NYT : Scores Dead in Battle at Pakistani Mosque

Scores Dead in Battle at Pakistani Mosque

By SOMINI SENGUPTA and SALMAN MASOOD | Published: July 11, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 10 — The eight-day siege of the Red Mosque exploded into an all-day battle on Tuesday that left 8 members of the security forces and at least 50 militants dead, including the ringleader, and presented a test of Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s ability to root out religious radicals.

After storming a corner of the mosque compound before dawn, government security forces and militants armed with automatic weapons, rocket launchers and grenades battled building to building and then room to room into the evening.

Militants made firing nests atop minarets. They laid booby traps. The leader of the rebellion, Abdur Rashid Ghazi, held out in the basement of the women’s seminary with aides before being killed, said Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad, the military spokesman.

“There is intense engagement,” he said at a midday briefing. “There is a lot of resistance. They are well-armed, well-trained terrorists.”

Even after 17 hours, there was no end to the fighting, and the operation was likely to continue through the night, General Arshad said, as security forces fought an unknown number of hard-core militants and struggled to take control of the entire sprawling compound.

The assault on the Red Mosque, the epicenter of Pakistan’s religious right, held potentially grave repercussions for the credibility of General Musharraf, Pakistan’s president. Pro-democracy protests have dogged him before elections expected this year, and Islamic extremists, including members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, have widened their influence in the country.

Despite the clamor for democracy and General Musharraf’s mixed performance in fighting the extremists, the Bush administration has steadfastly backed the Pakistani leader. On Tuesday, the White House spokesman, Sean McCormack, gave credit to the Musharraf government for “exercising a great deal of patience.”

General Musharraf’s domestic supporters, too, described the operation as an example of restraint amid great provocation, with the minister of state for information, Tariq Azeem, calling it a demonstration of the government’s “resolve to root out terrorism and extremism.”

But already there were signs of fresh anger and discontent from Islamist elements over the assault, and the potential for a backlash. Liaqat Baloch, a legislator with the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami party, called it a case of “mishandling” by the government.

“This issue could have been handled by negotiations and dialogue,” he said in an interview. “It was an engineered plan to appease the Americans and Western countries.”

Abdul Malik, an influential cleric, told reporters on Tuesday afternoon that the assault was a ploy to cleanse the capital of “turbaned students.”

In the North-West Frontier Province, meanwhile, roadside explosions wounded 11 security personnel and 6 civilians, while rioters set ablaze the offices of two international relief organizations in the remote northern Battagram district, officials said.

The Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid, having enjoyed decades of government backing, has been a millstone around General Musharraf’s neck for the past several months. A network of buildings that took up two city blocks, it comprises the mosque, the seminary, a public library occupied by the seminary students and the homes of the two brothers who ran the organization.

Mr. Ghazi was the voice of bluster from inside for the past eight days. He told a private television station, Geo, that he was prepared to die. He lambasted the government and the military for betraying the cause of the “mujahedeen.”

His older brother and the chief cleric at the mosque, Mohammed Abdul Aziz, was arrested last week while trying to flee in a burqa. His wife and daughter, the military said, were among those seized Tuesday.

For months, the two men had used their followers to goad the authorities into imposing Islamic law, or Shariah, in the capital and throughout Pakistan. Trouble began to simmer in January when the female students occupied the library. Mr. Aziz threatened suicide attacks if the government tried to raid the mosque.

Having set up a Shariah court in the compound, the mosque issued an edict against a government minister, after she was shown in newspaper photographs receiving a congratulatory hug from a man after a parachute jump in France. Students roamed around the capital as vigilante vice squads, warning vendors against selling music and movies, in a crude impersonation of the Taliban. Then, in late June, in what apparently became an embarrassing diplomatic dispute, seminary students kidnapped six Chinese women and a Chinese man from an acupuncture clinic, which the students claimed was a brothel.

For more than a week, militants had been holed up inside the mosque compound, engaging security forces in gun battles. Last-minute efforts to negotiate a deal with Mr. Ghazi proved fruitless. Even early Tuesday, it seems, the delegation of clerics and government officials were themselves unable to agree on the terms of the deal.

Abdul Hameed Rabbani, a cleric who was part of the delegation, said the government had insisted that Mr. Ghazi face charges. Mr. Azeem, of the Information Ministry, said Mr. Ghazi insisted on clemency for everyone inside the mosque, including foreigners. How many foreigners may have been inside remains a mystery. The military said it had yet to identify the dead.

The big assault began a half-hour after the talks broke down, about 4:30 a.m. A series of deafening explosions were followed by a black plume of smoke rising to the sky. Throughout the day, more explosions were followed by the rattle of small-arms fire and, by early afternoon, heavy bursts of machine-gun fire.

Of those who had been captured or wounded, General Arshad said it was too early to tell how many were part of the armed rebellion and how many had been kept inside against their will. “It’s too early to say who is who, who is a militant,” he said.

Nor did the military say how many remained inside, dead or alive. According to an Associated Press report, Abdul Sattar Edhi, founder of the private relief agency Edhi Foundation, said the army had requested 400 funeral shrouds.

Critics describe the storming of the mosque as an inevitable consequence of allowing radical Islamist organizations to blossom, even after General Musharraf’s post-Sept. 11, 2001, pledge to curb extremism.

“He allowed the Red Mosque people to become so powerful that they are in a position to militarily contest Pakistani troops,” said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based political scientist teaching this year at Johns Hopkins University. “Second would be that some sympathy that he enjoyed among some Islamic groups has totally disappeared.”

Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director of the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that aims to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts, said of the rebellion inside the Lal Masjid, “The chickens have come home to roost.”

“There’s been no attempt to close down jihadi madrasas, no attempt to disband the network of banned jihadi organizations, no attempt made to adopt a comprehensive approach to eradicating militancy,” she said.

Relatives of those inside the mosque sat listlessly at a parking lot that had been dubbed the “surrender point” for those leaving the besieged mosque, waiting for information.

“We just want to find out if he has been martyred and where to collect his body,” said Jamila Bibi, whose son, Qazi Ajmal Mahmood, 18, had gone inside the mosque eight days ago for reasons she could not specify. He called her on someone else’s cellphone four days ago, she said, and told her he was not leaving.

“Who knows what happened inside,” the woman said, clutching prayer beads and a cellphone. “Maybe people inside didn’t let him out.”

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.