‘Father of the Taliban’ Sami ul-Haq found dead

Cleric Sami ul-Haq, known as the “Father of the Taliban” for having taught some of the Afghan Islamist movement’s leaders, has been found dead.Pakistan’s interior ministry confirmed Haq’s death in a statement yesterday evening, and expressed condolence.“Unidentified attackers killed Maulana Sami ul-Haq inside his residence,” Umar Jahangir, a senior government official, told state-run Pakistan television.Unknown attackers killed the cleric, who runs an Islamic seminary in northwestern Pakistan, his deputy Yousaf Shah said.There were conflicting reports of exactly how he was killed and why his bodyguard and driver were apparently not there to protect him at the time of the attack.Shah initially said that Haq had been shot dead.Hamid ul-Haq, the cleric’s son and a former MP, confirmed the killing to private TV channel GEO, and said that his father was stabbed by the attackers before they opened fire.Haq’s nephew Mohamed Bilal told Reuters that his uncle was found with stab and gunshot wounds in a house he owns in an upscale area on Islamabad’s outskirts.“When the assailants entered his house ... they first started hitting Mullah Sami ul-Haq with knives and daggers, and then shot him dead,” he said.Further details remained unclear.Haq was chief of his own Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam faction (the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam – Sami, JUI-S), and was a member of the Senate from 1985 to 1997.He has run the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, near the Afghanistan border, for decades.One of his students from the 1980s, known later as Mullah Mohamed Omar, went along with classmates to Afghanistan to join mujahideen groups fighting against the Soviet occupation of the country.Omar went on to found the Taliban, which seized power in Afghanistan in 1996 after years of chaos and civil war following the Soviet military’s withdrawal.The ultra-conservative Taliban imposed an extreme version of Sharia law on Afghanistan that included forbidding women to leave home without a male relative, imposing minimum lengths on men’s beards, and banning sports, radio and television.Haq’s seminary has continued to thrive in Pakistan, including being allocated funding in provincial government budgets.His JUI-S party is an ally of the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party headed by Prime Minister Imran Khan.Khan, currently on an official visit to Beijing, condemned the killing and ordered an investigation, his office said.