NYT : Musharraf Defends Raid that Ended Red Mosque Siege

Musharraf Defends Raid that Ended Red Mosque Siege

By SALMAN MASOOD | Published: July 13, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 12 — President Pervez Musharraf on Thursday defended the raid on the Red Mosque here, which ended Wednesday, as necessary, prompted by intransigent militants who had “challenged the writ of the government.” As relatives buried the dead from the siege, three suicide bombers struck in the country’s north.

“We vow that we won’t let any mosque or madrasa be misused like the Red Mosque,” General Musharraf said in a television address Thursday evening, his first since the raid. “Wherever there is fundamentalism and extremism we have to finish that, destroy that.”

He said he ordered the military strike after negotiations failed and the ringleader of the rebellion, a militant 43-year-old cleric named Abdur Rashid Ghazi, demanded amnesty for those inside, including foreign fighters. The Red Mosque and Mr. Ghazi had long enjoyed state backing, but had lately become a festering sore in the heart of the capital.

All told, the eight-day siege at the Red Mosque, known here as the Lal Masjid, left at least 87 people dead, including Mr. Ghazi and 11 members of the Pakistani special forces who penetrated the sprawling mosque compound early Tuesday, military officials said. The military said its forces went from building to building, and then room to room, battling a small army of Islamic militants who had turned the complex into a well-armed garrison.

The siege was a watershed confrontation between General Musharraf and the religious radicals who have blossomed in his country. Their influence has steadily spread to cities from the remote tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda are believed to have made a home.

Not surprisingly, the most bristling reaction has come from there. A suicide bomber blew himself up on Thursday in front of the offices of the administrator of Miramshah, the regional headquarters of the restive North Waziristan tribal region, killing three other people and wounding two, officials said. The bomber first scuffled with a gatekeeper, then pulled out a pistol and fired shots at him, an official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the attack. The guard and two other employees died on the spot, and two others were wounded.

Three police officials were killed when two men rammed an explosives-laden car into a police patrol vehicle in a town called Swat. The attackers died in the explosion.

On Tuesday, protesters attacked two Western aid agencies in the North-West Frontier Province. Two days before that, three Chinese residents were shot to death.

One important question remained unanswered Thursday: How many of those killed in the mosque siege were fighters and how many civilians held against their will? The government had said up to 60 fighters had holed up inside with an untold number of hostages, many of them women and children who had been students at the schools run by the mosque leaders.

The military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad, said six bodies of women had been found in the ruins. “We suspect the women were held there against their will and their bodies were burned,” he said.

It is not yet clear whether women may have been among the fighters as well. The Red Mosque contained a seminary for women and girls, whose students made up a Taliban-style moral police brigade that had spent the last several months harassing video shop owners and carrying out abductions. In late June, they kidnapped six Chinese women and a Chinese man from an acupuncture clinic that also provided massages that they claimed was a brothel.

General Arshad said that 76 bodies had been pulled out after two days of fighting, including the corpse of a man in the women’s seminary who the general said appeared to have blown himself up.

Hundreds of students came out of the mosque as the siege began, some of whom were initially detained and then released. Earlier in the week, a spokesman told reporters that 86 men and women, and 30 children “came out” of the compound during the two days of fighting, but gave no further information about the nature of their involvement, except to say that they were being “screened.” Several female students were released to their families Wednesday and Thursday.

The ringleader of the rebellion, Mr. Ghazi, was buried in the family’s ancestral village in eastern Punjab Province on Thursday. Reuters reported that angry mourners tore open the funeral shroud to confirm that the corpse was his.

On Thursday evening, with sandalwood burning to hide the stench of bodies, about 200 men and women gathered here around freshly dug graves in Islamabad. “If a religious scholar is present, please step forward,” one man said, asking for someone to lead a funeral prayer for an unidentified man. A cleric in the crowd complied.

Grief quickly turned to anger at the government. People accused the military of playing down the death toll. “Having a beard is now a crime under Musharraf,” said Arshad Ali Sheikh, 38, a businessman from Islamabad. “Musharraf has done this to please America.” Those gathered around him nodded.

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.