The Shamzai Assassination

Shamzai was not just another militant cleric who hated the west.

From Winds of Change with plenty of links.

Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai was assassinated today in Karachi. This may not sound too terribly important, but allow me to add some context to his assassination. Mufti Shamzai was the head of the Jamiat ul-Uloom il Islamiyyah mosque, also known as Binori Town, which is one of the most radical Deobandi seminaries in all of Pakistan. Paul Moloney posted a pretty good bio of Binori Town over on Rantburg and there's also a very chilling description of the place in Bernard Henri Levy's book Who Killed Daniel Pearl? that basically explains what it was for the Deobandi Pakistani jihadis. Paul regards it as the ground zero of global terrorism, but I'd say a more apt description would be to compare Binori Town to America's own Command General Staff College (CGSC) in Leavenworth or the Army War College in Carlisle. This was where the majority of the "officer corps" of the South Asian branch of bin Laden's International Front were indoctrinated, from the Taliban leadership to members of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Sipah-e-Sahaba, the Harakat ul-Mujahideen, the Harakat ul-Jihad-e-Islami, and lastly the Jaish-e-Mohammed, which regarded Shamzai as its spiritual leader.

In addition to his other duties inciting violence and indoctrinating jihadis in South Asia, Mufti Shamzai was also a member of the Supreme Council of Global Jihad, the body of radical clerics that appears to serve as al-Qaeda's brain trust. When the US demanded that the Taliban extradict bin Laden to the US in September 2001, Mufti Shamzai was part of the delegation of Pakistani religious leaders and ISI officials that met with his former student Mullah Omar. While the Pakistani government sent them there to tell the Taliban to cough up bin Laden, Shamzai and the rest of the delegation reportedly told Mullah Omar to fight.

The perpetrators of the Shamzai assassination are unclear at this point, but the usual suspects are likely to range from Shi'ite sectarian groups, Musharraf loyalists, rival Deobandi or Wahhabi Islamists, moderate Pakistani Sunnis, Indian intelligence, the CIA, or any combination that one desires to create. I note that Shamzai's students and the usual rent-a-mob have already rioted in protest over the mufti's killing. Understand this, however: Shamzai was an integral part of the terror machine in South Asia and while his assassination doesn't mean the end of Binori Town by any means, it is every bit as significant within the framework of the war on terrorism as the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.