More troubling, Pakistani authorities say, the gunmen are holding several hundred women and children as human shields inside. As a result, “Operation Silence,” the army’s code name for the assault, would be a deliberately “slow, step by step process” in order to minimize the loss of innocent lives, says Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad, the military’s top spokesman. As the operation began at about 4:30 a.m., he predicted it would be over in four hours or so.
He was too optimistic. Twelve hours later journalists, who could only approach within several hundred yards of the mosque, could still hear loud explosions and the staccato sounds of small arms and machine gun fire. The militants were putting up “a lot of resistance,” and had turned the mosque into a “fighting trench,” Arshad said. They were resisting with machine guns, automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades and were believed to have laid booby traps around the mosque’s approximately three acres of grounds—located just a five-minute drive from Musharraf’s presidential palace. By the end of the day, gunmen manning the mosque’s two minarets were still taking potshots at Pakistani troops and the military operation was expected to continue through the night.
The commandos faced tough going inside the 75-room mosque complex, where the militants had plenty of places to hide and mount ambushes. Arshad said Pakistani forces were fighting against the well-armed, supplied and trained gunmen in “room to room” combat and even in the stairwells. Arshad said he believed the militants had herded most of the women and children into the mosque’s basement, where Ghazi eventually was killed late this afternoon.
Not surprisingly, overall casualties are heavy. In his Tuesday afternoon briefing, Gen. Arshad announced that 50 militant gunmen had been killed and that 50 had been arrested. Eight Pakistani soldiers had died and 29 had been wounded. Nearly 40 women and children had managed to escape. It was this large presence of non-combatants, including some female students and women including Ghazi’s wife and mother, that had made Musharraf and his commanders hesitate before attacking.
The Red Mosque had been a destabilizing force in Islamabad for months. Its radical male and female students had formed anti-vice brigades. Carrying bamboo sticks, they raided music and video shops and kidnapped and later released nearly a dozen Pakistani and Chinese women they accused of prostitution. Islamabad residents feared that the Talibanization movement that was occurring in the lawless and conservative tribal areas along the Afghan border, and that was creeping into neighboring towns and cities, was now being exported to the nation’s capital.
Ghazi and his elder brother, Maulana Abdul Aziz, precipitated a fresh crisis early last week when militants and Islamic students affiliated with the mosque attacked and stole weapons from a police post set up across the street. In the ensuing shootout between the paramilitary police and the mosque’s AK-47-armed gunmen, one government trooper was killed. That was the last straw for Musharraf, who ordered his troops and armored personnel carriers to surround the mosque and to prepare to take it by force if the two religious leaders and their militiamen refused to surrender. (Aziz was arrested early on in the siege trying to escape by disguising himself in a burqa.) For eight days, Pakistani troops slowly prepared for the assault, shooting at snipers in the mosque, peppering its façade with bullets and blasting holes in the mosque’s surrounding wall and façade. During one such operation over the weekend a senior command commander officer was killed, setting the stage for the operation. Musharraf suddenly gave an ultimatum to Ghazi and the gunmen: surrender or die.
Even so, Musharraf seemed determined to hold off on using force as long as possible. On Monday, he made a last-ditch negotiating effort by allowing a 13-member delegation of clerics, led by one militant mullah who had founded a now-banned jihadi organization, to try to persuade Ghazi and his gunmen to surrender. The delegation was not allowed into the mosque but talked to Ghazi over loudspeakers and cellular telephones. The talks lasted all Monday night and into the early hours of Tuesday morning. “There were some hopeful and positive signs,” says Arshad. But around 3 a.m. the talks suddenly broke down. And Musharraf gave the order for his troops to attack.
Provided the storming of the mosque doesn’t end with mass casualties among the hostages, Musharraf is likely to emerge from this crisis with enhanced approval ratings. He certainly needs the boost. Many Pakistanis have been outraged by his controversial, indeed ham-handed, sacking of the country’s top judge last March, and had taken to the streets in protest. They are also frightened by what they see as the Talibanization movement creeping toward them from the country’s northwest. And they are skeptical of Musharraf’s peace deals with tribal leaders along the Afghan border that has led to pro-Taliban Pakistani militants seizing control of the tribal belt and enforcing Islamist morality and justice.
Now for the first time in months, most Pakistanis are supporting the president’s tough action. Even the secular opposition parties that had been leading protests against the president are behind his crackdown on the mosque. They, and most Pakistanis, only wonder why it took him so long to act. Many moderate Pakistanis are hoping that Musharraf’s assault on the radical and recalcitrant mosque signals a turnaround for the president who, while talking tough against radical madrasas and Pakistani extremist organizations for the past six years, has done little curb the Talibanization movement. Many hope that it’s not too late.
