Aryavartha
31-10-2006, 03:24
beeb reports that it was carried out by Pak forces...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6097636.stm
Pakistan madrassa raid 'kills 80'
At least 80 militants have been killed in an air strike by Pakistani forces on a madrassa (religious school) used as a militant training camp, the army says.
The army said the madrassa in the tribal area of Bajaur bordering Afghanistan was destroyed by helicopter gunships early on Monday.
One eyewitness told the BBC that 70-80 students were inside. A leading local politician says the dead were innocent.
Pakistan has deployed nearly 80,000 troops along the border.
They are there to hunt militants who sought refuge in the rugged tribal terrain after the ousting of the Taleban in Afghanistan in late 2001.
President Pervez Musharraf has pledged to reform madrassas after many were criticised for supporting Islamic militancy.
Monday's attack took place near Khar, the main town in Bajaur.
The leader of the madrassa, radical cleric Maulana Liaqat, was among the dead.
He was a prominent member of a group of pro-Taleban tribal clerics, the BBC's Rahimullah Yusufzai in Peshawar says.
"We received confirmed intelligence reports that 70-80 militants were hiding in a madrassa used as a terrorist training facility, which was destroyed by an army strike, led by helicopters," army spokesman Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan told the Associated Press news agency.
'Saddened'
However, an eyewitness told the BBC that the madrassa school was filled with about 80 local students who had resumed studies after the Muslim Eid holidays.
People at the scene told reporters that body parts were scattered in the area after the attack.
"We heard helicopters flying in and then heard bombs," villager Haji Youssef said.
"We are all saddened by what we have seen."
A cabinet minister from Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, Siraj ul-Haq, has resigned in protest over the attack.
"This is a very wrong action. They [the victims] were not given any warning. This was an unprovoked attack on a madrassa. They were innocent people," Siraj ul-Haq told the Associated Press before resigning.
Journalists trying to get to the scene were being turned back as they tried to enter the Bajaur region.
The attack came two days after local militants attended a rally in the area where they declared the al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and Taleban chief Mullah Muhammad Omar as their heroes.
The BBC's Barbara Plett in Islamabad says Monday morning's attack coincides with peace talks between tribal elders and pro-Taleban militants in Bajaur.
The government had already released prisoners in anticipation of a deal, possibly along the lines of an agreement signed in the neighbouring tribal region of North Waziristan, our correspondent says.
But the army says peace talks would not be allowed to serve as a cover for militant activity.
Bajaur, which borders Afghanistan's insurgency-plagued eastern province of Kunar, was the scene of a controversial US air strike in January, believed to be aimed at al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The 13 January raid killed at least 18 people, mostly civilians.
In May, Pakistani authorities said a senior al-Qaeda figure, Abu Marwan al-Suri, had been killed in Bajaur during a clash with local police.
But SSS of ATimes reports it as a predator strike..
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ31Df03.html
Another deadly blow for Pakistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf wanted to draw a line in the sand in his struggle for the spiritual soul of the country by early next month, ramming through parliament a controversial bill regarding women's rights that is seen as a move to purge Islamic laws from the constitution.
Instead, helicopter gunships raining death on a village in the remote Bajour agency tribal area on Monday morning significantly escalated Musharraf's battle with militant Islamic forces fiercely opposed to any softening of the state's Islamic legislation.
A pre-dawn attack on a madrassa (Islamic seminary) in a village in the Bajour tribal district in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) claimed the lives of scores of people.
Pakistani authorities claimed immediately that the raid was carried out by Pakistani forces. However, Asia Times Online contacts on the spot are convinced that the raid was undertaken by North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. Recently, Islamabad agreed with NATO that it could conduct operations in Pakistan from across the border in Afghanistan.
Monday's attack came two days after thousands of pro-Taliban tribesmen held an anti-US, anti-NATO rally in Damadola in the Bajour area close to the site of a US missile attack that killed several al-Qaeda members and civilians in January.
Authorities say information that Taliban or al-Qaeda fugitives were in the region prompted Monday's raid. The border village lies opposite the Afghan province of Kunar and is considered a major corridor for militants to enter Afghanistan. In May, Pakistani authorities said a senior al-Qaeda figure, Abu Marwan al-Suri, had been killed in Bajour during a clash with local police.
Just as they are denying NATO involvement in Monday's attack, Pakistani authorities also initially denied the US had carried out the January attack.
Political fallout
Soon after Monday's raid, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the chief of the powerful Islamic political party, the Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan (JI), announced that two leading JI members had resigned their posts - a senior minister in NWFP, Sirajul Haq, and a member of the federal parliament from the Bajour agency, Haroon Rasheed.
The JI is a part of the six-party religious alliance the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which has been at the forefront of agitation against the proposed legislation on women's issues, as well as in opposition in general to Musharraf and his pro-US stance in the "war on terror".
Haq was quoted as saying that protests would be staged throughout the northern tribal region on Tuesday.
Significantly, Pakistan and Taliban authorities struck a peace deal in Bajour only two days ago and were scheduled to sign a document to that effect on Monday. This lends credence to the possibility that it was NATO and not Pakistani forces that made the raid.
Clearly, any peace deal in Bajour is now off the table, and the MMA will seize on the raid to ramp up and expand its campaign against the proposed women's legislation. The MMA has already threatened to resign from the central parliament and all four provincial assemblies, two of which have a controlling MMA presence.
Behind this political activism in the garb of religious issues, though, lies the fear that any demonstrations will turn anti-West - and violent. Under cover of violence and chaos, various smaller underground religious groups as well as militants will mobilize for the fulfillment of their agendas.
Militants already have immense power in the country and have forced the government to step away from the tribal areas, notably North and South Waziristan, where the Pakistani Taliban have a heavy footprint. The same was to happen in Bajour agency.
Bajour is home of the powerful Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammedi, which was the group responsible which gathering more than 10,000 Pakistani youths to go to Afghanistan before the US invasion of 2001.
Bajour is also the strategic back yard of the Hezb-i-Islami led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which is active in the Afghan insurgency. Many prominent al-Qaeda leaders use the area while in transit in the Nooristan-Kunar Valley.
Musharraf in the crosshairs
With the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, pockets of jihadi groups have sprung up in Pakistani cities and villages, and to them the symbol of hatred is Musharraf.
After the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001, Musharraf came up with a guarded approach to handle jihadis. He held many secret meetings with their leaders at which he expressed his resolve in the cause of Islam, as well as in jihad.
He tried to convince the jihadist leadership that Pakistan's decision to ditch the Taliban was made under duress from the US and that as soon as Pakistan could it would resume its support of the Islamic forces in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, the bridge continued to widen between the jihadis and Musharraf, to a point where Musharraf was repeatedly a target for assassination by jihadist groups allied with disaffected military officers.
Pakistani military operations in Waziristan further alienated the jihadist outfits from Musharraf, even as his dependence on the US grew. Recent Pentagon documents indicate that disbursements to Islamabad amounted to about US$3.6 billion for operations from January 2002 through August 2005, an amount roughly equal to one-quarter of Pakistan's total military expenditure during that period. At the same time, as the Taliban revival in Afghanistan continues, the United States' dependency on Musharraf has grown.
Musharraf appears to forget that Pakistan is still a traditional society in which the majority of the people live in a tribal setup. Traditions are generally the final word, and the true literacy rate (which only means capability to read Urdu-language newspapers) is hardly 25%.
In such an environment there is a blind following in religious issues, as in the case of the Women's Protection Bill, which all traditional clerics from north to south and from east to west are unanimous in rejecting.
Military dictatorships, as is Musharraf's, tend to care more their constituency (the armed forces) than the masses. Yet any development that is perceived as an intervention against religion will have a serious impact, as Islam is specifically the soul of the Pakistani army, thanks to the rule of the late dictator General Zia ul-Haq and his Islamification program.
Monday's bombing in Bajour brings Musharraf's showdown, and the line in the sand, with Islamic forces just that little bit closer.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com .
ABC says the strike was by a predator lending credence to SSS's story above..
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/10/zawahiri_was_ta.html
Ayman al Zawahiri was the target of a Predator missile attack this morning on a religious school in Pakistan, according to Pakistani intelligence sources.
ABC News has learned the raid was launched after U.S. intelligence received tips and examined Predator reconnaissance indicating that al Qaeda's No. 2 man may have been staying at the school, which is located in the Bajaur region near the village that is thought to be al Qaeda's winter headquarters.
Despite earlier reports that the missiles had been launched by Pakistani military helicopters:rolleyes: , Pakistani intelligence sources now tell ABC News that the missiles were fired from a U.S. Predator drone plane.
Between two and five senior al Qaeda militants were killed in the attack, including the mastermind of the airliners plot in the U.K., according to Pakistani intelligence sources.
No word yet on whether or not Zawahiri was killed in the raid, but one Pakistani intelligence source did express doubt that Zawahiri would have been staying in a madrassa, which is an obvious target for strikes against militants. That source, however, did express confidence that Pakistani intelligence is closing in on Zawahiri's location.
One of the clerics who is believed to have been killed today, Maulana Liaquat, was one of the two main local leaders believed to be protecting Zawahiri.
Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News they believe they have "boxed" Zawahiri in a 40-square-mile area between the Khalozai Valley in Bajaur and the village of Pashat in Kunar, Afghanistan. They hope to capture or kill him in the next few months.
By now you should be as confused as I am about WTF actually happened, and who did what etc...
All we know is that 80 people are dead. Nothing big accomplished. The Moulana Liaqat, while being a nasty undesirable mullah, is not that big of a target to in any way "justify" the collateral damage and the fallout of this operation.
War on terror, in all its glory...:rolleyes:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6097636.stm
Pakistan madrassa raid 'kills 80'
At least 80 militants have been killed in an air strike by Pakistani forces on a madrassa (religious school) used as a militant training camp, the army says.
The army said the madrassa in the tribal area of Bajaur bordering Afghanistan was destroyed by helicopter gunships early on Monday.
One eyewitness told the BBC that 70-80 students were inside. A leading local politician says the dead were innocent.
Pakistan has deployed nearly 80,000 troops along the border.
They are there to hunt militants who sought refuge in the rugged tribal terrain after the ousting of the Taleban in Afghanistan in late 2001.
President Pervez Musharraf has pledged to reform madrassas after many were criticised for supporting Islamic militancy.
Monday's attack took place near Khar, the main town in Bajaur.
The leader of the madrassa, radical cleric Maulana Liaqat, was among the dead.
He was a prominent member of a group of pro-Taleban tribal clerics, the BBC's Rahimullah Yusufzai in Peshawar says.
"We received confirmed intelligence reports that 70-80 militants were hiding in a madrassa used as a terrorist training facility, which was destroyed by an army strike, led by helicopters," army spokesman Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan told the Associated Press news agency.
'Saddened'
However, an eyewitness told the BBC that the madrassa school was filled with about 80 local students who had resumed studies after the Muslim Eid holidays.
People at the scene told reporters that body parts were scattered in the area after the attack.
"We heard helicopters flying in and then heard bombs," villager Haji Youssef said.
"We are all saddened by what we have seen."
A cabinet minister from Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, Siraj ul-Haq, has resigned in protest over the attack.
"This is a very wrong action. They [the victims] were not given any warning. This was an unprovoked attack on a madrassa. They were innocent people," Siraj ul-Haq told the Associated Press before resigning.
Journalists trying to get to the scene were being turned back as they tried to enter the Bajaur region.
The attack came two days after local militants attended a rally in the area where they declared the al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and Taleban chief Mullah Muhammad Omar as their heroes.
The BBC's Barbara Plett in Islamabad says Monday morning's attack coincides with peace talks between tribal elders and pro-Taleban militants in Bajaur.
The government had already released prisoners in anticipation of a deal, possibly along the lines of an agreement signed in the neighbouring tribal region of North Waziristan, our correspondent says.
But the army says peace talks would not be allowed to serve as a cover for militant activity.
Bajaur, which borders Afghanistan's insurgency-plagued eastern province of Kunar, was the scene of a controversial US air strike in January, believed to be aimed at al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The 13 January raid killed at least 18 people, mostly civilians.
In May, Pakistani authorities said a senior al-Qaeda figure, Abu Marwan al-Suri, had been killed in Bajaur during a clash with local police.
But SSS of ATimes reports it as a predator strike..
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ31Df03.html
Another deadly blow for Pakistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf wanted to draw a line in the sand in his struggle for the spiritual soul of the country by early next month, ramming through parliament a controversial bill regarding women's rights that is seen as a move to purge Islamic laws from the constitution.
Instead, helicopter gunships raining death on a village in the remote Bajour agency tribal area on Monday morning significantly escalated Musharraf's battle with militant Islamic forces fiercely opposed to any softening of the state's Islamic legislation.
A pre-dawn attack on a madrassa (Islamic seminary) in a village in the Bajour tribal district in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) claimed the lives of scores of people.
Pakistani authorities claimed immediately that the raid was carried out by Pakistani forces. However, Asia Times Online contacts on the spot are convinced that the raid was undertaken by North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. Recently, Islamabad agreed with NATO that it could conduct operations in Pakistan from across the border in Afghanistan.
Monday's attack came two days after thousands of pro-Taliban tribesmen held an anti-US, anti-NATO rally in Damadola in the Bajour area close to the site of a US missile attack that killed several al-Qaeda members and civilians in January.
Authorities say information that Taliban or al-Qaeda fugitives were in the region prompted Monday's raid. The border village lies opposite the Afghan province of Kunar and is considered a major corridor for militants to enter Afghanistan. In May, Pakistani authorities said a senior al-Qaeda figure, Abu Marwan al-Suri, had been killed in Bajour during a clash with local police.
Just as they are denying NATO involvement in Monday's attack, Pakistani authorities also initially denied the US had carried out the January attack.
Political fallout
Soon after Monday's raid, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the chief of the powerful Islamic political party, the Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan (JI), announced that two leading JI members had resigned their posts - a senior minister in NWFP, Sirajul Haq, and a member of the federal parliament from the Bajour agency, Haroon Rasheed.
The JI is a part of the six-party religious alliance the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which has been at the forefront of agitation against the proposed legislation on women's issues, as well as in opposition in general to Musharraf and his pro-US stance in the "war on terror".
Haq was quoted as saying that protests would be staged throughout the northern tribal region on Tuesday.
Significantly, Pakistan and Taliban authorities struck a peace deal in Bajour only two days ago and were scheduled to sign a document to that effect on Monday. This lends credence to the possibility that it was NATO and not Pakistani forces that made the raid.
Clearly, any peace deal in Bajour is now off the table, and the MMA will seize on the raid to ramp up and expand its campaign against the proposed women's legislation. The MMA has already threatened to resign from the central parliament and all four provincial assemblies, two of which have a controlling MMA presence.
Behind this political activism in the garb of religious issues, though, lies the fear that any demonstrations will turn anti-West - and violent. Under cover of violence and chaos, various smaller underground religious groups as well as militants will mobilize for the fulfillment of their agendas.
Militants already have immense power in the country and have forced the government to step away from the tribal areas, notably North and South Waziristan, where the Pakistani Taliban have a heavy footprint. The same was to happen in Bajour agency.
Bajour is home of the powerful Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammedi, which was the group responsible which gathering more than 10,000 Pakistani youths to go to Afghanistan before the US invasion of 2001.
Bajour is also the strategic back yard of the Hezb-i-Islami led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which is active in the Afghan insurgency. Many prominent al-Qaeda leaders use the area while in transit in the Nooristan-Kunar Valley.
Musharraf in the crosshairs
With the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, pockets of jihadi groups have sprung up in Pakistani cities and villages, and to them the symbol of hatred is Musharraf.
After the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001, Musharraf came up with a guarded approach to handle jihadis. He held many secret meetings with their leaders at which he expressed his resolve in the cause of Islam, as well as in jihad.
He tried to convince the jihadist leadership that Pakistan's decision to ditch the Taliban was made under duress from the US and that as soon as Pakistan could it would resume its support of the Islamic forces in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, the bridge continued to widen between the jihadis and Musharraf, to a point where Musharraf was repeatedly a target for assassination by jihadist groups allied with disaffected military officers.
Pakistani military operations in Waziristan further alienated the jihadist outfits from Musharraf, even as his dependence on the US grew. Recent Pentagon documents indicate that disbursements to Islamabad amounted to about US$3.6 billion for operations from January 2002 through August 2005, an amount roughly equal to one-quarter of Pakistan's total military expenditure during that period. At the same time, as the Taliban revival in Afghanistan continues, the United States' dependency on Musharraf has grown.
Musharraf appears to forget that Pakistan is still a traditional society in which the majority of the people live in a tribal setup. Traditions are generally the final word, and the true literacy rate (which only means capability to read Urdu-language newspapers) is hardly 25%.
In such an environment there is a blind following in religious issues, as in the case of the Women's Protection Bill, which all traditional clerics from north to south and from east to west are unanimous in rejecting.
Military dictatorships, as is Musharraf's, tend to care more their constituency (the armed forces) than the masses. Yet any development that is perceived as an intervention against religion will have a serious impact, as Islam is specifically the soul of the Pakistani army, thanks to the rule of the late dictator General Zia ul-Haq and his Islamification program.
Monday's bombing in Bajour brings Musharraf's showdown, and the line in the sand, with Islamic forces just that little bit closer.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com .
ABC says the strike was by a predator lending credence to SSS's story above..
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/10/zawahiri_was_ta.html
Ayman al Zawahiri was the target of a Predator missile attack this morning on a religious school in Pakistan, according to Pakistani intelligence sources.
ABC News has learned the raid was launched after U.S. intelligence received tips and examined Predator reconnaissance indicating that al Qaeda's No. 2 man may have been staying at the school, which is located in the Bajaur region near the village that is thought to be al Qaeda's winter headquarters.
Despite earlier reports that the missiles had been launched by Pakistani military helicopters:rolleyes: , Pakistani intelligence sources now tell ABC News that the missiles were fired from a U.S. Predator drone plane.
Between two and five senior al Qaeda militants were killed in the attack, including the mastermind of the airliners plot in the U.K., according to Pakistani intelligence sources.
No word yet on whether or not Zawahiri was killed in the raid, but one Pakistani intelligence source did express doubt that Zawahiri would have been staying in a madrassa, which is an obvious target for strikes against militants. That source, however, did express confidence that Pakistani intelligence is closing in on Zawahiri's location.
One of the clerics who is believed to have been killed today, Maulana Liaquat, was one of the two main local leaders believed to be protecting Zawahiri.
Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News they believe they have "boxed" Zawahiri in a 40-square-mile area between the Khalozai Valley in Bajaur and the village of Pashat in Kunar, Afghanistan. They hope to capture or kill him in the next few months.
By now you should be as confused as I am about WTF actually happened, and who did what etc...
All we know is that 80 people are dead. Nothing big accomplished. The Moulana Liaqat, while being a nasty undesirable mullah, is not that big of a target to in any way "justify" the collateral damage and the fallout of this operation.
War on terror, in all its glory...:rolleyes: