The 2007 assault on the Lal Masjid by military officials has been linked to several events that played out subsequently, from the rise of the Taliban to the decline in popularity of then-president Pervez Musharraf. Imran Khan, an opposition politician at the time, offered his own insight into the tale in his 2011 autobiography, Pakistan: a Personal History.
Background
The Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, of Islamabad was established in the 1980s as a sectarian seminary by General Ziaul Haq, who had fallen foul of the Shia with his controversial zakat tax. It came to be favored in the following decade by Al Qaeda; like many religious leaders, doctors, nuclear scientists, and members of the armed forces, the founding family of the mosque admired Osama bin Laden and met him in the mountains of Afghanistan to pledge their allegiance to his jihad. In due course, the head of the family was killed in what was reported as a sectarian hit. But the family thought otherwise.
According to a report published in daily Jang on Jan. 3, 2013, Umme Hassan, wife of mosque head Maulvi Aziz, told the Lal Masjid Judicial Commission that her father-in-law, Maulana Abdullah Ghazi, was killed in front of her eyes. Abdullah had met bin Laden in Afghanistan and was advised by agencies to keep mum about the meeting. However, he decided to reveal all in a speech to the Friday congregation at the Lal Masjid. A few months later, on Oct. 18, 1998, he was killed by a boy who walked in, shook hands with him, and then emptied his revolver point-blank. Umme Hassan said she had run after the killer, who jumped into a white car before fleeing the scene. She also claimed no FIR had been lodged because Maulana Ghazi was considered dangerous for Pakistan, while his son, Rashid Ghazi, had been picked up by the ISI and kept in custody for putting too much pressure on the government for the investigation of his father’s murder.
Abdullah Ghazi and Lal Masjid
Abdullah Ghazi was a graduate of the anti-Shia incubator Jamia Banuria Madrassa, Karachi, like Maulana Masood Azhar of Jaish-e-Muhammad, whose trained terrorists were often found living within the Lal Masjid compound. Rashid Ghazi echoed his father’s sectarian worldview when he told a TV channel during the 2007 commando operation against the mosque that “the government may have brought out Shia warriors against his besieged acolytes.” Lal Masjid was feeding ideologically into the anarchic order of Talibanization in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal territories (FATA). Eighty percent of the acolytes in its residential madrassas were either from FATA or the provincially administered tribal region of Malakand, Swat and Dir. Aziz and his younger brother, Abdur Rashid Ghazi, regularly harangued the “state within the state” of “FM radio mullah” Fazlullah of Malakand, who was also connected with Al Qaeda. No one paid heed to this. No one registered the trend of increased Al Qaeda “appearances” in Islamabad either.
The phenomenon was simply not understood. No intelligence agency took note that Aziz had started seeing “sacred dreams”—numbering 300—in which Islam’s Prophet ordered him to raise the standard of revolt, declare jihad and implement sharia in Pakistan. Timely information on this proclaimed project would have laid the ground for some state action, but no one cared. General “President” Musharraf, who ruled the country with his commando panache, had no clue that he would have to quit because of crazy Aziz. He was taught a lesson on not taking the rightwing conservative crutch of the Muslim League, which caved to the equally conservative Urdu media swinging in favor of Lal Masjid.
Military Operation ‘Silence’
Much before the military operation, codenamed “Operation Silence,” was launched by the Pakistan Army, Lal Masjid had become known to the outer world as a center of radical Islamic learning, housing several thousand male and female students in adjacent seminaries, culled from hardline students from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas where support for the Taliban and Al Qaeda was quite strong. Elements from militant and non-state actor groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Harkatul Jihadul Islami used the seminary as their watering-hole.
Islamabad was besieged by a mushroom growth of illegal mosque and madrassas in a creeping makeover of the state to caliphate in its very capital. As Musharraf fought a losing battle with the mosque, there were 88 madrassas in Islamabad imparting religious education to more than 16,000 students. Today, all sorts of outfits linked to Al Qaeda have moved to the peripheries of the capital, including Bani Gala, affecting the worldview of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf whose leader lives there.
Lal Masjid founder Ghazi’s sons, Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid, ran the seminary aggressively after his murder, targeting elements they thought were flouting sharia. They fed youths into state-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir, connecting the state to training camps run by terrorist organizations under Al Qaeda. Younger brother Rashid was killed in Operation Silence; the elder son now runs the Lal Masjid complex together with his more aggressive wife. Ghazi was shown much favor by General Zia—who gave him prime property in Islamabad for his mosque-cum-madrassas during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. But after meeting bin Laden in Afghanistan, Ghazi’s loyalty became divided and ultimately leaned to the program of Al Qaeda of forcibly transforming Pakistan into a caliphate.
Imran Khan’s version
The chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf offered his own insight into the siege of Lal Masjid in his 2011 biography, describing it as having proven “counterproductive” and sowing the seeds of resentment. The following is a relevant passage reproduced from his book:
Attacks against security forces, particularly the army and the police, shot up in 2004; there were assaults on offices belonging to the ISI and FIA, the Federal Investigation Agency, as well as against Pakistan Air Force employees. Musharraf himself became a target with at least four attempts on his life. In 2009, six soldiers died in an audacious assault on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi.
Another decisive factor in this growing hostility towards the security forces was the Lai Masjid affair in 2007 when the army stormed Islamabad’s Red Mosque, killing scores of religious students holed up inside the mosque and its madrassa compound. For several months beforehand tension had been rising between the mosque’s students and the authorities but Musharraf failed to take any effective action over what should have been simply a police matter. The mosque students were fundamentalists, not terrorists, and could just have been punished for the specific crimes they had committed. They were stoking opposition to him and making vigilante-style attempts to curb what they saw as immoral activities in Islamabad—threatening DVD shops and even kidnapping some Chinese women alleged to be working as prostitutes. They were infuriated by Musharraf’s reform for madrassas, his demolition of mosques built legally on state-ground and his attempts to impose westernization as part of his so-called ‘Enlightened Moderation’. In their eyes, he was a Western stooge out to destroy true Islam. (This is an example of how Western puppets actually fuel extremism in the Muslim world.) Musharraf came under increasing pressure from the westernized elite to crack down on them. His popularity, already on the wane since 2004, had taken a further hit with the lawyers’ movement that year. Seeing an opportunity to prove himself to his Western backers too, Musharraf took a typically heavy-handed approach. He could have turned off the utility supplies and waited for the students to cave in (it was summer and they would not have lasted long without water and electricity). Instead he sent in the army, despite the fact that there were also women and children within the complex. There are various versions of what exactly happened. A delegation of religious leaders had tried to negotiate a peaceful solution and—according to the newspapers—the students had been prepared to surrender if certain conditions were met.
No compromise
One of the two Ghazi brothers who ran the mosque told the media before the army launched its final full-scale assault that there were only 14 guns in the mosque complex at the time. Chaudhry Shujaat, head of the PMLQ party, was the last to go inside the Red Mosque before the operation started. According to him, he had managed to work out a deal with those left inside the mosque, which meant they would lay down their arms and come out. When he found out that Musharraf refused to accept any compromise he was appalled and called Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, only to find that he was out eating ice cream with his family. Even now Chaudhry becomes emotional, because he can still see the faces of the students who were incinerated inside. Nobody really knows how many died in the carnage that followed. The government claimed at least a hundred militants and students were killed but Qazi Hussain Ahmed, leader of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami, had put the number at over seven hundred. There has never been an investigation. The site was sealed up and the bodies removed, to be thrown in an unmarked grave. This whole debacle coincided with the APDM’s first conference, which took place in London, conveniently wiping the massacre off the news.
However, Musharraf’s zeal was counterproductive. First of all, the Lal Masjid assault turned the Pakistani masses against him. They saw it as an issue of class rather than religion. They felt that the authorities dealt with the matter so violently because the madrassa students were from poor families, and that therefore they could get away with it. Had the students been from English-medium schools, would they have been treated like that? One of the biggest reasons Musharraf was to do so badly in the 2008 elections was resentment over Lal Masjid. Even one of his strongest candidates, Sheikh Rasheed, blamed the affair for his own defeat. It also had tremendous repercussions for national security. Many of the mosque students were from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s Swat area and militants there launched a campaign of retribution, attacking convoys and police stations and setting off bombs throughout the valley. Lal Masjid basically created the Swat Taliban, as it threw up Maulana Fazlullah, who became known as the ‘Radio Mullah.’