LAHORE, 24 March 2003 — Over 200,000 people took to the streets of Lahore yesterday in what is believed to have been Pakistan’s biggest demonstration yet condemning the US-led attacks on Iraq.

Chanting slogans and burning effigies of US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, protesters demanded an immediate end to the war.

Responding to a call by a six-party bloc, the religious alliance of Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), protesters swarmed a three-kilometer stretch of the eastern city’s main Mall Road.

“It was like a human tempest, one could see only heads of people,” an AFP reporter watching the crowd from a rooftop said.

Chanting “Allah-o-Akbar” (God is great), the marchers carried banners attacking Bush and Blair. “Stop spilling blood, no to US terrorism” and “Iraqi Muslims, we are with you,” posters read.

Groups of youths riding motorbikes and carrying portraits of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein shouted “Dump Bush” and “No war for oil”, while schoolchildren displayed toy guns.

Others carried posters of terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden and denounced US involvement in Afghanistan in the hunt for Al-Qaeda.

MMA leader Fazlur Rehman told the emotional crowd the US would be trapped in a “quagmire” in Iraq. “It did not attack Iraq, it signed its own death warrant,” he said from a makeshift stage at the heart of the demonstration.

Rehman, whose Jamiat Ulema Islam party had supported the ousted Taleban regime in Afghanistan, said “Americans failed to subjugate Afghans and they will fail to usurp Iraq.”

He also blasted the presence of US intelligence agents in Pakistan searching for terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden as an “attack on the sovereignty of Pakistan.” “This massive rally has proved that the government stance is not the stance of 140 million Pakistanis,” he said, urging the people to boycott US products.

The rally was joined by members of the moderate Movement for Justice, headed by cricket hero-turned politician Imran Khan, former Premier Nawaz Sharif’s faction of the Pakistan-Muslim League (PML-N) and several other religious groups. Hafiz Saeed Ahmed, leader of the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, also attended the rally but did not speak.

AFP reporters estimate around 200,000 protesters swarmed the road, while police acknowledged the crowd exceeded 100,000. Traffic was snarled for hours throughout the city.

MMA President Mian Maqsood said it was the biggest ever anti-war demonstration in Pakistan. Yesterday’s protest was the first large-scale demonstration against the invasion since US and British bombs and cruise missiles began raining down on Iraq at dawn Thursday. Before the march, protesters thronged the city’s main Nasir Bagh park, burning US flags and Bush’s effigy.

Pakistanis continuing anti-war protests for the fourth day yesterday also staged a demonstrations in downtown Peshawar, the nearby tribal town of Bara, the central city of Multan and the southern town of Jacobabad, where a military base is being used by US troops in their ongoing operation in Afghanistan.

Pakistan, a key US ally in the 18-month US-led war on terrorism, has said it “deplored” the military action.