ISLAMABAD/KHAR, 4 November 2006 — A complete strike was observed in Khar, the main town in the Bajaur tribal region, yesterday where Pakistan Army airstrike on Monday destroyed an Al-Qaeda-linked madrasa killing 80 suspected militants.
Shops were closed and public transport stayed off the roads. Thousands of tribesmen protested vowing vengeance. Eyewitnesses and local journalists said over 20,000 people attended the protest rally.
Effigies of US President George Bush and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf were paraded on mules through Khar and beaten with sticks and shoes before being burned.
The NWFP provincial assembly adjourned its session as a mark of protest. Pakistan’s ruling party PML(Q) is in opposition in the NWFP legislative assembly.
“The people of the tribal areas are being treated like terrorists and innocent people are being killed by the US and Pakistan Army. We will not tolerate this anymore,” Waheed Gul, the deputy head of the Jamaat-e-Islami told protesters. Another speaker, Zahir Shah, said “we will certainly take revenge on these people” as chants of “Al-Jihad,” rang out.
Musharraf says all those killed in the airstrike were militants, and the military released video footage shot from a surveillance aircraft showing rows of men doing physical exercises at the madrasa just an hour before the attack. Protesters said the dead, mostly young men aged between 15 and 25, were merely students.
In the central city of Lahore, some 8,000 members of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a charity that the United States says is a terrorist organization, held prayers for the airstrike’s victims.
“The people of Bajaur are 100 percent convinced that the attack was launched by US forces,” tribal elder Akhunzada Chatan told demonstrators in Khar. Another 2,000 tribesmen waving assault rifles in the air chanted anti-government slogans in the small town of Enayat Killi in Bajaur, while 2,500 more gathered in Loyisom, a town just north of Khar.
Witnesses said the protesters were marching toward Khar and were joined by hundreds of angry villagers en route. Some 3,000 protesters, mostly ethnic Pashtuns with links to the tribal areas or to Afghanistan, took to the streets of Karachi shouting “Down with America” and “Down with Musharraf.”
In Multan some 400 protesters belonging to the opposition Pakistan Muslim League of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif burned Bush effigies and American flags. Islamists also called a protest in the main northwestern city of Peshawar. US fast food chain KFC closed for the day and other shops hung banners inscribed with Qur’anic verses over their windows amid fears of rioting.
Kasuri Defends Anti-Terror War
“Pakistan would have become another Iraq had it not supported the United States in its war on terror,” Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri told the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee in Islamabad yesterday.
He said Pakistan never backed terrorism and its policy to combat terror was in its own interest. Kasuri said Islamabad wants peace in South Asia and in line with this policy it is holding peace talks with India. He said a number of issues will figure at the Nov. 14 secretarial-level talks between India and Pakistan but the priority would be Siachen where the forces of the two countries have had skirmishes since the early 80s.
Sir Creek, construction of dams over river Neelum and Jhelum in Indian Kashmir are other issues to be discussed at the meeting. Kasuri said he would visit New Delhi during the third week of this month.
