PAKISTAN - Jihad fervor replaced by resentment

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LATimes

Pakistan's Jihad Fervor Replaced by Resentment By KIM MURPHY, Times Staff Writer

TALASH, Pakistan -- Mohammed Youssef tried to stop it, first calling the local religious leader on the phone, then following his convoy of young jihad recruits into Afghanistan and confronting him in person. Don't take them, Youssef said. They're just boys. They don't know how to fight. If it gets bad, they don't know how to run.

"I personally talked to Sufi Mohammed twice and requested him not to go to Afghanistan with the large number of young people, all untrained," Youssef, a 55-year-old veteran of the Afghan war with the Soviets, said over the weekend. " 'Don't kill them,' I asked him. But he did not listen to me, and he refused."

After the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan began eight weeks ago, young Pakistani men from the deeply religious border region were clamoring for the chance to fight with the Taliban. In this small farming village in the northwest frontier, more than 60 youths joined thousands of others who followed Mohammed, charismatic founder of the fundamentalist Movement for the Enforcement of the Laws of Muhammad, across the rugged frontier to take up arms.

A few weeks later, the Taliban was in substantial retreat, reports of Pakistani fighters being slaughtered were emerging, and Mohammed slipped quietly back across the border. Of the 60 jihadis who left with him from Talash, fewer than 25 have returned.

"It's a tragedy," Shansur Rehman, whose 23-year-old son was confirmed dead near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, said with a shrug.

The battle fervor that swept this region at the beginning of the war has largely evaporated, as thousands of foreign volunteer fighters--many of them Pakistani--were left in the gun sights while the Taliban leadership slipped back into its native landscape or retreated to Kandahar, the regime's southern Afghan stronghold.

In these frontier communities, where the mullahs have always had more pull than the government, there is a deepening resentment of the religious leaders who called away so many young men to a certain death.

"They went to Afghanistan to fight Americans, and they ended up fighting their fellow Muslims," said Sher Zameen, whose uncle, a farmer with six children, left for Afghanistan without a gun. He hoped he'd get one when he arrived, Zameen said. Now he is missing.

"In the initial stages, people were emotional, and everyone wanted to go to Afghanistan to fight. But then when people heard about the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, people started feeling sick," said Faizal Hassan, whose father is missing in Afghanistan. More than 1,500 Taliban fighters were killed in the Northern Alliance's siege of the city and a prisoner revolt two weeks later, prompting calls for an international investigation of each incident.

"Now, people are criticizing Sufi Mohammed," Hassan said. "He ordered his followers to go to Afghanistan without any long-term planning. Without planning, without strategy, they sent laymen to Afghanistan to fight the Americans, and the result now is people are missing."

The intra-Muslim fighting that has occurred over the past several weeks in Afghanistan now threatens to spill into Pakistan. Limited clashes have already broken out between tribes that faced each other in Afghanistan, and several border communities have for the first time evicted Afghan refugees.

Government Blamed for Letting Youths Go

Accusations are spreading across the country. Commentators alternately blame the government, for allowing thousands of its citizens to take up weapons and cross the border, and the Islamic political parties, whose call for jihad, or holy war, represented a direct challenge to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's pledge to aid the U.S. war effort against the Taliban and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

"The romanticization of jihad was the gift of small minds to Pakistan," newspaper columnist Muhammad Ali Siddiqi said last week. "Lacking any real understanding of the intricacies of a modern war, these parties presented to the raw minds of Pakistani boys a jihad that was fun. . . . Now, they are holed up in the barren vastness of Kandahar, waiting for death, while those who urged them to jihad and turned them into cannon fodder have confined their own part in jihad to issuing press statements and observing black days."

The Pakistani government has arrested Sufi Mohammed on charges of possessing illegal weapons. But it has denied reports that it sent planes to evacuate Pakistani fighters from Afghanistan. Indeed, those rumors may have been wishful thinking more than anything else. The reality, say analysts in Islamabad, the capital, is that Pakistan, facing years of sectarian violence at the hands of Islamic extremists, was probably no more eager than the U.S. to see volunteer jihadis repatriated from Afghanistan.

In Talash, returning fighters gave dispiriting accounts of a war in which they expected to encounter American troops, but instead encountered confusion, retreat and the gun barrels of fellow Muslims.

Sardar Daud, 20, said he decided to join the fight after listening to appeals from the local mosques. "The religious leaders were giving sermons in the mosques to condemn the [U.S.] attacks and urging people to go to Afghanistan," he said. "Jihad is part of our faith. It's compulsory for any Muslim, and when you refuse to take part in jihad, it means you are not a Muslim."

Daud said he entered Afghanistan with 700 other Pakistanis and camped for a few days at the border with Mohammed. "He issued some directives. He recited a few verses of the holy Koran to highlight the importance of jihad for Muslims. Then we started moving toward Jalalabad."

But by the time they got there, U.S. airstrikes were hitting the area fiercely, and the Taliban arranged transport the next morning to Kabul, the Afghan capital. From there, Daud and 1,500 other fighters were taken to the front line in the Panjshir Valley.

"We took positions. Somebody told me on the front line there is a trench where the Northern Alliance and some foreign troops have taken positions. We planned to attack this position. For one thing, we wanted to kill those foreign troops. For another, we wanted to get some food, because we were short of food."

'Nobody Told Us' How War Would Be

The Taliban commander switched sides, and a new commander ordered them to abandon their positions only minutes before U.S. planes started hitting them, Daud said. He and his comrades walked five straight days back to the Pakistani border, and eventually home. Now, he wonders what he accomplished.

"We had an idea that some foreign troops, some American troops and British troops, were in Afghanistan. We wanted to capture some American troops--it would be a great honor for us to capture a U.S. Army man. But when we entered the area, we never saw any foreigners. They were all Muslims. They were all Afghans. And nobody told us about the airstrikes, this carpet bombing."

In the town of Rustam, also along Pakistan's northwest frontier, 28-year-old Pir Mohammed said he and nine others joined Sufi Mohammed and were outfitted with Kalashnikov rifles, rocket launchers, hand grenades and machine guns. "We had some missiles also, and small cannons, but due to logistical problems, we couldn't transport them," he said.

The weapons were leftover American supplies from the war with the Soviets in the 1980s, said his friend, Hafez Izhar Ahmed, 20.

Determined Fighters Lacked Directions

Once they got to Jalalabad, those with military training went on to Mazar-i-Sharif, while those who didn't stayed behind to learn how to load, unload and fire a weapon. Pir Mohammed stayed on for training but was evacuated to Kabul when the Americans started bombing Jalalabad. "When we reached Kabul, the Taliban informed us they were conducting a strategic retreat. The Northern Alliance was on the way," he said.

"For every 500 or 600 Pakistanis, there was only one Taliban who gave us information on what we should do," he said. "People were still determined to defend Kabul, but we never saw any Taliban, we had no information on where to go, whether we should retreat, or where we should retreat to. Thousands of people were there."

Still, Mohammed said, no one despaired. "We left Pakistan to sacrifice our life. Our aim was that. So whatever happened was up to God. We never expected that we would come back alive to our homes."

Now that he's home, Mohammed doesn't rule out going back. Indeed, despite their disillusionment, most of these jihadis say they expect the Taliban to regroup in the mountains and fight a guerrilla war for years to come.

Mohammed Youssef, the old Soviet fighter, for all his reservations about sending untrained boys to the front, says he is ready to be part of the future battle. The coalition government about to be set up in Kabul will be nothing more than a puppet of the U.S., Youssef said, and jihadis in Pakistan are determined to join the Taliban to fight it.

"Our strategy is to wait until the Northern Alliance sets up a government in Kabul, backed by the U.S. and other Western countries," he said with a smile. "Then we will start our activities."

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-- Anonymous, December 04, 2001


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