Taliban’s ‘Radio Mullah’ sent hit squad after teen rights activist

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PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN- One of the Taliban’s most feared commanders, Maulana Fazlullah, carefully briefed two killers from his special hit squad on their next target.

Malala Yousafzai inspires with courage

The gunmen weren’t going after any army officer, politician or Western diplomat. Their target was a 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl who had angered the Taliban by speaking out for “Western”-style girls’ education.

Malala Yousafzai survives surgery

Tuesday’s shooting of Malala Yousafzai was the culmination of years of campaigning that had pitted the fearless, smiling young girl against one of Pakistan’s most ruthless Taliban commanders.

Their story began in 2009, when Fazlullah, known as Radio Mullah for his fiery radio broadcasts, took over Swat Valley, and ordered the closure of girls’ schools, including Yousafzai’s.

Outraged, the then-11-year-old kept a blog for the BBC under a pen name and later launched a campaign for girls’ education. It won her Pakistan’s highest civilian honour and death threats from the Taliban.

Yousafzai was not blind to the dangers. In her hometown of Mingora, Fazlullah’s Taliban fighters dumped bodies near where her family lived.

“I heard my father talking about another three bodies lying at Green Chowk,” she wrote in her diary, referring to a nearby roundabout.

A military offensive pushed Fazlullah out of Swat in 2009, but his men simply melted away across the border to Afghanistan. Earlier this year, they kidnapped and beheaded 17 Pakistani soldiers in one of several cross border raids.

Yousafzai continued speaking out despite the danger. As her fame grew, Fazlullah tried everything he could to silence her. The Taliban published death threats in the newspapers and slipped them under her door. But she ignored them.

The Taliban say that’s why they sent assassins, despite a tribal code forbidding the killing of women.

“We had no intentions to kill her but were forced when she would not stop (speaking against us),” said Sirajuddin Ahmad, a spokesman of Swat Taliban now based in Afghanistan’s Kunar province.

He said the Taliban held a meeting a few months ago at which they unanimously agreed to kill her. The task was then given to military commanders to carry out.

The militia has a force of around 100 men specialized in targeted killing, fighters said. They chose two men, aged between 20-30, who were locals from Swat Valley.

The gunmen had proved their worth in previous assassinations, killing an opposition politician and attacking a leading hotelier for “obscenity” in promoting tourism.

Their trademark is to kill by shots to the head.

Such hits, although dangerous, are also a badge of honour among the Taliban. The fighters who carry them out often receive personal calls of congratulations from senior leaders and may also get cash or guns.

Now it was Yousafzai’s turn.

“Before the attack, the two fighters personally collected information about Malala’s route to school, timing, the vehicle she used and her security,” Ahmad said.

They decided to shoot her near a military checkpoint to make the point they could strike anywhere, he said.

On Tuesday, the two men stopped the bus she was riding home in. They asked for Yousafzai by name. Although the frightened girls said she wasn’t there, the men fired at her and also hit two other girls in the van. One of them remains in critical condition.

Shot in the head and the neck, Yousafzai still lies unconscious in hospital, unaware that world leaders from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to U.S. President Barack Obama have pledged support. Schoolchildren in Swat prayed for her recovery.

“The American people are shocked by this deplorable shooting of a girl who was targeted because she dared to attend school,” a statement from the White House said.

On Wednesday, the singer Madonna dedicated a song to Yousafzai during a L.A. concert. In a gesture that bemused many Pakistanis, she performed a striptease that revealed Yousafzai’s first name, Malala, written across her back.

Her would-be killers said they had no idea their attack would propel their victim, already a national hero, into a global icon.

“Actually the media gave it so much importance and now even Ban Ki-moon used dirty language against us,” Ahmad said. The international community stayed silent when the Pakistani security forces killed women during a crackdown, he complained.

Now that they had failed to kill Yousafzai, they would target her father, Ahmad said.

Ziauddin Yousafzai, the headmaster of a girls’ school, is on their hit list for speaking against them, his activities to promote peace in the region and for encouraging his daughter.

“We have a clear-cut stance. Anyone who takes side with the government against us will have to die at our hands,” Ahmad warned. “You will see. Other important people will soon become victims.”

Taliban

 

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Who shoots a 14-year-old girl for going to school? Barbarians, of course. But who are they? How did they come about? Such questions are being conveniently glossed over in Pakistan as well as abroad.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attempted murder of Malala Yousafzai in the tribal badlands of northern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. She was targeted because she had become “a symbol of Western culture.”

The Taliban make it sound as though girls don’t go to school anywhere except in the West. They make this claim in a country that had a highly educated female prime minister long before Germany had a woman chancellor and Canada had Kim Campbell. But the Taliban are also the ones who assassinated Benazir Bhutto in 2007.

Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, now the president, has joined the chorus of local and international condemnation against the attack on Malala. This does not hide the fact that his government has been incapable of defeating the Taliban.

But he is no more impotent than the American and other NATO forces have been in neighbouring Afghanistan where acid is thrown in the faces of women, girls’ noses are hacked off and girls’ schools remain closed in several areas. But Barack Obama, Stephen Harper and others no longer talk much about saving them, focused as they are on washing their hands of the decade-long Afghan mess.

The horror inflicted on Malala is part of the same story being played out in Afghanistan.

Zardari’s declaration that such attacks would not shake his government’s resolve to fight militants or its determination to support women’s education is empty rhetoric.

The problems of Pakistan do predate him. The country has long been sliding into anarchy. There are a million reasons why — poverty, illiteracy, feudalism, corruption, low taxation base, military dictatorships, repression, wars with India, and so on, that have spawned extremism and murderous sectarianism against minority Shiite Muslims as well as Christians and Hindus.

But besides these indigenous ills, for which no one is to blame but Pakistanis themselves, there’s no question that the country has paid a huge price for playing patsy to American machinations in Afghanistan.

Pakistan was the linchpin of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation (1980-88). This was done under then military ruler Muhammad Zia ul Haq (1978-88), who also initiated the first wave of Islamization. But he did so in concert with Ronald Reagan, who hailed the Afghan mujahideen as the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers. He fought the last battle of the Cold War by Islamizing it.

The detritus included Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and record opium crops in the failed state of Afghanistan. It included the parallel Talibanization of Pakistan, with its drug and Kalashnikov culture.

The post-Sept. 11 war in Afghanistan only intensified those trends.

Another military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was rewarded for siding with the U.S. But the nation he was presiding over was not the one Zia had lorded over. It was now deeply divided between the many Taliban offshoots that controlled wide swaths of land, including the stunningly beautiful Swat Valley, Malala’s home, on the one hand, and the majority population who resented the Afghan war being brought to their door, on the other.

Musharraf alternated between making peace deals with the militants and attacking them, while trying to keep Washington happy. He ended up losing both — and his job.

He was succeeded by Zardari, who has walked his own fine line between Washington and his overwhelmingly anti-American public.

He is even less credible than Musharraf, despite heading a democratic government, because of his reputation for unbridled corruption and because he got the job by default, upon the assassination of his wife.

Real power rests with the military. Washington has a direct pipeline to the commanders. They give their silent assent to American drones violating Pakistani sovereignty to attack militants in the border areas. Zardari winks.

But the drones end up killing far too many civilians, as a recent report by Stanford and New York universities said. The more civilian deaths, the more empowered the Taliban and their associates become to wage their jihad and, more practically, enrich themselves through brazen mafia tactics of murder and mayhem, while invoking Islam.

Civilian deaths also feed public fury against the U.S. and the Pakistan government for its complicity with Washington.

While we rightly glorify the courage of Malala, let’s not pretend that she and other brave ones like her can turn the country around on their own — even with growing public opinion on their side. They are the victims of greater forces at work.

Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears on Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiqui@thestar.ca

 

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Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears on Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiqui@thestar.ca

Very aptly stated. Have to agree with everything there.

 

[1ndy]

That girl is still in danger... Sooner or later she has to die your govt as well as your army incapable of providing security to its people.