Telegraph : Pakistan clears bodies from the Red Mosque

Pakistan clears bodies from the Red Mosque

By Isambard Wilkinson | Islamabad | July 13, 2007

Inside the Red Mosque, the bodies have been dragged away, the blood cleaned up and used ammunition cartridges swept into a large mound.

The orderly calm of Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, has once again been enforced on the mosque after an eight-day siege.

It took 36 hours for Pakistani special forces to dislodge about 100 militants from the building and the army yesterday declared that the site had been "sanitised".

A six-month stand-off that pitted two previously obscure clerics and their students against the government had transformed the mosque into both a symbol of Islamic martyrdom and of President Pervez Musharraf's will to impose his authority.

The facts surrounding the storming of the mosque have also been polished into an official version.

Who was inside the building and how many people were still there when the assault took place remains unclear.

More than 1,200 students, women and children had fled the mosque before and during the fighting.

The government claimed that 75 militants were killed during the final attack.

Their bodies were buried on Wednesday night in temporary graves. No relatives were present.

But the mosque's bullet-scarred concrete tells a story in itself.

Its burnt-out arches, battered minarets, sections of blown-up perimeter walls and swirling clouds of flies in dark passages are evidence of intense combat.

Maj-Gen Waheed Arshad, the chief spokesman for Pakistan's army, nonchalantly guided reporters around the mosque, past coils of barbed wire and soldiers nursing assault-rifles in the drowsy afternoon humidity.

The front of the Jamia Hafsa girls' madrassa was ravaged by bullets and shells; its metal gates buckled and bundles of bedding and clothes, textbooks and shoes lay swept up in corners in the 70-room complex.

Inside its courtyards, used for ablutions and prayer, the concrete and white plaster walls were riddled with bullet holes.

Commandos had breached the southern walls of the four-storey building and traded fire with its defenders.

Inside a room near the main entrance, the army had stashed the arsenal amassed by the students and militants.

Heavy machine guns, Kalashnikov assault rifles, mines and rocket-propelled grenade rounds were laid on the floor next to an array of less orthodox armaments, including a spear, a trident and a box of explosives wrapped in sticky tape.

A belt of live explosives, intended to be worn by a suicide bomber, was on display next to some grenades which, with unusual regard for health and safety, had been dunked in buckets of water.

"Here is where parents could speak to their children," said Maj-Gen Arshad, pointing to a row of gloomy cubicles with barred hatches resembling confessional boxes.

"They were not allowed any physical contact with their children," he explained.

In one corner of the courtyard, the militants had created a makeshift bunker under a staircase.

"It was from here that they fired on commandos coming over the roof," said the military spokesman.

It was reduced to a fly-infested pit of incinerated human remains, a few bricks and crushed ammunition cartridges.

Thousands of rounds had pitted the surrounding masonry.

Next to the staircase was a burnt-out room. A suicide bomber had blown himself - or herself - up inside this space.

Soldiers found the bomber's head along with the remains of five or six other people.

Of the 85 people who were killed in the mosque, the government claims that 39 were under 18.

"We can only speculate but perhaps these are the women and children, the hostages," said Maj-Gen Arshad. "We will not know until we have the results of [forensic] tests."

The only sign of the hostages that the government claimed militants had held as "human shields" was these charred remains and the bodies of 19 so-far unidentified people.

The Red Mosque has been a centre of radical Islamic learning since it was founded by Maulana Abdullah during the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

His sons, Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi, took over the running of the mosque after he was assassinated by rivals in its courtyard in the late nineties.

Aziz fled the mosque before the final assault, dressed in a burqa.

Ghazi was killed in a hail of fire in the basement - now a dim bunker scarred by gunfire and strewn with empty stun grenade canisters.

Every window of the office where The Daily Telegraph last interviewed Ghazi, two months ago, had been blown out.

On that occasion, Ghazi had sounded a note of defiance, saying that he was ready if the mosque was stormed.

His eyes darted about under a heavily embroidered cap as he held forth on matters ranging from a problematic sewage system to international jihad.

"We are educationalists," he said. He thanked the media for its portrayal of madrassas as terrorist factories.

"Students have flocked to us since then," Ghazi explained.

His legacy is as yet unfathomable. Pakistan's information minister, Mohammed Ali Durrani, surveyed yesterday's scene with inscrutable detachment.

"They had this place and all this weaponry at the heart of the capital and now they do not," he said. "They will be demoralised."

He was less clear about how the mosque's occupants had managed to stockpile weaponry and set up a jihadi hub in the first place.