March 29, 2006 ☼ Foreign Affairs ☼ Security
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, leader of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and a Taliban mentor, had a bad day. According to the Daily Times he was picked up by six unidentified men, beaten into unconsciousness and then dumped by the roadside in Islamabad. The reporter filing the story may not have realised the many meanings of his words when he wrote that it was only “when Khalil returned to his senses he made a phone call to his home”.
It is not hard to guess at who those attackers were. Debt collecters they certainly were not. Rival jihadis would not stop at simply knocking him out. That leaves the ISI — who may just have wanted to teach an uppity jihadi leader a lesson on who is boss.
Following his ‘arrest’ in the wake of Musharraf’s crackdown after becoming a FATWAT, Khalil was released on the sly in December 2004, after which he promptly ‘resigned’ from the leadership of the jihadi movement. The perils of post-retirement work are not insignificant.
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