The Pakistan Army emerged victorious from the Lal Masjid battle that took place in Islamabad on 10 July, following a week's standoff. But it is a victory achieved at a heavy price. The bloodshed in the Red Mosque upped the ante in the ongoing war between the "boots and the beards", to use the terminology of young Pakistanis for the military and the religious extremists. The story also involves the burqas – hundreds of young girls and women affiliated with the Jamia Hafsa girls' madrassa adjacent to the mosque became an integral part of the story.
By the end of the army operation, the mosque's name, derived from the red bricks with which it is built, took on a new, bloody connotation. Elite units of the Pakistan Army pounded the sprawling two-acre compound with automatic and chemical weapons for more than 12 hours, fiercely resisted by armed militants inside. By the end of the fighting, over 70 of the mosque's affiliates, including their leader, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, were dead. So were ten army men. The number of dead may have been much higher than the official number, however. Some were burnt beyond recognition, and may have included women and children. Smoke that still lingered over the site two days later was identified as residue from the Pakistan Army's use of White Phosphorus, a hot-burning substance prohibited by the Geneva Convention for use against civilians.
For months, General Pervez Musharraf had allowed the militants of the Lal Masjid to run a parallel Taliban-style government in the heart of the capital. They had damaged billboards and other property that they deemed 'vulgar', and ransacked music and video shops. Female students from the madrassa occupied a children's library in January; their spiriting away of six Chinese massage-parlour girls was apparently the last straw. It is believed that pressure from Beijing, Pakistan's long-time ally, finally goaded Gen Musharraf into besieging the mosque, and ordering its inmates to surrender. A week later, he launched Operation Silence, originally expected to last only a couple of hours.
Ghazi and Abdul
The Lal Masjid saga exploded in July but it actually dates back to the late 1970s, when America enlisted Pakistan, led by the all-too-willing General Zia ul-Haq, as a frontline state against the Russian communists who had invaded Afghanistan. Soon the Pakistani madrassas were flush with American and Saudi money. The influx coincided with the rise of Khomeini's Shi'ite Iran, perceived as a threat by the Saudis who until then were the undisputed 'leaders' of the Muslim world. More madrassas, mostly financed by the Saudis but some also by the Iranians, began appearing in Pakistan, along with training camps for the Mujahideen. Afghanistan's fight for national independence was transformed into a jihad. Ironically, Gen Zia's son, Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan's Minister for Religious Affairs, was among the negotiators trying to work out a solution to the situation, until talks failed reportedly due to pressure from Washington, DC).