned a blind eye to the new base, in the far south of Punjab province, even though it is believed to have been built to serve as a radical madrassah – Islamic school – or some kind of training camp”, Saeed Shah reports in his latest dispatch datelined Bahawalpur.

According to Shah’s report, Jaish members, who were behind ‘a spectacular attempt’ to assassinate then-president Pervez Musharraf in 2004 were were also involved in training and commanding the Taliban guerrillas who overran the Swat valley.

The whole story:

Jaish-e-Mohammad (“army of Mohammad”), which is linked to a series of atrocities including an attack on the Indian parliament and the beheading of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, has walled off a 4.5 acre compound just outside the town of Bahawalpur.

Pakistani authorities have turned a blind eye to the new base, in the far south of Punjab province, even though it is believed to have been built to serve as a radical madrassah – Islamic school – or some kind of training camp.

British security sources believe Rauf helped organise the July 7 and 21 attacks in 2005. He was born in England to Pakistani parents and brought up in Birmingham where his father was a baker. It was in Bahawalpur that Rauf was arrested in 2006, before his mysterious and still unexplained escape from custody.

While world attention has been focused on the menace of the Taliban in the north west of Pakistan, the bases of Jaish and a string of other similar jihadist groups in southern Punjab have gone largely unnoticed.

Yet Punjabi extremist groups send thousands of recruits to fight British soldiers in Afghanistan.

Bahawalpur is a backwater, a dusty, dirt-poor town which is swelteringly hot in summer. Its isolation allows it to function quietly as a centre for ideological indoctrination and terrorist planning, a jihadist oasis surrounded by parched fields. Once mentally prepared, promising students are dispatched to camps for training jihadists in warfare, in the north west of the country.

Jaish members were behind a spectacular attempt to assassinate then-president Pervez Musharraf in 2004. They were also involved in training and commanding the Taliban guerrillas who overran Pakistan’s Swat valley.

The terrorist group was reputedly formed with help from Pakistan’s ISI military spy agency as a weapon to be used against their arch-enemy India, and the two organisations are understood to remain close.

Aside from Rauf, two other two other notorious British-Pakistani militants had connections with Jaish: Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 2005 bombers of the London transport system; and Omar Sheikh, who was found guilty in Pakistan of the murder of the American journalist, Daniel Pearl. It emerged last week that British intelligence believes that Rauf is still alive, despite claims that he died in a US missile attack in Pakistan’s tribal area in 2008.

Bahawalpur and the surrounding districts also serve as a safe resting place for jihadists battling in Afghanistan, including, it is believed, for British-born Muslims who go to fight there. They have respite from the threat of US spy planes that patrol the tribal area in the north west, killing militants with deadly missile strikes.

In Bahawalpur alone, there may be as many as 1,000 madrassas, many of which teach a violent version of Islam to children, who are mostly too poor to go to regular school.

Jaish has its headquarters in Bahawalpur and it openly runs a imposing madrassah in the centre of town, called Usman-o-Ali, where it teaches its extremist interpretation of Islam to hundreds of children every year.

The group was banned by Pakistan back in 2002 and designated by the US as a “foreign terrorist organisation”. The Sunday Telegraph was prevented from entering the madrassah, which also has a mosque that should be open to everyone.

Jaish’s new site, about 5km (3 miles) out of Bahawalpur at Chowk Azam, on the main road to Karachi, is much larger, with evidence that it could contain underground bunkers or tunnels. Surrounded by a high brick and mud wall, little can be seen from the road.

However, The Sunday Telegraph discovered that it has a fully-tiled swimming pool, stabling for over a dozen horses, an ornamental fountain and even swings and a slide for children – all belying claims by the group and Pakistani officials that the facility is simply a small farm to keep cattle. There were signs of construction activity.

A man at the site, who gave his name as Abdul Jabbar, who wore a visible ammunition vest under his shirt, would not allow The Sunday Telegraph to enter, and suggested it was time for the newspaper to leave.

“We’re not hiding anything. Nothing happens here. We have just kept some cattle for our milk,” said Mr Jabbar, who sported the long hair that is typical for Pakistani and Afghan Taliban.

A man on a motorbike followed as The Sunday Telegraph drove away.

The new facility is known to the regional administration and, with a hefty army cantonment in Bahawalpur, the military would also be aware.

It has deeply worried some Pakistani security personnel. One described it as a “second centre of terrorism”, to complement the existing Jaish madrassah in the middle of town.

The officer, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that Jaish should never have been allowed to buy the land.

He said they initially acquired 4.5 acres, then they forced the adjacent landowner to sell them another 2 acres. “It’s big enough for training purposes,” he said.

On the inside walls, there are painted jihadist inscriptions, including a warning to “Hindus and Jews”, with a picture of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, suggesting they will conquer the city.

Bahawalpur was where Rashid Rauf fled in 2002, after being implicated in the murder of his uncle in the UK. His family friend Ghulam Mustafa, a radical imam, ran a madrassah, the Dar-ul-Uloom Medina.

He married Mr Mustafa’s daughter, and his wife and children are still believed to live there.

No-one was willing to talk about Rauf in Bahawalpur.

Attaur Rehman, the deputy head of the Dar-ul-Uloom Medina madrassah, which is run out of an unmarked building in a back street and is closely associated with Jaish, said: “We don’t say anything about this, I won’t talk to you. I’m fed up with you media people.”

Publicly, Pakistani officials insisted that the new compound is innocuous and even that there is no extremist threat in Bahawalpur.

Mushtaq Sukhera, the Regional Police Officer for Bahawalpur, the most senior police officer for the area, admitted that the Usman-o-Ali madrassah in the middle of Bahawalpur “belongs to “Jaish” . He said that Jaish also owned the facility out of town. “But there’s nothing over there except a few cows and horses,” he said.

“No militancy, no military training is being imparted to students (at Usman-o-Ali),” said Mr Sukhera. “There is no problem with militancy (in south Punjab), there’s no problem with Talibanisation. It’s just media hype.” Others tell a different story. Somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 men from southern Punjab are currently fighting jihad in Afghanistan or Pakistan’s north western tribal area, according to independent estimates, said Ayesha Siddiqa, an analyst who has studied the area.

They are often known as the “Punjabi Taliban”, whereas the main Taliban forces are ethnic Pashtuns, the group that straddles north west Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“These guys [in Bahawalpur] aren’t connected with a war, they don’t have any ethnic affiliation with Afghanistan,” said Dr Siddiqa. “These guys are purely ideologically motivated. That makes it much more difficult to crack them during investigation or to break their will to fight.”

Story link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/6180118/Al-Qaeda-allies-build-huge-Pakistan-base.html