mosque has two madrasas, one for girls and one for boys, which had been used for years to recruit and train volunteers to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir. It was run by two brothers, Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid, and had become a centre for spreading propaganda about bin Laden whom Abdul Rashid had met in Kandahar when visiting Mullah Omar. The brothers were famed for their fiery sermons and attracted thousands of worshippers, particularly after 9/11. When President Musharraf agreed to help America in the ‘War on Terror’, the mosque broke off its long links with the military and became a centre of protest against the government. Abdul Rashid was even accused of being part of a plot to blow up Musharraf’s convoy in Rawalpindi in December 2003. Investigators said the explosives used had been stored in Lal Masjid. But a few months later he was cleared.
When Musharraf sent troops into the FATA, starting with Waziristan in 2004, the brothers led a campaign declaring the military action un-Islamic. They had their own website and pirate FM station on which they broadcast, just like Fazlullah.
Around the same time as our Taliban were emerging in Swat, the girls of the Red Mosque madrasa began terrorising the streets of Islamabad. They raided houses they claimed were being used as massage centres, they kidnapped women they said were prostitutes and closed down DVD shops, again making bonfires of CDs and DVDs. When it suits the Taliban, women can be vocal and visible. The head of the madrasa was Umme Hassan, the wife of the elder brother, Abdul Aziz, and she even boasted that she had trained many of her girls to become suicide bombers. The mosque also set up its own courts to dispense Islamic justice, saying the state had failed. Their militants kidnapped policemen and ransacked government buildings.
The Musharraf government didn’t seem to know what to do. This was perhaps because the military had been so attached to the mosque. But by the middle of 2007 the situation was so bad that people began to worry the militants could take over the capital. It was almost unbelievable – Islamabad is usually a quiet, orderly place, very different to the rest of our country. Finally on the evening of 3 July commandos with tanks and armoured personnel carriers surrounded the mosque. They cut off the electricity in the area, and as dusk fell there was a sudden burst of gunfire and explosions. The troops blasted holes in the wall surrounding the mosque and fired mortars at the compound as helicopter gunships hovered overhead. Over loudspeakers they called for the girls to surrender.
Many of the militants in the mosque had fought in Afghanistan or Kashmir. They barricaded themselves and the madrasa students inside concrete bunkers with sandbags. Worried parents gathered outside, calling their daughters on mobile phones, begging them to come out. Some of the girls refused, saying their teachers had taught them that to become a martyr is a glorious thing.
The next evening a small group of girls emerged. Hidden among them was Abdul Aziz, disguised in a burqa, along with his daughter. But his wife and younger brother stayed inside, along with many students, and there were daily exchanges of gunfire between the militants and the troops outside. The militants had RPGs and petrol bombs made from Sprite bottles. The siege went on until late on 9 July, when the commander of the special forces outside was killed by a sniper in one of the minarets. The military finally lost patience and stormed the compound.
They called it Operation Silence although it was very loud. Never had there been such a battle in the heart of our capital. Commandos fought from room to room for hours until they finally tracked Abdul Rashid and his followers to a basement where they killed him. By nightfall on 10 July, when the siege was finally over, around a hundred people had been killed including several soldiers and a number of children. The news showed shocking pictures of the wreckage, everywhere blood and broken glass, and dead bodies. We all watched in horror. Some of the students at the two madrasas were from Swat. How could something like that happen in our capital city and in a mosque? A mosque is a sacred place for us.
It was after the Red Mosque siege that the Swat Taliban changed. On 12 July – which I remember because it was my birthday – Fazlullah gave a radio address that was quite different to his previous ones. He raged against the Lal Masjid attack and vowed to avenge the death of Abdul Rashid. Then he declared war on the Pakistani government.
This was the start of real trouble. Fazlullah could now carry out his threats and mobilise support for his Taliban in the name of Lal Masjid. A few days later they attacked an army convoy travelling in the direction of Swat and killed thirteen soldiers. The backlash wasn’t just in Swat. There was an enormous protest by tribesmen in Bajaur and a wave of suicide bombings across the country. There was one ray of hope – Benazir Bhutto was returning. The Americans were worried that their ally General Musharraf was too unpopular in Pakistan to be effective against the Taliban so they had helped broker an unlikely power-sharing deal. The plan was that Musharraf would finally take off his uniform and be a civilian president, supported by Benazir’s party. In return he would drop corruption charges against her and her husband and agree to hold elections, which everyone assumed would result in Benazir becoming prime minister. No Pakistani, including my father, thought this deal would work as Musharraf and Benazir hated each other.
Benazir had been in exile since I was two years old, but I had heard so much about her from my father and was very excited that she would return and we might have a woman leader once more. It was because of Benazir that girls like me could think of speaking out and becoming politicians. She was our role model. She symbolised the end of dictatorship and the beginning of democracy as well as sending a message of hope and strength to the rest of the world. She was also our only political leader to speak out against the militants and even offered to help American troops hunt for bin Laden inside Pakistani borders.
Some people obviously did not like that. On 18 October 2007 we were all glued to the TV as she walked down the steps of the plane in Karachi and wept as she stepped onto Pakistani soil after almost nine years in exile. When she paraded on an open-top bus through the streets, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to see her. They had travelled from all over the country and many of them were carrying small children. Some released white doves, one of which flew to perch on Benazir’s shoulder. The crowds were so large that the bus moved at a walking pace. We stopped watching after a while as it was clearly going to take hours.
I had gone to bed when just before midnight the militants struck. Benazir’s bus was blown up in a wave of orange flame. My father told me the news when I woke up the next morning. He and his friends were in such a state of shock that they had not gone to bed. Luckily, Benazir survived because she had gone downstairs to an armoured compartment to rest her feet just before the explosions, but 150 people had been killed. It was the biggest bomb ever to have gone off in our country. Many of the dead were students who had made a human chain around the bus. They called themselves Martyrs for Benazir. At school that day everyone was subdued, even those who had opposed Benazir. We were devastated but also thankful that she had survived.
About a week later the army came to Swat, making lots of noise with their jeeps and helicopters. We were at school when the helicopters first arrived and were very excited. We ran outside and they threw toffees and tennis balls down to us, which we rushed to catch. Helicopters were a rare sight in Swat, but since our house was close to the local army headquarters they sometimes flew right over us. We used to hold competitions for who would collect the most toffees.
One day a man from along the street came and told us that it had been announced in the mosques that there would be a curfew the next day. We didn’t know what a curfew was and were anxious. There was a hole in the wall to our neighbours’ house, Safina’s family, through which we used to communicate with them, and we knocked on the wall so they would come to the hole. ‘What does it mean this curfew?’ we asked. When they explained, we didn’t even come out of our rooms because we thought something bad might happen. Later the curfew took over our lives.
We heard on the news that Musharraf had sent 3,000 troops into our valley to confront the Taliban. They occupied all government and private buildings which they thought were of strategic importance. Until then it had seemed as if the rest of Pakistan was ignoring what was happening in Swat. The following day a suicide bomber attacked another army truck in Swat, killing seventeen soldiers and thirteen civilians. Then all that night we heard
On the TV the next day we heard that fighting had erupted in the hills to the north. School was closed and we stayed at home, trying to understand what was going on. The fighting was taking place outside Mingora though we could still hear gunfire. The military said it had killed more than a hundred militants, but then on the first day of November around 700 Taliban overran an army position at Khwazakhela. Some fifty men deserted from the Frontier Corps and another forty-eight were captured and then paraded around. Fazlullah’s men humiliated them
