Pakistan : More Than 70 Police, Soldiers Killed In Revenge Attacks For Red Mosque Massacre

Peace Deal Between Tribal Pro-Taliban Leaders And Musharraf Torn Up

New Holy War Looms

The revenge attacks from Islamists in remote tribal Pakistan against the Musharraf military dictatorship were expected to be fierce, and they were.

More than 70 people, mostly Musharraf soldiers and police, were blown to pieces over the weekend, in a string of attacks and suicide bombings.

Islamists have called for a holy war against the Musharraf regime, and few serious commentators doubt that it won't become a reality. The peace agreement reached between Musharraf and pro-Taliban tribal leaders in the north west of Pakistan's remote territories has been torn up. Local leaders have now vowed to go to war on the Pakistan military.

Perversely, having a holy war declared against himself, and having suicide attacks and Islamist terrorism explode across the country, will actually work in President Musharraf's favour, at least on one key issue : he will realistically be able to delay the coming elections, as he will be able to declare his country is in a state of national emergency.

From AFP :

At least 14 people were killed Sunday in a blast at a police recruitment centre in North West Frontier Province, hours after two explosives-packed cars plowed into an army convoy in the province's Swat Valley, claiming 17 lives.

The previous day, a suicide car bomber killed 24 people in a similar attack on a paramilitary convoy in North Waziristan tribal region, launching the string of attacks that has also left scores of troops and civilians wounded.

The bloodshed came amid outrage across the mainly Muslim nation over the army's raid last week on Islamabad's Red Mosque, which has saddled President Pervez Musharraf with the worst crisis since he took power in 1999.

The army attack that killed 86, mostly militants, led Al-Qaeda's number two to call for jihad against the Pakistan government, which has sent thousands of troops into remote tribal areas to try to keep a lid on bubbling popular anger.

Pro-Taliban militants in North Waziristan scrapped a controversial peace accord reached with the government last year, in which the tribal groups had promised to hunt down foreign fighters in return for security assurances.

The Taliban Shura (Taliban Council) said in pamphlets that it would refuse all dialogue and cooperation with authorities after the government had failed to meet a Sunday deadline to abandon 25 new military checkpoints.

"We had signed the agreement for the safety and protection of the lives and property of our people," the statement said. "But the government forces continued to launch attacks on the Taliban and have killed a number of people."

Militants last week had attacked police and security posts in the Swat Valley after local pro-Taliban cleric Maulvi Fazlullah in radio broadcasts urged followers to wage jihad over the mosque attack.

President Musharraf has vowed to crush all "extremists" and promised to "root them out from every corner of the country."

Exactly the kind of talk Bush Co. likes to hear, but an incredibly hard reality to bring to life. Musharraf has neither the military or police resources to "root them out" from every remote territory, mountain pass, isolated valley or city back alley in the country. Most Pakistanis support Musharraf in fighting Islamic extremists, but the pro-Taliban tribes hare believed to have deep and loyal ties to valuable and important members of the military infrastructure.

This report claims that Al Qaeda was behind the Red Mosque uprising, based on "secret Pakistani government documents" :

...leaked reports from the Government claiming that documents recovered from the mosque and the neighbouring madrassas prove conclusively that al-Qa'ida - and specifically Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri - directed the uprising, maintaining close contact with Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who died in the battle.

Intelligence officials also claimed al-Qa'ida had sent foreign fighters to assist in the rebellion, with Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Cheema saying yesterday the bodies of at least 10 such Chechens and Arabs had been recovered. But as the Government counted the cost of the suicide attacks and anti-government protests swept several cities over the storming of the mosque, it was the controversy over the real death toll that spelled trouble ahead for President Pervez Musharraf.

General Hamid Gul, a powerful former head of the ISI spying agency who is now one of the President's most trenchant critics, said yesterday the emerging accounts of women and children who were killed could lead to the military ruler's downfall. "The Government is trying to hide the number of young girls killed," he said. "As the truth comes out that young girls were gassed and burnt, riddled with bullets and killed, it'll be bad for Musharraf."

Speaking to reporters yesterday, Brigadier Cheema maintained that claims about the death toll and the killing of women and children were being "exaggerated". He said a total of 103 people had been killed.

He conceded, however, that after the operation ended, "22 charred bodies", including those of seven children, were found in the courtyard of the mosque, and that the bodies of nine females were recovered from a room of the Jamia Hafsa girls' madrassa.

Adding to General Musharraf's difficulties, tribal militants in the province linked to the Taliban and al-Qa'ida said they had given him a four-day deadline to remove Pakistani army checkpoints from the province or they would tear up the so-called "peace accord" they signed with him last year.

For all the horrors of Iraq, and the civil war and its associated terrorism and street fighting, the real 'War On Terror', as defined as being a war against Islamic extremism, is likely to consume Pakistan and Afghanistan, and all the tribal lands in between in the coming months.

US Special Forces will have to get involved, if they aren't already. Pakistan, of course, is a nation armed with nuclear weapons.

And the US government, the US military itself, along with the shared/combined intelligence resources of countries like the UK, Germany, France, Russia, China and Australia, would never let Islamic extremists get within a thousand metres of any known nuclear weapon in the world, if they can actually stop such activity, and you'd presume this would be the top priority for all the major players in the 'War on Terror'.

The risk for all nations, obviously, would simply be far too high to allow the risk to even come close to reality.

The United States is constructing a controversial new military base at the Ghakhi Pass, on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border :

Militants believe this is in preparation for an operation inside Pakistan to clamp down on them as well as to renew the hunt for bin Laden and his associates. As a result, the militants have attacked the new base in an attempt to delay its construction.

"This is a matter of life and death for the mujahideen. We will shed our blood, but we will never let this base be completed..."

A remarkable admission from a US official comes via The Times Of India. The US government is paying the Musharraf regime more than $100 million a month for 80,000 Pakistani soldiers and police to man the border with the Afghanistan, primarily to keep pro-Taliban tribal militias and fighters from entering the Afghanistan war :

The money is meant to be "reimbursements" to Pakistan "for stationing troops and moving them around, and gasoline, and bullets, and training and other costs that they incur as part of the war on terror," US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher, told a Congressional panel.

"That's a lot of money," Boucher admitted before the panel about what amounts to a $ 1.2 billion per year reimbursement. "I don't know if it comes to the whole amount of their expenses, but we support their expenses, yes."

The US government is estimated to have spent more than $10 billion is such funding to the Musharraf regime in the past five years of the 'War on Terror.'

The obvious question is how much corruption is involved with such huge amounts of money for equipment, gear, weapons and "expenses". The obvious answer is plenty. And no doubt there is a vast blackmarket trade in smuggling weaponry and ammunition into Afghanistan across remote and unsecured border regions.

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Pakistan In Shock As Red Mosque Siege Ends With 100 Dead, Cleric Leader Killed

President Musharraf's military forces stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad at 4am, clearing the ground floor rooms, and engaging students, clerics and supporters in raging gunfire.

Some 88 hardline students, clerics and supporters of radical cleric, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, are believed to have been killed, along with twelve commanders of Musharraf's military, according to news service PTI.

43 year old Ghazi was the younger brother of Maulana Abdul Aziz, the former head of the mosque, who was captured last week trying to escape the mosque dressed as a woman.

The standoff began last Tuesday, when more than 1800 refused to leave the mosque, after a number of students were arrested for attacking prostitutes and destroying music stories. The hardliners of the mosque were trying to establish a Taliban-like control over the local community, most of whom resisted.

Ghazi, who led the stand-off over the weekend and demanded he and his followers be allowed to walk out of the mosque and return their homes unmolested, was reportedly cornered in the basement of the complex. Surrounded by supporters, Ghazi refused to surrender, declared he wanted to die a martyr and Musharraf's military obliged.

While the radical clerics of the Red Mosque, and their followers, who wanted to live under Sharia law, did not have majority support amongst Pakistan's population, there was a popular view that the way President Musharraf would choose to end the stand off would act as a warning to all who decided to oppose, or defy, his military dictatorship.

Most Pakistanis, according to locally published polling late last week, wanted the siege to end with negotiations, or a voluntary surrender. Few wanted to have the news of a mass slaughter at a mosque, full of clerics, teachers and students, some as young as 14 years old, broadcast to the world.

From Forbes :

Pakistani troops were flushing out holdouts entrenched inside a women's religious school, taking control of the sprawling Red Mosque room by room in fighting that left about 50 militants and eight soldiers dead, the army said. State-run television said Pakistani troops had killed the head of the besieged mosque.

Commandos stormed the sprawling mosque compound before dawn. Twelve hours later, the army said the complex was 80 percent cleared of militants but it was still trying to root out well-armed defenders the government accuses of holding a number of hostages. A local relief agency said the army asked for 400 white funeral shrouds.

The extremists had been using the mosque as a base to send out radicalized students to enforce their version of Islamic morality, including abducting alleged prostitutes and trying to "re-educate" them at the mosque.

Khalid Pervez, the city's top administrator, said as many as 50 women were the first to be freed by the militants and had emerged from the complex following the escape of 26 children.

President Musharraf is unlikely to benefit from the bloodshed, and the death toll will cause him great political turmoil, and will incite unrest amongst Pakistan's millions of Islamists.

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20,000 Taliban Tribesmen Vow Revenge

Now into its seventh day, the siege of the Red Mosque in Islamabad, within walking distance of Pakistan President Musharraf's office and palace, has all the makings of an international incident, bound to inflame Islamist sentiment across the globe.

More than 1800 students and teachers are believed to be holed in the fortress-like mosque, in the heart of the nation's capital, surrounded by troops. But the lead cleric claims he has enough food, weapons and ammunition to stay inside, with his followers, and hostages, for at least one month.

Because President Musharraf held back from storming the mosque, he won international praise for showing restraint, until he issued a statement that said the Islamists must "surrender or die." But Musharraf knew that if he had allowed his troops to storm the mosque, it would have likely sparked an Islamic uprising against his military dictatorship.

Now some 20,000 Taliban aligned tribesmen how vowed revenge on Musharraf for laying siege to the mosque in the first place, as the stand-off looks set to spark wider conflict :

“We are ready for jihad!” cried the protesters - some of them armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers - who rallied near Khar, the main town in the troubled Bajaur tribal district bordering Afghanistan.

Local pro-Taliban commanders told the gathering that there should be a holy war in return for the standoff at the Red Mosque.

The confrontation has so far left at least 24 people dead, according to the government, but the mosque's leaders say more than 400 students have been killed.

“We beg Allah to destroy Musharraf and we will seek revenge for the atrocities committed at the Red Mosque,” militant commander Maulvi Faqir Mohammed told the gathering.

Mohammed had links to a hardline madrassa, or Islamic school, that was bombed by Pakistani forces in October 2006, killing around 80 people.

Another mujahedin commander, Inayat-ur Rehman, told the tribesmen: “You must all get training for jihad because it is binding on every Muslim, just like prayers and fasting.”

Militants blew up a security vehicle in Bajaur early yesterday, killing a policeman, and kidnapped four others in a separate attack.

Yesterday, Musharraf's troops blew a hole in the wall of the mosque, supposedly to allow women and children trapped inside to escape. But when troops entered the grounds, more than 100 armed students reportedly opened fire, killing a lieutenant-colonel.

From the UK Independent :

In a statement carried yesterday by newspapers in Pakistan, the radical cleric holed inside the building, Abdul Rashid Ghazi...said that he would prefer martyrdom to surrender. "We have firm belief in God that our blood will lead to a revolution," he said.

Mr Musharraf, facing considerable political pressures unrelated to the stand-off at the mosque, is desperate to avoid not only making martyrs of Mr Ghazi, but also upsetting religious fundamentalists in the country, whose support he courts. As a result, for all the government's rhetoric, its options are limited.

"So long as there are people inside who are holding innocent children and women hostages, we have to be very careful. If we wanted to barge in guns blazing, we could have done it on day one," said the government's information minister, Tariq Azim. Speaking to Dawn TV, he added: "We will have to play this wait game. It may take a while, but I think we will succeed in the end."

Some locals are talking to friends and relatives inside the mosque complex, and reports claim that up to 250 people are not being allowed to leave, in effect they're being held hostage. Students trying to flee have been reportedly shot dead by other students.

Students as young as 14 years old have received training in the use of heavy automatic
weapons and have vowed to stand and fight should the Pakistan special forces units try to storm the mosque.

The Associated Press carried a report claiming that "the resistance" is being led by wanted terrorists and raises claims that hundreds were killed in the mosque during a recent night-time assault.

The mosque's radical clerics want to impose Taliban-style rule in Islamabad, and last week supporters outside the mosque attacked CD and DVD stores, trashing and burning.

American media, like the New York Times, claim that the mosque's mullahs mission to impose Sharia law is deeply unpopular with Islamabad residents, and they've found little support across the country :

The arrest of the leader of the mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz, who tried to escape in a burqa while leaving behind hundreds of his students, many of them female, has brought ridicule in the news media, which have largely supported the government. Neither the public nor the religious parties have protested the actions of the government, which has won praise for its relative restraint.

But the standoff is far from over, and several bombings in the North-West Frontier Province this week, including a suicide bombing, and gunfire as the president’s plane took off Friday, are a reminder that the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, is only the most visible bulwark of Islamist militancy that is lodged in cities and districts across Pakistan and appears to be growing.

An investigation published Friday by The News, a national daily, found that 88 seminaries belonging to various sects were giving religious education to more than 16,000 students in the capital. Moreover, the number of students here attending religious schools belonging to the Deobandi sect, an anti-Western, pro-jihadi fundamentalist school of thought that inspired the Taliban, among other movements, has doubled in the last year alone.

The newspaper cited figures for students taking exams, using information collected from unidentified government agencies. In 2006, 5,039 students from Deobandi seminaries took exams conducted by the sect’s central examination board, with about 3,000 of them coming from the two seminaries attached to the Lal Masjid.

Today those two seminaries hold 10,700 students, the report said. “The reason for this big surge in the number of students is still not known to the government,” it said.

The number of students at the Lal Masjid’s two madrasas, or religious schools — 5,039 — is not far short of the total in the whole province of Baluchistan. It also is almost equal to the number of students in the 74 schools belonging to other sects in the capital, which together have 5,400 students.

There is widespread debate inside and outside Pakistan about whether the siege of the Red Mosque is a boon or a curse for Musharraf, who maintains a majority of support, but is being pressured by international democracy advocates to hold more free and open elections. But others claim that Musharraf will lose any such election, even if the Red Mosque siege ends without further bloodshed, and Islamists may make up the majority of Pakistan's next government.

Considering Pakistan has an arsenal of nuclear weapons, an Islamist government seizing control of the military seems an unlikely scenario, when the United States and the UK have fiercely opposed Islamist rule in countries like Somalia. Should Musharraf at any stage appear to be on the verge of being deposed, American special forces would enter Pakistan and lock down all known nuclear weapons. At least, they would surely attempt to.

As the siege continues, Musharraf knows he cannot allow the clerics of the Red Mosque, and their supporters, to become martyrs, even though they are committed to this fate, if Musharraf refuses to negotiate an outcome which means they can all return, unharmed, unmolested, to their homes.

In the provinces near the Afghanistan border, Musharraf's government forces regularly clash with tribesmen who support the Taliban. In the past two days, there were at least two suicide bombings against government forces convoys.

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