The government of Pakistan released the father-in-law of the head of the Pakistani Taliban, himself a prominent jihadist voice, on bail shortly after losing billions in U.S. aid for not doing enough to combat terrorism.
Sufi Muhammad, the head of the radical Islamist Tehreek Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi (“Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws”) (TNSM) group, was released on bail after his attorneys pled with a court in Peshawar to release him for health reasons. Muhammad is “believed to be in his 90s.” Muhammad founded TNSM in 1994 to enforce Sharia law in the Swat valley region of the country, where the group established a makeshift bureaucracy to replace the government of Pakistan.
Muhammad was charged with sedition—and, reportedly, prior to that “murder, treason, terrorism and rebellion”—in 2009 for accusing then head of government Pervez Musharraf of being an agent of the United States and for encouraging followers to attack Pakistani soldiers sent into the area to take back administrative power. He has yet to be found guilty of a crime, according to Pakistan’s Express Tribune. Before his arrest, Muhammad had traveled into Afghanistan with “thousands” of jihadists to join the Taliban against American soldiers that arrived in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
He was arrested shortly after this, but released in 2008. The government then “saw him as a savior who could restore peace to the region” of Swat, according to Pakistani newspaper Dawn. Before his arrest, the newspaper notes, “in 2009, the year a peace deal was signed with his proscribed organization, he was exercising much influence and had even stopped regular courts from functioning there.”
In addition to his own activities promoting the violent implementation of Sharia law and supporting the Taliban, Muhammad is the father-in-law of Mullah Fazlullah, the head of the Pakistani Taliban. The Pakistani and Afghan Taliban consider themselves separate entities. Muhammad had reportedly renounced Fazlullah in 2015, however.
Attorney Fida Gul said taking Muhammad out of prison was necessary due to his ill health. “The Maulana is so old. He is almost paralysed now. His health is unstable,” he told reporters.
The release comes at a time of heightened tension between Pakistan and the United States, whose influence Muhammad had fought against for years. On the first day of the year, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he would end the policy of providing aid to the Pakistani government in exchange for help fighting terrorism because the country had not fulfilled its promises to use the funds to eradicate terrorism.
“The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools,” Trump wrote. “They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”
The Pakistani government responded by accusing the United States of having “given us nothing but invective & mistrust” and declaring an end to diplomatic ties. The State Department subsequently announced a reduction in military aid of over one billion dollars.
Pakistan has since also rekindled diplomatic ties to China, which had thawed in the last month of 2017 over tensions regarding China’s expansive One Belt One Road (OBOR) project, which cuts through Pakistan. In response to Trump’s statement, the Chinese government immediately came to Islamabad’s defense.
“Pakistan has made great efforts and sacrifices for combating terrorism and made prominent contributions to the cause of international counterterrorism, and the international community should fully recognize this,” Geng Shuang, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters. Pakistan has since announced that it would continue to approve projects tied to OBOR and accept doing business with China in yuan, not U.S. dollars.
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