it's been known to happen... http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=311_1179355691 Posted on 07/07/2007 11:38:42 AM PDT by mdittmar
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf Saturday told Islamists besieged at a mosque in the capital to surrender or be killed, amid claims that a bid to shoot down his plane was in revenge for the standoff.
Military ruler Musharraf said that the hardline students holed up inside the fortified Red Mosque complex in Islamabad for the past five days must immediately free women and children allegedly being held as human shields.
"I request these people to come out and surrender and I say this here, that they will be killed if they do not surrender," Musharraf, wearing his army uniform, told reporters in his first public comment on the confrontation.
"There are women and children in the mosque and we have been careful only to avoid any loss."
Pakistani forces have held back from raiding the now bullet-pocked mosque but there were intense clashes again during the day, while troops blew up the complex's petrol tank before dawn, sending flames high into the air.
The firebrand cleric leading the resistance, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, said Pakistani forces had killed 30 female and 40 male students in the siege. The women were buried at the site, he said.
The government says the toll is 19, including a soldier and several civilians.
The cleric said he and his followers had enough rations, arms and ammunition inside the compound to "fight for another 25 to 30 days and we will do that, God willing."
Ghazi, 43, also signalled his defiance by saying that he was telephoned by a man who claimed to have shot at Musharraf's aircraft on Friday in revenge for the siege.
"I received a telephone call yesterday from a man I did not know," who offered his "congratulations" before news of the attack on the president became public, Ghazi told AFP by telephone from the mosque.
"He said, 'I fired at Musharraf's plane just a while ago.' He said that Musharraf survived," said Ghazi, the deputy leader of the mosque.
Security officials said earlier they were probing possible links between the mosque operation and the failed bid to shoot down the president's plane as it took off from Chaklala military airbase at Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.
Police have said they found two anti-aircraft guns and a machine gun on the roof of a house near the airbase after the attack.
Musharraf, a key US ally who grabbed power in a 1999 coup, has survived at least three other militant attempts to kill him.
A group of Islamist lawmakers said troops stopped them from entering the mosque to negotiate with Ghazi, whose brother, mosque leader Abdul Aziz, was captured by police on Wednesday while trying to flee dressed in a woman's burqa.
"We have been prevented because the forces of Musharraf are hell-bent on spilling the blood of women and children," said hardline member of parliament Maulana Shah Abdul Aziz, the leader of the delegation.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz blamed the militants for the standoff and accused them of holding hostages. Ghazi denies the hostage charge.
"All children and women who are being held hostage should be freed forthwith," he told state television. "Their parents are waiting for them outside and desperately want these children to be released."
In a blow to the mosque's defiance, police in a pre-dawn swoop seized control of a separate radical madrassa affiliated to it, the Jamia Faridia religious school, without a shot being fired, officials said.
Police said the Jamia Faridia was the "powerhouse" for the Red Mosque and that several students were involved in the current violence. Dozens of students were arrested.
Students from the mosque and the madrassa had irked the government since January with a Taliban-style anti-vice campaign, which involved the abduction of several people they linked to prostitution, including seven Chinese.
Musharraf's tough stance has boosted his popularity after months of being embroiled in a crisis over his suspension of Pakistan's chief justice.
But Pakistani opposition politicians meeting in London want to draw up a "roadmap" to return the country to a constitutional path, a spokesman for ex-premier Nawaz Sharif said Saturday.
Bomb the place to dust.
I know I won’t lose a moments sleep.
Don’t let anyone stop you General Musharraff!
it's been known to happen... http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=311_1179355691 Actions speak louder than words. When those mosques are piles of powder with bones sticking out I will believe you.
Turn it to glass,they understand nothing less.
let’s put this guy in charge of the border here. Oh, and deportations.
"'The turning point clearly was the abduction of the Chinese massage parlour girls,' says a senior diplomat in Islamabad."
So apparently Musharraf is fine with terrorists running rampant in his capital, unless it interferes with his ability to get "massages" from Chinese girls. Who knew he had an Asian fetish?
The full story here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6274018.stm
I hope the Feds are watching Musharraf’s every move. They could learn from him on how to deal with Muslim fundamentalists - some day this knowledge will become handy here at home.
Oh I forgot, the dems and ACLU may object to his course of action.
This will be interesting. Musharaff is hanging by a thinner thread having sacked their supreme court chief justice. He has radical jihadist elements rifled throughout his internal intelligence agency, who would love to make Pakistan a nuclear armed jihadist camp.
This particular mosque is one of the hotbeds stirring up trouble for the general.
This may end up being a case of him or them. I know for whom I am rooting.
“Police have said they found two anti-aircraft guns and a machine gun on the roof of a house near the airbase after the attack.”
Interestingly, the report I heard yesterday said that those weapons had not been fired.
I also read that part of the mosque had been bulldozed. They should continue with that project until it’s been flattened.
It is nice to hear the words of a leader unafraid. I wish we still had one.
And I will fear the backlash, for it will be all encompassing in it's wrath.
5.56mm
ROFL!
When the military enters, watch and see the hands flying up!
Leave it to a Muslim to know how to deal with other Muslims.
And the beat goes on;)
The Last Straw [John Derbyshire]
An arresting sentence in this BBC report on Pakistan President Musharraf's latest troubles:
“‘The turning point clearly was the abduction of the Chinese massage parlour girls,' says a senior diplomat in Islamabad."
This is all to do with Musharraf having finally authorized an assault on the "Red Mosque" seminary in Pakistan's capital. It's a nest of radical jihadis, who have been making a nuisance of themselves going round the city imposing Islamic virtue, Taliban-style. One of those impositions somehow led to them kidnapping the madam of a Chinese-staffed brothel much frequented by Pakistan's movers and shakers (if you'll pardon the expression).
Musharraf has been loth to stomp on the jihadis for all the usual reasons—mainly, the Pak army's long, long record of using jihadis as proxy troops in various conflicts (Afghanistan, Kashmir,...). Those jih adis really come in handy. However, the kidnapping of the madam got the Chinese mad. Everybody else—including us—is chronically mad with Musharraf for foot-dragging over his country's jihadis, but China's too close (they share a 300-mile border) and too mean (WAY meaner than us), and the Pak-Chinese relationship goes too far back—all the way back to Cold War days, when the line-up was Russia with India, Pakistan with China (and then, after Nixon/Kissinger, with us).
To paraphrase Elvis Presley:
You can burn my house, steal my car
Drink my liquor from that old fruit jar
Do anything that you want to do
But kidnap my whores, and I’ll come down on you!
The Red Mosque is now under serious siege. The seminarians swear they will all be martyrs rather than surrender. Let's hope so.
07/06 03:16 PM
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