Amir Mir
Sufi Mohammad first rose to prominence in 1994 when he had staged a sit-in in Malakand by blocking the Mingora-Peshawar road for seven days, cutting off the Swat valley from the rest of Pakistan, demanding the enforcement of the Islamic laws. Subsequently, armed clashes between the law enforcing agencies and the TNSM activists took place at different places. A sitting member of the NWFP Assembly, Badiuzaman Khan, was taken hostage by the TNSM supporters and eventually killed. The law enforcement agencies thus moved in to crush the insurgents who clashed with the administration and effectively brought the whole administrative structure of Swat to a standstill by seizing control of the government buildings and the Saidu Sharif airport.
The uprising followed the February 12, 1994, Supreme Court verdict declaring the PATA Regulation that governed the Provincially-Administered Tribal Areas of Malakand as unconstitutional. The void created by the SC judgment led to the demand for the Shariah enforcement. Over three dozen people, including 12 security force personnel, were killed in a week of fighting before the government was able to re-establish its writ, but only after signing a peace agreement with Sufi to enforce the Shariah in Malakand. However, the deal could not be implemented, thus prompting fresh violence. Peace was only restored after another deal that served as a clear victory for the TNSM as Sufi Mohammad handed himself over to the military and the federal government agreed to enforce the Shariah in Malakand. Sufi remained in the government custody for a short period of time.
By November 1994, senior government functionaries reportedly sent Sufi official letters addressed to “Honorable Maulana Sufi Mohammad bin Hasan Mahmud” updating him about the government directives to enforce the Shariah law and requesting his cooperation. Immediate official instructions were then issued to establish religious courts. Sufi’s followers meanwhile started driving on the wrong side of the road claiming to defy the traffic rules introduced by Britain a century ago. Men were also told to grow beards. In short, Talibanisation began to take place while the political leadership failed to contain it and to put an end to the problem at its outset. Already a conservative area, Malakand suffered in the process with the TNSM extremists openly pursuing their agenda.
By that time, the Taliban movement led by Mullah Omar had already surfaced in Afghanistan after capturing Kandahar. As the Taliban and the TNSM had the same religious vision and ideals, Sufi Mohammad used to enjoy cordial relations with the Taliban rulers who funded him in a big way to make him extend the TNSM organisational set-up in other parts of the NWFP and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. On September 6, 1998, the TNSM threatened to attack American property and to abduct American citizens in Pakistan unless Washington apologised for the August 1998 missile strikes in Afghanistan, targeting Osama’s training camps. The TNSM organised a protest procession in Mingora on September 20, 2001 where the speakers called for raising a voluntary army in order to extend support to the Taliban militia against the impending US strikes.
The Taliban rule in Afghanistan at that time actually provided the TNSM with an instant reference to argue and justify their rigid social policies. When the US-led Allied forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, Sufi exhorted his followers to join the Taliban in Afghanistan in their armed struggle against the US-led allied forces. He had self-admittedly led over 10,000 Pakistani youngsters to fight the US-led Allied forces in Afghanistan in November 2001. Reportedly armed with Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers, missiles, anti-aircraft guns, hand grenades and swords, thousands of the TNSM cadres led by Sufi crossed the Pak-Afghan border. Thousands of the youngsters he had taken to Afghanistan in the aftermath of the US invasion were killed by the Northern Alliance troops and hundreds others were trapped by various Afghan warlords, who literally sold them back to their relatives in Pakistan for huge sums of money.
When a majority of his soldiers had been either killed or captured, he returned home only to be arrested by government forces. He was ultimately convicted on April 24, 2002, along with his 30 companions, to ten years of imprisonment for inciting people to go to Afghanistan and for violating state restrictions. He was then sent to a Dera Ismail Khan jail. Interestingly, he had refused to contest his case in the court of law, saying he does not believe in the existing courts and laws which were un-Islamic to him. In the aftermath of his Jihadi misadventure and the subsequent loss of lives, Sufi Mohammad lost much of his support in the Malakand division. A majority of his supporters went underground after the TNSM was banned on January 12, 2002 by the Musharraf regime along with four other Jihadi and sectarian organisations.
The TNSM had become almost dormant till the October 8, 2005 devastating earthquake struck the region, thus making the followers of Sufi capitalise on the great human tragedy and use it to revive their organisation.
Since the TNSM volunteers were in the forefront of the humanitarian relief work, especially in the devastated areas of the NWFP, the popularity of the Jihadi group once again shot up. In 2006, in the process of helping out the quake affected people, the TNSM, now led by Maulana Fazalullah, re-established its stronghold in the Malakand and Swat areas of the NWFP and in the Bajaur area of Fata like other banned Jihadi groups and started mobilising its activists.
