Armed supporters of mosque militants block old Silk Route
Posted : Tue, 10 Jul 2007 08:51:01 GMT
Author : DPA

Islamabad - Hundreds of armed supporters of the militants in the besieged Red Mosque blocked the Himalayan Karakorum Highway linking to China in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province Tuesday, officials said. "Dozens of armed men have taken positions on the mountains along the Silk Route near Batagram, while hundreds of students from Islamic seminary have blocked the highway," police assistant sub-inspector Attiq-ur-Rehman told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

He said the students were enraged over several deaths in the military attack on the mosque in Islamabad to end a week-long standoff, which began when student zealots attacked a police post last Tuesday.

Red Mosque militants have received some support from extremist groups in the country, although public sentiment in general remained against them.

Around 20,000 tribesmen, many armed with rocket launchers and automatic weapons in the tribal Bajaur region bordering Afghanistan, protested against the siege of the mosque on Monday, burning effigies of President Musharraf.

Several leaders of local Taliban militia also joined the rally, where speakers warned they would declare jihad on the government if it continued the siege on the mosque.

Suspected supporters of Red Mosque militants gunned down three Chinese nationals in Monday night in the provincial capital Peshawar.

More than 50 dead as troops storm Red Mosque

Audio: Declan Walsh in Islamabad

Tuesday July 10, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Fears of large-scale casualties at Islamabad's Red Mosque increased this morning as an all-out assault on the compound by Pakistani security forces moved into its ninth hour.

The official death toll stood at 50 militants and eight soldiers, but in a phone call to a local television station, the mosque's chief cleric, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, said there had been "massive bombing and indiscriminate fire" and that there were "dead bodies everywhere".

As frequent loud explosions and occasional bursts of gunfire continued to ring out over the compound - suggesting continued pockets of resistance inside - fleets of ambulances ferried the dead and wounded to local hospitals, where officials said they had treated dozens of injuries.

The Pakistani military has kept the media away from the mosque compound itself and local journalists expressed their frustration at being denied access to the hospitals treating casualties. A cameraman for an Arab TV station said a member of the security forces had threatened to shoot him if he didn't leave the hospital he was trying to enter immediately.

The operation to break the bloody week-long siege in central Islamabad began at 4am (0000 BST) when special forces breached the mosque walls amid gunfire and explosions. It was anticipated to last for four hours, but at a press conference about five hours after the assault began, the army spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad said 70% of the mosque compound was under the control of security forces, but militants were resisting "using rocket launchers and booby traps".

"Those who surrender will be arrested, but the others will be treated as combatants and killed," he said. "Until the whole area has been sanitised, the operation has not ended."

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Dead bodies everywhere inside raided Pakistani mosque: witness
By :
Date : 10 July 2007 1410 hrs (SST)
URL : http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/287285/1/.html

ISLAMABAD - Dead bodies are "everywhere" inside a radical Pakistani mosque raided by troops on Tuesday, a source inside the complex told AFP by telephone.

A man who picked up one of top mosque cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi's mobile phones said those inside were under "massive bombing and gunfire. This is indiscriminate killing."

"There is no contact with each other because no one can leave the rooms and basements. There are dead bodies everywhere," the witness added, declining to give his name as explosions and gunfire echoed in the background.

One of those killed was Ghazi's own elderly mother, who died of suffocation from smoke caused by blasts, while Ghazi was still alive, the source added.

"The students are in different blocks and are determined to fight till death," he said.

The army says around 40 militants and four soldiers have died so far in the raid.

Rebels are still holding out in part of the compound and are believed to have many women and children with them, officials said.

Earlier, 20 children escaped from the Red Mosque in Islamabad when the soldiers launched the operation against the militants at daybreak.

Around 50 suspected militants surrendered to government forces during a break in fighting at the mosque, a military official said.

"Fifty militants have surrendered to troops after they were given a last chance to give themselves up," the official said on condition of anonymity. - AFP/ir

Tough choices for Musharraf
By M Ilyas Khan
BBC News, Islamabad

snip snip

The conflict between the government and the Red Mosque clerics has been going on since February, and can be divided into two phases.

In the first phase, female students of a seminary in the mosque complex took over a public library by force and refused to vacate it until the government promised to rebuild some illegally constructed mosques that it had demolished.

Appeasement

From there, the female students and their male colleagues went on to impose their own version of Islamic justice in the city, raiding music stores and kidnapping women accused of prostitution, as well as a number of policemen.

The second phase began with the abduction of some Chinese nationals by the students last month.

Pakistani soldiers man barricades at mosque
Troops are blocking all entrances and roads to the mosque
Many analysts believe this was the tipping point when the government's earlier policy of appeasement towards them gave way to a siege of the mosque by troops.

This six-month long saga has been unfolding at a time when Gen Musharraf faces the most serious challenge to his eight-year rule.

He inadvertently sparked country-wide protests by lawyers when he suspended the country's chief justice for allegedly misusing his position on 9 March, weeks after the students captured the public library.

Since then, the Red Mosque conflict has been "waxing and waning with the lawyers' movement, and it is felt that every time the chief justice addressed a high-profile gathering, the Red Mosque students made a controversial move as if to grab rival space in the media", says Tanvir Ahmad Khan, a former diplomat and analyst.

Observers say these "coincidences" have tended to juxtapose an Islamist threat to Gen Musharraf, taken seriously in the West, with a gathering movement for democracy in the country.

The second phase began days after a cyclone hit Balochistan, a province which observers believe to be politically marginalised and where a low-intensity nationalist insurgency has been brewing since 2000.

Reluctant

Two weeks after the floods, people across large parts of the province still remain without any government relief in terms of water, food and shelter.

The provincial chief minister, Jam Yousuf, says the floods have caused damage costing people $1.35bn. He has asked the federal government to call for international aid, a request which the latter has turned down.

Floods in Balochistan
The government has rejected demands for foreign aid in Balochistan
Analysts believe the government is reluctant to allow international aid groups into the area because this will expose the political and economic condition of the people of the province.

"It will expose the actual extent of the military operation in Balochistan, and a non-responsive political set-up that is the product of rigged elections," says Afrasiab Khatak, an analyst and former head of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

The Red Mosque conflict has also eclipsed an important gathering of opposition leaders in London, which comes at a time when Gen Musharraf is just days away from making a decision about whether he should quit as army chief.

A decision to this effect may translate into much needed support from some powerful political groups but will strip him of most of his powers, a prospect he is reluctant to accept.

Western, notably American, support has traditionally strengthened his bargaining position at home, and the Red Mosque conflict has eased some of the negative press that he was lately getting in the West.

Difficult questions

But the Red Mosque conflict is expected to throw up some difficult questions which could haunt him on his campaign trail.

"After the conflict, the government has to explain why the intelligence apparatus failed to notice the presence of a large cache of arms and ammunition that enabled the militants to put up such a long fight in the heart of the country's capital," says Tanvir Ahmad Khan.

Students released from Lal Masjid
The siege of the mosque is a direct challenge to the president
He points out that the mosque is located in the oldest and most central sector of Islamabad, among government offices, including the country's premier intelligence establishment.

The mosque's leaders have a history of links to the intelligence establishment, he says, and have often been used to destabilise liberal and secular governments in the past.

"It will be difficult to convince a common citizen that the government did not know what was going on, or that it is wrong to suggest that the government plunged into action only when a structure that it had created for its own convenience got out of hand and resulted in the killing of so many people," he says.

The Supreme Court judgement in the chief justice's case is less than two weeks away, and whichever way it goes, Gen Musharraf will find treading the legal path from then on extremely narrow and tortuous.

Unless, say analysts, a string of militant attacks being seen as revenge for the mosque siege create a situation that prompts Gen Musharraf to impose an emergency.

That would enable him to suspend fundamental rights and put off elections by a year.

Jul 11, 2007

Pakistan's iron fist is to the US's liking
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - A last-minute intervention by Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf ended nine hours of negotiations seeking a peaceful end to the siege of the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad.

Apparently saying he was "heavily under duress from his allies", the president in the early hours of Tuesday instead ordered in the military to end the seven-day saga. Unconfirmed reports even say that Musharraf personally led the assault, along with Corps

Commander Rawalpindi Lieutenant-General Tariq Majid. The media were barred from the mosque's immediate vicinity.

Asia Times Online contacts believe that Musharraf was referring to Washington, which has in the past few months stepped up pressure on its partner in the "war on terror" to take action against al-Qaeda, the Taliban and foreign militants inside Pakistan.

When the siege of Lal Masjid began a week ago, the administration of US President George W Bush was fulsome in its praise that something was being done, as the mosque is a known supporter of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and even a safe haven for militants.

According to the contacts, Musharraf said, "They want targets in Operation Silence," referring to the code name for Tuesday's final assault on the mosque. That is, the militants should be arrested or killed.

On Monday, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, commenting on terror, said, "We believe Pakistan is a good ally, a good friend in fighting terror. They have an issue there with violent extremism. It's an issue that affects the Pakistani people as well as others in the region and the US."

By Tuesday afternoon, Pakistani forces were in the final stages of clearing the mosque. They encountered fierce resistance, but the mosque itself was said to be secure. There was still resistance from fighters holed up in a nearby women's seminary associated with the mosque. Pakistani media reported that at least 40 fighters and three soldiers had been killed.

The fate of Abdul Rasheed Ghazi is not known. He and his brother Abdul Aziz run the mosque. Ghazi was quoted on Geo TV as saying his mother had been wounded by gunfire. "The government is using full force. This is naked aggression. My martyrdom is certain now," the television station quoted him as saying. Aziz was captured on Wednesday while trying to leave the mosque disguised as a women in a full-length veil.

At 5am, Ghazi sent text messages to journalists, including this one, saying, "My death is certain." One of the ideologues of the mosque, Ume Hassan, Aziz' wife, was arrested with her daughter Asma and 30 hardcore members of the Women's Brigade of Lal Masjid.

The storming of the mosque is the first seizure of Taliban assets in Pakistan and is certain to have a strong ripple effect throughout the country as the mosque has strong links with jihadis and the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan.

Although the offensive in Pakistan's federal capital - which has captured international headlines - is finally playing out, one question remains. Who is the real director of the drama? Observers and analysts believe there might be several - one running the show separately in Lal Masjid, and others pulling strings from the outside. If so, there can be no clean, simple end to the saga.

The next episode has already begun in Batkhaila, North West Frontier Province, where the pro-Taliban Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Moham has clashed with the military and seized all highways in the area, including on the Silk Road leading to China.

It is only a matter of time before the US-led "war on terror" formally crosses the Pakistani border.

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Eight troopers, 50 militants killed in Lal Masjid assault

Islamabad, July 10 (IANS) Pakistani security forces finally stormed the besieged Lal Masjid here early Tuesday sparking fierce fighting that killed at least 50 militants and eight soldiers after last minute talks failed to end the week-long crisis.

snip

Television footage after the start of the operation showed smoke billowing from the mosque compound. Several dozen heavy blasts were heard at the scene, presumably carried out by security forces to demolish sections of the boundary wall of the heavily fortified compound.

Military officials admitted the mosque had been partially damaged due to the fighting.

Ghazi remained defiant during early hours of heavy fighting, keeping in touch with journalists on telephone.

"This is my last chance to say anything, and I would like to say that we fought with courage. We were asked to bow before power, but we refused to do so," Ghazi told Aaj news channel.

"We will fight till martyrdom, but the people will take revenge from the rulers.

I offered surrender in the presence of media so that the entire world could see what sort of weapons we had and that was my last words with them (negotiators)."

Ghazi telephoned a TV channel and said: "Commandos have reached my room." Telephone contact was lost immediately afterwards.

At least 50 of the militants were captured and 20 screaming children fled to safety as heavy fighting erupted early in the morning. Twenty-seven women were also rescued.

Media personnel were not allowed to go near the complex for "their own safety as the area is not safe, still heavy resistance is going on", Arshad said.

Pakistani troops have taken control of all hospitals in Islamabad and in the nearby garrison city of Rawalpindi.

"We have been asked to leave the hospitals with a warning that they will shoot anyone trying to enter the vicinity," a reporter said from the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences.

blogging the siege and aftermath

July 10, 2007
Analysis: Musharraf faced with stark choice after mosque siege
Michael Binyon

The storming of the Red Mosque in the centre of Islamabad may be the deciding factor in the survival in office of President Pervez Musharraf. Already dozens have been killed in the fighting between Islamist militants in the mosque and Pakistani security forces.

If the siege ends in a bloodbath, with many women and children among those killed, the resulting uproar could trigger a general uprising among the tribal and religious groups opposed to the Pakistani leader.

General Musharraf is clearly hoping that most Pakistanis will, however, blame the militants for the bloodshed. Indeed, one reason why he has waited so long before ordering in the soldiers is to show Pakistanis and the outside world that it is the extremists who are deliberately provoking the showdown and are actively seeking “martyrdom”, as their leader has insisted.

Most people in Islamabad have blamed the President for not taking tougher action earlier. They have been shocked and angered by the militants’ violent attempts over the past six months to impose sharia on the capital and the forays by armed students to attack music shops, kidnap women alleged to be prostitutes and target anything seen as “unIslamic”. The Government’s failure to act until now has been portrayed as weakness — despite Musharraf’s insistence that he was seeking to avoid bloodshed.

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How many of those "militants" were actually students?

Politics is the control of wealth and power. You are being conditioned to condemn politics as petty and boring, thus granting all the more control to the powers that be. You are either a part of the problem or a part of the solution. The choice is yours.

Chief cleric among scores killed in Red Mosque assault

Declan Walsh in Islamabad and agencies
Tuesday July 10, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The chief cleric of Islamabad's Red Mosque was among at least 59 people killed today during an all-out assault on the compound, Pakistani officials said today.

A military spokesman said Abdul Rashid Ghazi was killed by his own hardliners as he attempted to give himself up. Militants in the mosque had mounted a last stand in the basement of the madrasa.

"He was accompanied by four to five companions and he wanted to surrender when he was shot dead in a hail of bullets by other militants," Brigadier Javed Cheema told the AFP news agency.

Article continues
The official death toll stood at 50 militants and eight soldiers after 12 hours of the assault, but in an earlier phone call to a local television station Mr Ghazi said there were "dead bodies everywhere", raising fears that the final toll would be much higher.

Mr Ghazi vowed to die rather than surrender.

In a television interview moments after the assault started, he accused government troops of shooting his elderly mother. "The government is using full force. This is naked aggression," he said. "My martyrdom is certain now."

Special forces soldiers attacked from three directions just before dawn in a bid to end the seven-day siege of the radical mosque. But by afternoon they were still battling for control of the Jamia Hafsa madrasa, or religious school, which military officials described as a sprawling 75-room complex withing the Red Mosque compound.

"It will take some time to finish. The militants are fighting us room to room, in the stairs and on the verandas," said spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad.

As he spoke, thunderous gunfire and loud explosions rang out from the mosque compound about half a mile away. Fleets of ambulances ferried the dead and wounded to local hospitals, where officials said they had treated dozens of injuries.

The number of civilian casualties - hundreds of women and children are feared to be inside the mosque - remained unclear, with journalists pushed far back from the mosque compound and government security forces blocking media access to the city's main hospitals.

Gen Arshad said the militants were firing on security forces from the mosque's minarets, armed with machine guns, rocket launchers and petrol bombs, and had booby trapped several areas. By mid-afternoon 76 children and women had escaped the mosque, some fleeing under burkas, according to officials.

But fears lingered that a far greater number of people remained trapped inside. The army said many were being held as human shields inside a labyrinthine basement defended by a core faction of battle-hardened militants.

Abdul Sattar Edhi, head of a respected aid agency, told reporters that the army had asked him to prepare 400 white shrouds used for covering the dead.

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al-Qaida: Wage Holy War Against Pakistan

Wednesday July 11, 2007 8:46 PM

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Al-Qaida's deputy leader issued a video Wednesday calling for Pakistanis to wage a holy war against their government in retaliation for the attack by Pakistan's army on the Red Mosque in Islamabad.

Ayman al-Zawahri's 4-minute, 24-second address focused entirely on the clashes between Islamic students and Pakistan's army at the mosque.

The video was released by al-Qaida's multimedia branch, as-Sahab. Its authenticity could not immediately be confirmed, but two U.S.-based terrorism monitoring groups also reported it.

Bodies in mosque may be women, children

July 12 2007 at 02:45PM

Islamabad - Pakistan's army said on Thursday the charred remains of 19 people killed in the raid on the Red Mosque could include women or children, raising the death toll from the two-day operation to 86.

Guiding journalists through the battle-scared compound for the first time since the raid ended on Wednesday, the military revealed a massive arsenal of the militants' weapons including suicide vests, grenade launchers and mines.

"Seventy-five bodies have been recovered," chief military spokesperson Major General Waheed Arshad told reporters at the scene, giving a new death toll for the compound's occupants.

"Out of these 75 bodies, 19 are beyond recognition and they could be anybody, any gender, any age."

Islamic revolution will come in Pakistan, warns cleric, as militants bury their dead

Musharraf appeals for unity to beat extremists as many question official death toll

Declan Walsh in Islamabad
Friday July 13, 2007
The Guardian

President Pervez Musharraf vowed yesterday to step up the fight against gun-toting fundamentalists, as the first funerals were held for militants killed in the Red Mosque siege and a defiant captured cleric predicted an Islamic revolution in Pakistan.
"Extremism is not finished in this country. We have to fight it and we have to finish it," the general said, promising new weapons and training for security forces along the Afghan border.

Wearing a dark suit and a sombre expression, Gen Musharraf appealed to a sense of unity among a nation still reeling from an eight-day siege that left at least 108 people dead. "The goal was not to kill people, it was to rescue children," he said.

But questions lingered about whether the government was masking the true extent of civilian casualties.

Angry relatives of madrasa students congregated at a graveyard on the outskirts of Islamabad as sealed coffins were lowered into unmarked graves. Many claimed that the military had put more than one body in each coffin. At a press conference earlier in the day the MMA coalition of hardline religious parties claimed the real death toll was between 400 and 1,000 people.

The prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, said on Wednesday that not a single body of a woman or child had been found. But the army said it had found 19 charred corpses - apparently killed in suicide attacks or petrol bomb accidents - that were impossible to identify.

In a remote village in southern Punjab Maulana Abdul Aziz, the Red Mosque's chief cleric caught fleeing under a burka, gave an incendiary graveside oration for his brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who died in a hail of bullets on Tuesday. "We can let our necks be severed but we cannot bow down before oppressive rulers. Our struggle will continue. There are many Ghazis living to be martyred," he said. "God willing, Pakistan will have an Islamic revolution soon."

Twenty-four hours after military operations ended the army conducted the first tours of the compound. Reporters found evidence of a fierce battle.

The militants made their last stand in Jamia Hafsa, a multi-storey girls' school that dominates the mosque compound. Bullet holes and shrapnel marks peppered the walls of courtyards, classrooms and dormitories. The acrid whiff of teargas hung in the air. Blackened walls marked a room where a suicide bomber exploded in the face of advancing commandos. "We found his head in the courtyard," said one military official.

Chunks of concrete were missing from the minarets. A warped locker beside a blasted wall marked the spot where the rebels' leader, Ghazi, had died. A stash of rifles, gas masks and bullets offered a glimpse of the arsenal that the militants had amassed, while piles of jihadist CDs were all that remained of their efforts to turn Pakistan into a sharia-law state.

But equally remarkable was the absence of evidence that many people had died. Every trace of blood had been scrubbed from the mosque walls. Only a faint smell of teargas lingered as reporters picked their way through the rubble.

The scene contrasted with reports in national newspapers in which official sources described piles of "hundreds" of bodies and an overwhelming stench of rotting flesh. Army officials admitted they had "sanitised" the mosque before allowing media visits but denied that the death toll had been falsified.

"All these media reports about civilian casualties are wrong," said a spokesman, Major General Waheed Arshad, as he led reporters through a deserted courtyard.

Remarkably, only a handful of bullets had pierced the white dome of the Red Mosque itself. But as soldiers tramped across the main hall in army boots - something normally forbidden in Islam - the military said the mosque had lost its sanctity. "This is not a mosque," said Gen Arshad. "This was used as a firing place by the militants ... they were on the minarets, they were in these rooms."

Gen Musharraf vowed to root out extremism from madrasas. "We will not allow any other mosque or madrasa to be misused like Jamia Hafsa," he said.

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