The Taliban's brothers in alms
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Asia Times Online / March 14, 2007
ISLAMABAD - The initial shots in the Taliban's spring offensive have already been fired in southwestern Afghanistan, and the chances of the insurgents winning against some of the best-equipped soldiers in the world are being keenly assessed.
At the same time, across the border in the heart of Pakistan's capital Islamabad and beyond, the Taliban's seedlings are growing into trees.
The spread of Taliban-style radical Islam, which has already taken control of large areas of the tribal regions of North and South
Waziristan and North West Frontier Province, poses a renewed threat to the military-led government of President General Pervez Musharraf. And it is a battle that could also have far-reaching consequences for the Taliban in Afghanistan, who draw much of their support from within Pakistan.
Recent protests by female students from a seminary in Islamabad, which resulted in the government having to back down, illustrate the power and support of radical clerics in the country.
Not your ordinary mosque
Since last month, female students from the Jamia Hafsa madrassa (seminary) in Islamabad have occupied a nearby public children's library over the government's demolition of what it claimed were two illegally built mosques. (The government also says that Jamia Hafsa is illegally built on public land.)
Jamia Hafsa is adjacent to Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), which lies in the heart of the city, very close to the headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Whenever there is a major terror attack in the world, such as in Madrid or London, attention immediately turns to Lal Masjid as a possible breeding ground of the perpetrators.
The mosque and the women's seminary are run by two prominent religious personalities, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz, the sons of slain religious leader Maulana Abdullah. Abdullah was close to the late dictator General Zia ul-Haq. His Friday sermons were popular among the military and the civilian bureaucracy, and he often preached the cause of jihad.
Abdullah's sons have continued his legacy, both his calls for jihad and his mysticism, and they were the driving force behind a religious decree insisting that Pakistani army personnel killed while fighting against tribals in South Waziristan be denied a Muslim burial. The decree was signed by 500 clerics and scholars and led to open defiance within the Pakistani armed forces, which in turn contributed to their withdrawal.
Under Western pressure, Pakistan's Ministry of Interior has officially declared the brothers "wanted", but several efforts to have them arrested have petered out. Every bid to nab them only adds to their popularity, and they have emerged as the real leaders of the religious hard core of the country.
The girls' occupation - the support of the brothers - prompted the government to lay siege to Lal Masjid, but after several weeks the siege was lifted. The students (although much fewer than the original hundreds) still control the library, saying they will only leave once the two mosques are rebuilt, which the government has agreed to do.
Brothers in arms
Long-bearded youths watched suspiciously as I approached Lal Masjid. Two men with their faces covered with cloth stopped and searched me, demanding an identity document.
Once they were satisfied, another young man escorted me to the residence of the brothers. A black-hooded figure watching me from a small window in an outside gate let me into a courtyard, even though Rasheed was in the middle of a television interview.
Rasheed is far more accessible to the media than his elder brother Aziz. Both are portrayed as ideologues of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, charges they never deny, along with their open support of all of the struggles in which mujahideen are engaged, from Afghanistan to Iraq.
It was the media-shy Aziz, however, who had agreed to meet with me. Photographs were out of the question - he will not have his taken. Aziz's fiery speeches at the mosque routinely electrify the youth, and compact discs and cassettes of his sermons are widely distributed across the country.
"The situation of the country is really one of a quagmire," Aziz said. "Baloch separatists, Sindhi and Urdu-speaking sub-nationalists and tribal [people] in North West Frontier Province are seriously disgruntled over the federalization of Pakistan. Our enemies, like India and the West, are exploiting the situation, and it seems that both forces will prey on us like hungry wolves as our disintegration does not allow us any effective defense.
"The question then is, what cohesive force will gather all the disgruntled elements together and make them an effective defense against our enemies? There is only one answer: the Islamization of Pakistan," Aziz said with conviction.
Our conversation was interrupted by Aziz arranging to give sermons over the telephone to madrassas in Punjab and Sindh provinces.
"Maulana, is this not a Taliban movement you are preparing in Pakistan?" I asked Aziz.
"Indeed, somebody needs to give a wake-up call and prepare the people for the Islamization of society," Aziz responded with a smile.
In the meantime, Rasheed had finished his interview and I spoke with him.
"Did you see how our determination and the help of God defeated the government's commitment to arrest us?" Rasheed asked me, referring to the siege of the mosque over the girls' occupation of the library. "Actually, it was the collective determination of all of us [circle of admirers] which terrified the government, and it just had to keep its hands off us," Rasheed said.
Security sources have confirmed to Asia Times Online that when the trouble at the library began, Musharraf ordered that the brothers be arrested. But his security forces refused, saying such a move would create havoc in Islamabad and beyond.
Musharraf apparently even floated the idea of having the Lal Masjid bombed, but his air force would have none of it. As a result, the government had little alternative but to back off, lift the siege and agree to dialogue.
"I want to make it clear that protest on any issue is the right of any citizen, whether he or she is religious or not," said Rasheed. "The students of the universities and the colleges carry out processions and rampage on the streets. They set public and private vehicles on fire, but are they ever called terrorists?
"The girls of my seminary did protest and they occupied a children's library, but peacefully. They did not break anything, not even television sets or CD players, which they believe are evil, yet they were declared terrorists, and stern action was promised against us two brothers and against the girls," Rasheed said.
Rasheed took his mobile phone from his pocket and showed me messages sent by a former ISI official who was once a close friend of Osama bin Laden - retired squadron leader Khalid Khawaja. The messages warned the brothers that the government was plotting to kill them.
"Our friend Khalid Khawaja kept informing us of threats around us, and as a result of such messages he was picked up by the ISI and booked on a fictitious charge," Rasheed said.
"The government does indeed have bad designs against us. Commandos were posted all around for target killings. An environment of terror was created, so much so that the Board of Religious Schools pulled its support of us. They were terrified that if we fell, they would be next in line. The federal minister for religious affairs, Ejaz ul-Haq [former president Zia's son], came to see us," Rasheed said.
"It was a strange environment. Ejaz was aware of the whole situation and he candidly held the feet of Maulana Abdul Aziz and said, 'I beg you, for God's sake, please retreat from this issue, otherwise there are strict instructions from Musharraf against you people.'
"Maulana Abdul Aziz then held the feet of Ejazul Haq and said, 'I beg you, too, for God's sake, enforce Islam in this country. Until then we will not retreat,'" Rasheed recalled.
"Most of our girls [more than 6,000] come from North and South Waziristan. When their relations learned about the situation [protest] they came all the way from the two Waziristans and gathered in the mosque. That was a real litmus test against the government. In a way, Waziristan, which the government has failed to pacify with military operations, entered the federal capital. The establishment had the shivers and it could see [what], if any operations were taken [against us], would happen to Islamabad," Rasheed said.
"The government had every intention to crush us, but then it had to request us to remove Waziristan's militants from the mosque. We responded that first the government had to lift the siege on the mosque. Only then would we ask them to leave. Musharraf took a strict stand, but all the agencies, including the Pakistan Rangers, were not ready to clash with Waziristani militants.
"Then Haji Omar [commander of the Taliban in Waziristan] said in an interview that if the government tried to attack Lal Masjid, they would take revenge. That was the last thing the government wanted and it lifted the siege and we asked the militants to leave. But the Waziris are still in Islamabad with their relatives, so if the government makes any advances again, they will immediately come to the rescue," Rasheed said.
During the siege, Islamabad witnessed an unusually high number of suicide attacks, which obviously spooked the government. Indeed, the government reaffirmed its deals with the Pakistani Taliban in the Waziristans whereby they have de facto rule in the tribal belt along the border with Afghanistan.
The brothers at Lal Masjid remain as defiant as ever after their brush with the government so close to the ISI's headquarters. There is no doubt that their influence is spreading across the country and that their hardline teachings are filling a void left by the absence of any real political opposition in the country to Musharraf's rule.
This plays into the Taliban's hands too, for when the going starts to get tough in Afghanistan, they will know where to look among their swelling ranks of supporters in Pakistan.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.
Edited by Afghanan - 14-Mar-2007 at 13:12