How Pakistan built a terrorist haven named Lal Masjid and then tried to dismantle it

On 16 December 2014, seven suicide bombers, sent by Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, killed 140 in a middle-and-secondary Army Public School in Peshawar, 131 of them boys aged between ten and twenty; and this was Taliban chief Fazlullah’s response to the military operation in the Taliban safe havens in North Waziristan. The school catered to 500 sons of the army personnel. The job was done with hand grenades and AK-47s at close range for over nine hours while under siege by the security forces. Pakistan changed that day, some calling it Pakistan’s 9/11. The Parliament got together to pass a unanimous resolution of condemnation while even heretofore friendly-to-Taliban clerics joined the national consensus of outrage. But not the chief of Lal Masjid – or the ‘red mosque’ – of Islamabad: Maulana Abdul Aziz. His mosque-cum-madrasa complex is situated in the heart of Islamabad. It was discovered only after a commando operation that it had a vast underground residential and educational facility where ‘guests’ – militants – could be lodged.

There are some culpable religious leaders that Pakistan will not or cannot punish under the law. They have been allowed to become too powerful through proxy jihad and now partake of the “monopoly of violence” of the state. Others are equally “untouchable” because they are backed by other proxy warriors, and removal of their impunity by the state will likely create fissures within the ruling establishment.

Grasping this fact, the judiciary equally “empowers” itself by favouring them in its judgements. It blinked at the acts of vigilante violence committed by the Lal Masjid seminarians against innocent citizens in Islamabad in 2007 and rewarded it with compensatory allocations after it was attacked and shut down by the government.

In 2015, after Maulana Aziz failed to condemn the massacre of schoolchildren in Peshawar, civil society protested. There was a modest gathering of citizens outside his mosque protesting his failure to answer a summons from the court of law asking him to explain his stance. They pointed out once again that his madrasa had been involved in terrorist activities. Preliminary investigation had revealed that the suicide bomber who blew himself up at a police picket in Wah the same month had been a student at his seminary.

The terrorists took notice. Jibran Nasir, the lawyer-activist leading the protest, reported receiving a call from the spokesperson of a Taliban faction, Ehsanullah Ehsan, threatening him with consequence for criticising Aziz. There was nothing anyone could do, and the deadlock was finally broken by the cleric saying he was sorry he had “failed to unconditionally condemn the Peshawar massacre”. The court, having summoned him for “supporting” the massacre, quickly forgot all about it.

When Ehsanullah Ehsan speaks you’d better listen. And Aziz was no small-time preacher; his impunity was bought at the cost of Pakistan’s relations with its “all-weather” friend, China.

A sectarian oracle

Lal Masjid or Red Mosque was established in the 1980s knowingly as a sectarian seminary by General Zia who had fallen foul of the Shia with his controversial zakat tax. It came to be favoured in the following decade by al-Qaeda as its client in central Islamabad.

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.

The Urdu daily Jang (January 3 2013) quoted Umme Hassan, wife of Aziz, as telling the Lal Masjid Judicial Commission that her father-in-law Maulana Abdullah Ghazi was killed in front of her own eyes. Abdullah had gone and met bin Laden in Afghanistan and was advised by the agencies to keep mum about the meeting but he decided to reveal the facts in a speech he made at a Lal Masjid Friday congregation. He was therefore killed on 18 October 1998 by a boy who walked in and shook hands with Abdullah Ghazi before emptying his revolver into him.

She said she ran after the killer who jumped into a white car before fleeing the scene. Later no FIR was allowed to be lodged because Maulana Ghazi was considered dangerous for Pakistan. His son Rashid Ghazi was 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 was a graduate of the anti-Shia incubator Jamia Banuria Madrasa, Karachi, like Maulana Masood Azhar of Jaish-e-Mohammad, 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 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 Talibanisation in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal territories (FATA). Eighty per cent of the acolytes in its residential seminaries were from FATA and from 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 the “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 the Holy Prophet in person ordered him to raise the standard of revolt, declare jihad and implement the sharia on his own. Timely information on this proclaimed project would have prepared the ground for some state action, but no one cared.

General “President” Musharraf, who ruled the country with his commando panache, had no clue he would have to quit because of crazy Aziz. He was taught a lesson about how not to take the right-wing conservative crutch of the Muslim League who would cave into the equally conservative Urdu media swinging in favour of Lal Masjid.

He was let down by his minister of state for religious affairs, then-MQM’s Amir Liaquat Hussain. Hussain ignored his own party line on the mullahs to give a most ill-advised TV interview, indirectly defending Lal Masjid’s revolt on the basis of “sharia backslidings” of the government. His line was picked up by the clerical coalition of MMA in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa which taxed the government with failing to implement the sharia. Hussain actually pointed to “lewd” signboards – staid by international standards – as a moral failure of the government, in unison with the MMA.

A not-so-silent operation

Finally the general took action in July 2007. It was a commando assault named Operation Silence, at first delayed by the intelligence that Aziz could call in help from Waziristan in the shape of suicide-bombers and could also count on the help of students from other seminaries in the vicinity. (There were eighty-eight unregistered madrasas in Islamabad in 2007.)

Musharraf was also off the mark in his assessment of the coverage of it by the electronic media. However, the stratagem of turning off the electricity in Lal Masjid quickly forced its 6000 militant boys and girls to start surrendering. Once the operation was afoot, curfew declared, and the army deployed, the dreaming mullah of Lal Masjid was disabused of his divinity in short order.

The lateness of the operation inclined a lot of people to speculate that the government had actually used the clerics to divert attention from the judicial crisis unfolding against Musharraf. Almost the entire opposition used this “convenient” interpretation to rubbish the government.

Even after the onset of the operation, opposition politicians were recommending “negotiations” in a situation that no longer brooked negotiation. Only the PPP chairperson Benazir Bhutto appropriately asserted that on coming to power she would wipe out religious extremism in Pakistan. More than a hundred persons from the fastness of the seminary were killed in the operation, including Ghazi, as Aziz escaped concealed as “a lady in burqa”.

According to the inspector general of police, Islamabad, 102 people were killed during the operation: ninety-one militants, ten SSG commandos, and one paramilitary ranger. The blanket term “militants” covered some seminarians who fell fighting the commandos.

The Chinese factor

The operation against Lal Masjid was triggered by a vigilante attack launched by Aziz in June. A group of seminarians – including ten burqa-clad girls – raided a Chinese massage parlour and acupuncture clinic in one of Islamabad’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. They grabbed the three guards, entered the house and ordered the seven Chinese staff and their Pakistani clients to accompany them.

When they refused, they were beaten and taken to the Jamia Hafza madrasa, the girls’ section of the Lal Masjid seminary where “a spokesman announced to local press that the clinic was used as a brothel house; and, despite our warnings, the administration failed to take any action; so we decided to take action on our own.” Months earlier, the Lal Masjid vigilantes, true to their sectarian indoctrination, had attacked another “brothel run by a Shia lady”, thrashing the inmates and kidnapping four policemen for good measure.

In 2009, Aziz’s wife Umme Hassan was still obstinately committed to attacking entertainment and other obscenity. She was asked by a reporter:

“If the government provides free education to all, gives them health coverage and finds jobs for our youth, but also allows people to pursue arts and music and live their life as they want to live, would that be acceptable to the clerics?”

“No, it cannot be permitted in an Islamic republic,” she replied. “Our Prophet destroyed 365 idols and broke musical instruments at the conquest of Makkah; and he fought against Abu Jahal, who believed in Jahiliat and profanity. But we in Pakistan are promoting a culture of dance and music.’

But the kidnapping of the Chinese this time was like crossing a strategic threshold. As Andrew Small tells it, Beijing reacted with understandable fury, the assertive section of Chinese society taking it as “a test of the Communist Party’s backbone”. To give point to their reaction, “mocking packages of calcium pills” were sent to the foreign ministry.

Wasn’t Pakistan China’s closest ally? How could it allow seven Chinese nationals to be picked up in its capital? Most Pakistanis were unaware that President Hu Jintao in Beijing was getting regular briefings from his diplomats in Pakistan as the kidnap drama in the name of religious piety unfolded in Islamabad. The irony was reinforced by the fact that China was about to compensate Pakistan for a 2005 US–India civil nuclear deal with the expansion of its Chashma nuclear power plants.

As it turned out, no religious piety was involved. The madrasa was holding Uighur terrorists from Xinjiang and only the Chinese and the Lal Masjid clerics knew it.

Before 2007, Lal Masjid was known as a watering-hole of all kinds of organisations the world recognised as terrorist, mostly al-Qaeda-linked Taliban not clearly defined as anti-state by Pakistan. After its opening in the 1980s, it “welcomed fighters in transit to Afghanistan and Kashmir alike”. Its founder was overwhelmed by the warrior charisma of bin Laden during a trip to Kandahar in 1998 to “pay homage” to the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar. His younger son Abdur Rashid was with him.

At the end of the meeting, Rashid picked up bin Laden’s glass of water and drank from it. An amused bin Laden asked him the reason for his action, to which he replied, “I drank from your glass so that Allah would make me a warrior like you.”

After Abdullah Ghazi’s assassination, sons Abdul Aziz and Abdur Rashid Ghazi ran the seminary, the former as its administrator and Ghazi as a firebrand behind-the-scenes inspiration who issued a reckless pro-Taliban fatwa, declaring that “those killed in the battle against Pakistani forces are shaheed (martyrs)”. Ghazi was in time accused of a plot to blow up the President’s house, the Parliament building, and the army GHQ, but was let off the hook by federal cabinet minister Ijaz ul-Haq, the son of General Zia-ul-Haq, who had helped the Ghazis set up the mosque in Islamabad.

That had emboldened the brothers, who in time began a campaign of “correction” in the capital city, deploying “vice and virtue” groups that attacked music and DVD shops for their “obscenity”, abducted people of “loose moral behaviour”, and took them to special Lal Masjid sharia courts for punishment. Pakistan tolerated this and thus laid the foundation of the “normalisation of the abnormal” in Pakistani society.

Excerpted with permission from Sleepwalking to Surrender: Dealing with Terrorism in Pakistan, Khaled Ahmed, Penguin Viking.