Pak madrassas churning out terrorists: US lawmaker

Influential US lawmaker Congressman Ed Royce, the ranking Republican on the house foreign affairs committee and seniormost minority member on the subcommittee on terrorism, has called for the shutting down of the Deobandi schools (madrassas) in Pakistan, which he alleged "continue to churn out terrorists that attack" democratic nations, including India and the United States.

Royce, who is serving his second stint as the GOP co-chair of the Congressional caucus on India and Indian Americans, speaking at the Congressional Reception on Capitol Hill hosted by the National Federation of Indian American Associations on Tuesday recalled that "just as the bomb was fizzling up in New York outside the Marriott in Times Square, we were on our way to Islamabad to talk to the government about the problems with the Deobandi schools that continue to churn out terrorists that attack democracies around the world".

"There are 800 specifically of those Deobandi schools that are focused on Jihad in Pakistan," he noted. "And (at) every graduating class, these young men are then approached and recruited as a result of that education that they've received in that type of radicalism and recruited in order to carry out terrorism."

"Whether that terrorism is in Mumbai or whether these attacks occur -- attempted attacks -- in New York or in London or whether those young men are leading troops in terms of the Afghan Taliban or the Pakistani Taliban, the results are the same  -- it's the loss of lives around the world," he added.

Most of the Taliban leadership attended Deobandi-influenced madrassas in Pakistan. The Delobandi Islamic movement had its roots in India, at the DArul Uloom Deoband Madrassah in Deoband, about 100 miles north of Delhi, which was founded in May 1866, initially as an opposition movement to the British colonialists.

Royce said the message he and his Congressional colleagues carried to the government of Pakistan was that "these schools have to be shut down, the Lashkar-e-Tayiba campus has to be closed, and those individuals have to be brought to the bar of justice who've had a hand in training these young people in terror".

He exhorted the international community to unanimously call on Pakistan to close down the schools and LeT camps that are the breeding grounds of terror that in turn are exported to Mumbai, New York and other democratic nations.

He said he had met two Sufi leaders in Pakistan and had asked about their experience.

"Both said they were the victims of attacks by graduates of Deobandi schools who had tried to kill these Sufi leaders -- one walking with braces, the other with crutches."

"This is what is happening around the world today, as the education in terror spreads," he said, and warned that "if we do not cooperate to shut this down, and if we don't bring significant pressure on the government of Pakistan to close this down, we are going to find ourselves subject again to the types of attacks that have become routine."