‘Pakistan madarsa reforms effort in shambles’

Pakistani religious schools are training militants and supporting violent Islamist groups while government efforts to reform the seminaries are in a shambles, a security think tank said on Thursday.

President Pervez Musharraf announced controls on the schools in 2002 but the seminaries, known as madarsas, had in fact thrived because of the government’s dependence on religious parties, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said.

The Brussels-based group said in a report focusing on Karachi that madarsas in Pakistan’s biggest city had trained and dispatched “jihadi”, or holy war, fighters to Afghanistan and Indian-administered Kashmir.