Sipah Sahaba Pakistan

Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP — Guardians of the Prophet's Companions), now renamed Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, is an extremist Deobandi Muslim organisation in Pakistan, which also functioned as a political party. It broke away from the main Deobandi Sunni organisation Jamiatul Ulema-e-Islam in 1985. Established in Jhang by Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, it aims to counter the Shiite Muslim influence in Pakistan, which is supposed to have increased in the wake of the Iranian Revolution.

The organisation was banned by President Pervez Musharraf in 2002 as a terrorist organisation under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997. In March 2012, the government of Pakistan banned Sipah-e-Sahaba again. The Supreme Court of Pakistan removed this ban in November 2014. The government of the United Kingdom banned the group earlier in 2001.

Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, Zia-ur-Rehman Farooqi, Eesar-ul-Haq Qasmi and Azam Tariq, formed the Sipah-e-Sahaba in 1985 originally under the name of Anjuman Sipah-e-Sahaba.

A leader of Sipah-e-Sahaba was a minister in the Coalition Government in Punjab in 1993 and the group has held seats in the Pakistan National Assembly.

When Jhangvi was assassinated in 1990 by presumed Shi'a militants, Zia-ur Rehman Farooqi assumed leadership of the group. Zia-ur-Rehman Farooqi died in a bomb explosion on January 19, 1997 at the Lahore Session Court. After his death, Azam Tariq led the group until October 2003, when he was also killed in an attack widely attributed to the militant Shi'a organization Sipah-e-Muhammad, along with four others.

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