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2 The Taliban's brothers in
alms By Syed Saleem Shahzad
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
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