LASHKAR GAH, Aug 14 — As they have captured more territory in Afghanistan this year, the Taliban have twinned their military offensive with a publicity push. Their pitch goes something like this: We’ve learned the lessons from our time in power, and we’re ready to moderate a bit.
At international conferences, delegates from the Taliban — infamous for outlawing girls’ schools during their rule from 1994 to 2001 — have made a point of being willing to meet and talk with female officials. Old hard-line stances against music and photography have been softening.
But for insight into how the Taliban might rule if they succeed in holding large stretches of Afghanistan, consider Baghran district, in the southern province of Helmand.
There, where the Taliban were scarcely ever out of power, the harsh old policies of the ’90s are still in full swing. Men are hauled into jail if they shave beards, and spot turban checks are still in place to expose any fancy haircuts. And there is still no freedom for women to travel or learn.
The Taliban in Baghran are not an insurgent force but the government, and a long-established one at that.
“In Baghran, you feel like you are in a mini-emirate of the Taliban,” said a 45-year-old shopkeeper, Esmatullah Baghrani, referring to the Taliban’s formal name, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. “When I am out of Baghran, I feel like I am in a different world.”
There is no cellphone service in Baghran, reflecting the Taliban’s wishes. Instead, people communicate with the outside world through a handful of “public call offices” — phones in stores near the bazaar.
Through more than a dozen interviews with the men who answered these phone lines, as well as men standing nearby, a rare sketch of life in the Taliban’s most secure stronghold began to emerge. The New York Times also interviewed Baghran residents in person in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital.
There is probably nowhere else in Afghanistan more completely under Taliban rule. Officially, the Afghan government acknowledges having lost only four out of roughly 400 districts to the Taliban. Of these, Baghran was the first to fall, about a decade ago.
“You have to obey the rule of the Taliban, and you have to be a good man and not even think of bad things,” said Omar Khan, a shopkeeper. “You have to live the way Taliban want you to live: You have to wear the proper clothing, and a turban, and grow your beard, and offer your prayers in a mosque five times a day, avoid listening to music, and avoid unnecessary chats with people. You can’t meet friends at night for card games.”
But the Taliban’s rule has still proved attractive, or at least tolerable, to many rural Afghans who have endured decades of war. Residents of other parts of Helmand, who find themselves caught in the cross hairs of the war, have sought out Baghran’s relative security, migrating away from the front lines.
“People are suffering under constant war, but we don’t suffer those kinds of problems,” said Hasti Khan, a farmer in Baghran.
Some things have changed. Public executions, a feature of the Taliban’s national rule, were halted in Baghran in 2007 after an American airstrike killed a large number of Taliban fighters and residents who had assembled for one, residents recalled.
But in most ways, the social restrictions that made the Taliban international pariahs during their reign have been resurrected in full in Baghran. Women leave home only with their husbands or male family members, and then only to visit a doctor or a few other authorized destinations. There are no girls’ schools, and education for boys is limited, too. The Taliban here converted schools to madrasas, which boys typically attend for perhaps three years before returning to family farms.
The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, once famous for pummeling women who went out and men who played music, is back on patrol in Baghran. Vice-prevention officers often carry scissors so that they can deal, on the spot, with haircuts deemed excessively vain.
Despite the rules, many in Baghran take a few risks, here and there, continuing to meet for card games. Radios are ubiquitous and tolerated for their news stations like BBC Pashto, Mashal radio and even Voice of America. “We are not supposed to listen to music, but sometimes when the Taliban are all inside we do listen to music,” one man in Baghran said.
But Baghran’s main mud-brick prison often has 100 and sometimes twice that many transgressors, like Nazir Ahmad, 19, who served three days for his curly bangs. “It’s a style I like,” he said in an interview in Lashkar Gah, where he had come to find work.
The Taliban, which have a robust propaganda arm and a news website featuring lengthy interviews with local commanders across Afghanistan, rarely talk about Baghran.
That may be in part because of its importance in the insurgency’s lucrative narcotics business. For years, it was home to an unusual concentration of heroin processing plants, so many, in fact, that they occasionally attracted Afghan military and counternarcotics raids. As the raids intensified, the Taliban ordered heroin production to move out of Baghran so as not to undermine security there, one local man explained.
Baghran has not been entirely untouched by the war. Western and Afghan troops have occasionally conducted forays into Baghran, initially in search of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, who Western military officials suspected might have sought refuge there after his government was toppled in late 2001. Mullah Omar died more than two years ago in a Pakistani hospital, the Afghan government recently announced.
The post-2001 Afghan government lost Baghran in a matter of three years. When a Taliban insurgency began to take shape, elders simply asked the 15 police officers in the province to quit and return home, recalled a tribal elder, Hajji Wali Mohammad, an uncle of one of those officers. With that, the Taliban became the dominant force.
“The government did not last long,” Omar Khan, a 35-year-old shopkeeper in Baghran, said. “People were getting used to democracy, and then the Taliban came again.”
Some Taliban officials, particularly those sent to international conferences, have grown savvier during their long exile, and they suggest that the movement has grown more moderate.
For example, the group no longer puts much effort into stamping out television or music recordings now that cellphones have become a fact of life across much of Afghanistan. Taliban-themed ringtones have become common. And the Taliban’s own propaganda wing, which provides battlefield videos and photographs of insurgent commanders and suicide bombers, makes a mockery of the old prohibition on photography and other depictions of the human form.
Where the Taliban remain an insurgency competing with the government for the people’s loyalties, the group’s social restrictions do in fact appear to have mellowed slightly, particularly in the country’s north.
“The Taliban have realized imposing Islamic laws by force will not make people admire us,” a Taliban commander named Fazlullah, who operates in Afghanistan’s far northwest, said in a recent phone interview. “It is our good governance and performance that will win people’s hearts and minds.”
Although the harsher ways have prevailed in Baghran, residents’ complaints often had less to do with the Taliban’s treatment of them than the deprivations that have taken hold: the lack of good doctors and the need to travel to other districts to buy staples, like cooking oil. And some said they were saddened by the lack of opportunities for their children, many of whom tend to work in the opium fields alongside their fathers.
Many residents who were interviewed said they were mostly satisfied with the Taliban’s rule. Some agree with the Taliban’s principles, others have come to accept them.
“I think I like the way of the Taliban,” Mr. Baghrani, the shopkeeper, said. “You live simply, the way you have been created.”
Not everyone, however, has been able to live simply. Ethnic Hazaras had been allowed relatively safe passage through Baghran, on several important market roads, in recent years. But over a month ago that suddenly changed: Hazara elders and other residents said that the Taliban’s district commander, Mullah Ghulam Hazrat Shahidmal, warned that Hazaras would no longer be allowed through, in what was seen as a troubling step back toward the targeting of minorities by the insurgents.
The only link remaining between the Kabul government and Baghran is symbolic: The government still assigns district officials to Baghran. They all serve in exile. “I have never been to Baghran,” said the district governor of Baghran, Salim Rodi, who lives in Lashkar Gah. “This job is a joke.”
His main responsibility is to occasionally remind others that the government lost Baghran long ago. He did so last year, when a new security adviser for Helmand Province complained that Mr. Rodi was not sending regular updates about the functioning of local government, like other district governors.
“I told this man: ‘You are an amazing security adviser. You don’t even know which districts are under the control of the Taliban.’ ”
Joseph Goldstein reported from Lashkar Gah, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar,
The first thing you hear as you approach Badam Bagh women’s prison in Kabul is children’s laughter. The closer you get, the more the building sounds like a kindergarten class during recess.
Over the past five years, I visited a half-dozen women’s prisons in Afghanistan and met hundreds of women who were arrested while pregnant and gave birth in prison, along with hundreds who came into the system with toddlers. Afghanistan’s prisons are filled with mothers who have been rejected by their families because they are accused of “moral crimes”: women who have been raped or fled abuse or forced marriages, women accused of adultery, unmarried women who have become pregnant with partners their families didn’t approve of. In Afghanistan, such victims of abuse are penalized instead of protected.
When a woman’s body, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, is considered the property of her father, husband, community, religion or state, any action she takes without first being given permission by the men who wield power over her becomes a threat to the authority of those men. In Afghanistan, such threats are often met with incarceration and violence. Whenever I asked a female prisoner what she would do when released, the most common response was: “I will be killed.”
The justice system in Afghanistan is a funhouse-mirror reflection of what a justice system should be. Women who run away from their homes to escape abuse or forced marriage are tracked down by the police. Victims are transformed into criminals, and the limited resources that should be used to bring perpetrators of violence against women to justice are instead spent to keep young women behind bars.
When I first began visiting women’s prisons in Afghanistan, I focused on these “moral crimes.” But as I spent hours seated on prison floors in conversation with prisoners, I met more and more women who had been incarcerated for crimes they actually did commit — such as one 20-year-old who cut the throat of the sleeping husband who forced her into prostitution, unable to withstand another day of the abuse he had inflicted on her for years. I came to realize that I needed to abandon the categories of guilty and innocent. Nearly every woman accurately accused of murder, drug or drug-related offenses said she had been physically abused or raped, or had survived extreme poverty, or had been forced into marriage and motherhood, often while still a child herself. Each of them had been denied control over the direction of her own life from girlhood.
If these women had been able to control their destinies, and had access to basic education and protection from abuse, they would have chosen different paths and would not have been in prison to tell me their stories.
In 2009, the Afghan government formulated groundbreaking legislation called the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW). This law criminalized harmful practices such as rape, forced marriage, domestic violence, the sale of women and girls and the denial of the right to education and work. It was enacted by presidential decree but because of conservative resistance was never ratified by parliament. The resulting confusion about its status has made its application inconsistent at best. Without a firmly established legal framework of protection and basic human rights, Afghan women have no hope of securing gender equality or a justice system in which their rights can be defended. As the international community continues to withdraw from Afghanistan, it is urgent that the law be ratified and implemented.
But the solution is not only legal. It is also cultural. The monitoring of women for “moral crimes” perpetuates a system of marginalization and legitimized violence. If women were free to choose their intimate partners, their communities, husbands, fathers and the entire justice system would no longer be in the business of safeguarding their virginity and their bodies. So long as a woman’s body is regarded as property, gender equality — and basic human rights — cannot exist.
Al Qaeda chief Ayman Zawahiri (Credit: huffingtonpost.com)
ISLAMABAD, Aug 13 —A recording posted online Thursday appears to show al Qaeda chief Ayman al Zawahiri vowing loyalty to the new leader of the Afghan Taliban, as the Kabul government demanded that neighboring Pakistan crack down on Taliban operations there.
Mullah Akhtar Mansour took the reins of the militant Taliban organization amid a swirl of controversy late last month when it emerged that the movement’s founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had been dead for more than two years.
“We pledge allegiance to you on establishing the Shariah [Islamic law] until it rules the lands of the Muslim—ruling and not ruled, leading and not led,” said the recording, in a translation circulated by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors global jihadist activity.
SITE said the recording was distributed on Twitter and that the voice sounds like Mr. al Zawahiri’s. This would be his first audio release in nearly a year, SITE said, and would end his longest public silence in more than a decade
Mullah Mansour, the Afghan Taliban’s former deputy, has enjoyed the support of most of the movement, but has faced opposition from rivals including his predecessor’s family.
Al Qaeda’s allegiance to the Taliban wouldn’t have much impact on the battlefield in Afghanistan, home to no more than a few hundred al Qaeda fighters, an Afghan intelligence official said. But he added that it would lend Mullah Mansour greater credibility as he battles for the support of his rivals.
It also could heighten concerns in the Kabul government that the Taliban will pursue war instead of continuing tentative Pakistan-brokered peace talks. The cutting of ties with al Qaeda is also a condition of U.S. support for peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
In the weeks since Mullah Mansour ascended to the Afghan Taliban’s top post, a period of relative calm in the restive Afghan capital has been shattered by car bombings, which the Afghan government blamed on Pakistan-based Taliban operatives.
An Afghan delegation led by Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani was in Islamabad on Thursday for talks with the Pakistani government. During the negotiations, they veered from recent requests that Pakistan use its influence to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, demanding instead that Islamabad take action against Taliban based in Pakistan, Afghan officials said.
“The delegation demands Pakistan crack down on the Taliban, deny them sanctuaries, shut their training camps, and stop supporting and financing them,” an Afghan official said.
But Pakistan has maintained that peace talks with the Taliban are the most effective way to stabilize Afghanistan, which has sunk further into violence since the withdrawal of U.S. troops began last year. Pakistan’s foreign policy chief, Sartaj Aziz, said before Thursday’s meeting that the talks were “the best option.”
The Afghan and U.S. governments have long pressed Islamabad to prevent the Taliban from operating from Pakistan, with little success. Pakistani officials insist that they don’t support the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, but have said that their priorities are combating the homegrown militants staging terror attacks in the country.
QUETTA, Aug 5: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif approved on Thursday a plan to make Balochistan completely peaceful and take measures to ensure flawless security for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Presiding over a meeting of the Apex Committee, the prime minister reviewed progress of implementation of the National Action Plan and said the law and order situation in Balochistan had improved satisfactorily because of joint civil and military efforts.
Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali, Balochistan Governor Mohammad Khan Achakzai, Chief Minister Dr Abdul Malik Baloch, Minister for Saffron retired Lt Gen Abdul Qadir Baloch, Chief of Army Staff Gen Raheel Sharif, Commander Southern Command Lt Gen Nasser Khan Janjua, provincial Home Minister Mir Sarfaraz Bugti, Chief Secretary Saifullah Chattha, Home Secretary retired Capt Akbar Hussain Durrani, Inspector General of Frontier Corps, Balochistan, Maj Gen Sher Afgan and IG Police Mohammad Amlish attended the meeting.
Mr Sharif was briefed on the security situation and measures taken by the federal and provincial governments, armed forces and law-enforcement agencies for maintaining peace in Balochistan.
According to official sources, the meeting was informed that there was a remarkable decline in incidents of terrorism and heinous crimes.
Civil and military officials submitted a security plan which focused on providing complete security to the CPEC and projects related to it and restoring lasting peace in the province.
The prime minister said that Balochistan had a bright future and it would be the main beneficiary of CPEC projects. The infrastructure and communication network would be developed for effective use of resources of Balochistan. Gwadar Port would be connected with Central Asian states through rail and roads, he said.
He directed the authorities concerned to prepare a plan for developing the port and the city as an economic hub. He ordered them to reach out to the people to make them partners in the development process.
The prime minister approved a ‘Pur-amn Balochistan’ plan for bringing the angry Balochs back into the national mainstream.
He expressed satisfaction over the unanimous approach of all stakeholders on national issues and said that it would take the country forward.
He said the economic turnaround in the country was being acknowledged by international financial institutions which were now ready to work with Pakistan.
Earlier, the prime minister laid the foundation stone of Mangi Dam, the Balochistan Agriculture University and Samungli Road Flyover and inaugurated the Sariab Phatak Flyover in Quetta.
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban, it turns out, had been sending the world messages from a dead man. And the world kept answering him.
It continued until last month, when the Taliban issued a statement in the name of their supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, intended to “elucidate some issues about the previous and present ongoing jihadi struggle.” In it, Mullah Omar seemed open to the idea of peace negotiations, raising hopes in Kabul.
The reclusive Mullah Omar, of course, had not been seen in public in nearly 14 years, and some of his commanders, having last heard from him around 2008 or 2009, had been demanding proof of life.
Mullah Omar, according to the Afghan spy service and some Taliban officials, had already been dead for more than two years — as many Afghan officials strongly suspected.
Still, President Ashraf Ghani, who had gone all out for months to open talks with the Taliban, said before news cameras that he was encouraged by Mullah Omar’s latest words, characterizing him as having said that “negotiation is the solution.”
For every major player in the Afghan war — the Afghan government, the Taliban, the United States and Pakistan — Mullah Omar and the unity his name imposed on the Afghan insurgency became convenient in some way, either politically or militarily.
How the insurgent leader’s death remained a secret for so long is a striking phenomenon that illuminates some of the murkier dynamics of the war in Afghanistan.
For the Taliban, news of Mullah Omar’s death risked fracturing an insurgency that has not just held together, but grown over a decade. No successor was likely to be as unifying in life as Mullah Omar proved to be even in death.
His name, and his rank — emir of the faithful — became a kind of talisman against defection to competing groups. When some Taliban-allied commanders finally began jumping ship this past year, some to pledge loyalty to the Islamic State, they cited growing evidence of Mullah Omar’s death as the reason.
Mullah Omar’s deputies drew much of their authority from their association, real or perceived, with the cleric, who the Afghan spy service said died in a Pakistani hospital in April 2013.
So until last month, the Taliban continued to issue in Mullah Omar’s name intermittent statements, marking holidays, bolstering morale and excoriating the government in Kabul and foreign invaders.
The more complicated part is that Afghan, American and European officials largely went along, even though many privately acknowledged that Mullah Omar, alive or dead, was completely emeritus.
Back in January, after the official end of the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan, the Pentagon hinted that Mullah Omar possibly remained a dangerous enemy. “To the degree he is still targeting our Afghan allies and U.S. troops, yes, he remains a threat,” the Pentagon’s press secretary said.
Diplomats made talking about Mullah Omar a kind of parlor game, compulsively discussing the latest official statements.
“If you had never gotten confirmation that Mullah Omar had died, this would have gone on until he was 110,” said the European Union’s representative to Afghanistan, Franz-Michael Mellbin. “When they would say ‘Mullah Omar issued this statement,’ I would say, ‘No, he didn’t; he’s not around.’ That’s been my line.”
Some Afghans wondered why the Taliban’s enemies seemed willing to keep breathing life into Mullah Omar.
“America especially should have undermined the notion that Mullah Omar was alive,” said Hajji Atta Mohammad Ahmadi, the head of Kandahar’s peace council. He said this would have helped uncover who actually led the Taliban, important information to “conduct peace talks from the standpoint of reliable knowledge.”
Yet for officials seeking peace negotiations, which are central to the long-term American hopes for Afghanistan, it was preferable that the insurgency possessed a clear hierarchy that could choose negotiators and decide terms. With Mullah Omar’s myth intact, the Taliban possessed that.
Moreover, any Taliban statements that sounded remotely like a peace overture were usually said to have Mullah Omar’s imprimatur. There was the time Mullah Omar was said to have sanctioned the opening of a political office in Qatar. And this year, Mullah Omar’s name was invoked during a nascent peace process, which stalled when his death was acknowledged last week.
“It doesn’t make sense to undermine a leader who sounds as though he is coming around to the idea of peace,” a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group in Kabul, Graeme Smith, said, offering an explanation for why diplomats might have gone along with treating Mullah Omar as alive and relevant.
Pakistani officials have also invoked Mullah Omar’s name. As Pakistani officials told Afghanistan in recent months that they would try to get a Taliban delegation to meet with the Afghan government, the Pakistanis, perhaps to lower expectations, added a caveat: It depended on Mullah Omar’s blessing, two Afghan officials familiar with the discussions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomacy.
Pakistani officials deny that Mullah Omar ever lived in their country. But American and some, though not all, Afghan officials claim he had been living there for years. If it is true that Mullah Omar died in a Karachi-area hospital two years ago, it seems unlikely that Pakistani security officials would not have known he was dead even when they were evoking his name in the peace process.
Again, the myth of an engaged Mullah Omar proved handy. It bolstered Pakistan’s public argument that the Afghan Taliban were autonomous, even while the Pakistani security forces kept themselves at the center of the peace talks by pressuring senior Taliban members to take part.
Some Western officials suggest that Mullah Omar’s myth became somewhat comfortable for a few reasons. No one knew what might come after. And over the course of a long war it helped obscure a discomfiting truth: The identities and motives of the insurgents, and their various factions, often remained opaque.
At times, the idea of Mullah Omar helped keep “hidden a simple truth that we don’t really know what’s going on or who we’re fighting on any given day, and who their backers are,” a Western official in Kabul said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering colleagues.
Underlying it all, too, was the difficulty of getting reliable intelligence on a man who, even when known to be alive, had cloaked himself in a calculated unapproachability.
“It was not out of convenience so much as the fact that while there wasn’t hard evidence he was alive, there certainly wasn’t any he was dead,” said James F. Dobbins, who was the State Department’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2013 and 2014. “We wondered, but in the absence of any evidence that he passed away, we simply operated under the assumption that he might still be living.”
Mr. Dobbins was not surprised at how little was ever learned about Mullah Omar’s whereabouts.
“Look how long it took us to find Bin Laden, and we were looking a lot harder for him,” said Mr. Dobbins, who is now at the RAND Corporation. Asked why the search for Mullah Omar had not taken on greater urgency, Mr. Dobbins replied, “I guess the answer is: What difference would it have made?”
He added, “Whether he was alive or not, the Taliban was operating in a coherent, unified fashion in his name.”
All that raises the question: If the United States government had learned of Mullah Omar’s death, would it have acknowledged it?
“We would have had to decide whether to announce it or not,” Mr. Dobbins said. “We never faced that.”
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Sabeen with mother (Credit: nylive.nytimes.com)It was a 9mm gun, probably a Stoeger. Before Saad Aziz got this “samaan” through an associate, by his own admission, he had already plotted a murder. On the evening of Friday, April 24, 2015, he met four other young men, all well-educated like him, somewhere on Karachi’s Tariq Road to finalise and carry out the plot. As dusk deepened into night, they set off towards Defence Housing Society Phase II Extension on three motorcycles. Their destination: a café-cum-communal space – The Second Floor or T2F – where an event, Unsilencing Balochistan: take two, was under way. Their target: Sabeen Mahmud, 40, the founder and director of T2F.
Two of Aziz’s associates, he says, “were just roaming around in the vicinity of T2F”. A third was keeping an eye on the street outside. Aziz himself was riding a motorcycle driven by one Aliur Rehman, also mentioned as Tony in the police record. When he received the message that Mahmud had left T2F, he says, he followed her. “Suzuki Swift, AWH 541,” he repeats her car’s make and registration number.
As the car stopped at a signal less than 500 metres to the north of T2F, “Tony rode up alongside it.” Mahmud was in the driving seat, Aziz says. “Next to her was her mother, I think. That is what we found out from the news later. There was a man sitting in the back. I fired the gun four or five times at her.”
“There wasn’t one particular reason to target her; she was generally promoting liberal, secular values. There were those campaigns of hers, the demonstration outside Lal Masjid [in Islamabad], Pyaar ho jaane do (let there be love) on Valentine’s Day and so on.”
Sitting in a sparsely furnished room within Karachi Police’s Crime Investigation Department (CID), Aziz appears at ease even in blindfold. Recounting the events of that evening, he never sounds hurried or under duress.
After shooting Mahmud, he says he and Tony turned left from the signal towards Punjab Chowrangi and reached Sharae-e-Faisal, crossing Teen Talwar in Clifton on their way. While still on the motorcycle, he messaged others to get back to Tariq Road. Once there, he just picked up his motorcycle and they all dispersed. “We only got confirmation of her death later from the news,” he says. “At that moment [of shooting], there is no way of confirming if the person is dead. You just do it and get out of there.”
It was on February 13, 2015, when he says he decided that Mahmud had to die. That evening, he was at T2F, attending an event, The Karachi “Situation”: Exploring Responses. “It was something she said during the talk,” he recalls. “That we shouldn’t be afraid of the Taliban, we should stand up to them, demonstrate against them, something like that. That is when we made up our minds.” Later in the conversation, though, he adds, “There wasn’t one particular reason to target her: she was generally promoting liberal, secular values. There were those campaigns of hers, the demonstration outside Lal Masjid [in Islamabad], Pyaar ho jaane do (let there be love) on Valentine’s Day and so on.” He laughs softly, almost bashfully, as he mentions the last.
Aziz remembers visiting The Karachi “Situation” seminar with Tony who, the police say, remains on the run. Pictures and video footage of the event show Aziz sitting at the end of a row, close to the entrance. Next to him is Tony, a round-faced young man with a dark complexion. The police say he is an engineering graduate from the National University of Sciences and Technology, Rawalpindi campus. “Tony had a Twitter account under a fake name and he used to follow Sabeen’s tweets very closely,” says Aziz. He also mentions another source of information. “About four weeks [after the discussion on Karachi], when I got emails about events being held there, I sent Tony there a few times to check if her car was there. It wasn’t.”
On April 24, 2015, Aziz says, he told Tony to go there again. “When he confirmed her car was there, we made the plan there and then.”
By that time, he confesses, he had taken part in 20 major and minor “operations” in Karachi. These include an attack – just eight days before Mahmud’s assassination – on American academic Debra Lobo, who taught at a college in Karachi, bank heists to put together money for their hit-and-run activities, multiple attempts to target the police and the Rangers and grenade attacks on co-education schools in Gulshan-e-Iqbal (on February 3, 2015) and North Nazimabad (on March 18, 2015).
Nineteen days after Mahmud’s murder, Aziz says he took part in an attack that elicited worldwide shock and condemnation: the assassination of 43 members of the Ismaili Shia community, including women and children, travelling in a bus in the Safoora Goth area on the outskirts of Karachi.
Aziz appears as a mild-mannered young man of medium height and build, with a trimmed beard. He makes a little joke about how he can instantly tell which law enforcement or intelligence agency the person asking him questions belongs to. “The first thing the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] want to know is whether there are any links with RAW [the Indian intelligence agency]; CID is interested in the funding aspect; and the police keep hammering on about what other wardaat (hits) we’ve been involved in.”
Aziz calls himself a Salafi, though his father says the family follows Sunni, not Salafi, Islam. When an interrogator asks him why he and his associates targeted Ismaili Shias, he cites their sectarian affiliation as the reason. “It is perfectly acceptable to take the lives of women and children for that reason.”
Aziz’s radicalisation began in 2009, following a visit to Saudi Arabia for umrah with his family. Upon his return to Pakistan, he decided to read translations of the Quran. “Until then I had only read it once in Arabic.” (One investigator, however, reports that Aziz could not recite certain Quranic verses that every practising Muslim recites at least once a day during Isha prayers.)
For a while, he joined the Tableeghi Jamaat. Then, he took to attending lectures by a scholar, Shaykh Kamaluddin Ahmed, a professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums) at the time, whose Sufi interpretation of Islam is distinct from what the Tableeghi Jamaat stands for. “But neither [Ahmed] nor Tableeghi Jamaat even discussed jihad,” he says. “It was over time, primarily through reading the Quran, that I developed an inclination towards jihad.”
Aziz then met Tony, whom he suspected had contacts with militants. Tony made him wait for some time before introducing him to one Haris, an al-Qaeda operative. “[Haris] was heading al-Qaeda’s daawati (recruitment) wing for Pakistan at the time. I joined this wing at the end of 2010,” says Aziz.
In September 2013, Haris, whose real name is said to be Abu Zar, was arrested from a hostel of the Punjab University in Lahore, along with two others, for alleged links with al-Qaeda. In the last 22 months, the authorities have not produced him in any court of law for a trial. Police sources in Lahore say Haris and his associates are in ISI’s custody. This information, however, could not be confirmed through other sources.
In 2011, Aziz went to Waziristan for training where, he says, he was attached to a group headed by Ahmad Farooq, deputy head of al-Qaeda in the subcontinent and a former student of Punjab University. (Farooq was killed in an American drone strike in January 2015 in North Waziristan.)
By 2013, Aziz says he was disillusioned and frustrated. Instead of allowing him take part in terrorist operations, his handler Haris limited him to media duties — such as managing online jihadist publications. “In mid-2013, I met Haider Abbas,” says Aziz. Abbas introduced him to Tahir Minhas alias Saeen, identified by the police as a member of al-Qaeda.
As a senior, experienced commander, Minhas set the ground rules for the group that Aziz joined. “We all used aliases; I only know Tony by his real name,” says Aziz. He got his own alias — Tin Tin. “None of us would ask for the members’ real names, addresses or anything that could identify them in case one of us was arrested. That was on Minhas’s instructions.”
The cell had no designated ‘safe house’ to meet. Minhas often called its members for meetings to Jan Japan Motors, a car auction site on the Super Highway. He also selected the targets. The attack on Mahmud, though, was different. Aziz says it was on his own initiative. “Tahir wasn’t even there that day.”
In 2014, the sudden ascendancy of the Islamic State (IS) and its territorial gains in Iraq and Syria became a lightning rod for militants across the globe. In January this year, IS announced its expansion into Khorasan, a historical region comprising parts of present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and some Central Asian countries. Several factions of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) immediately joined it.
“We just finished a 16-day joint investigation but we have not established any direct or indirect link between him and Daesh. Al-Qaeda’s tentacles, however, touch him in multiple ways. We are sure he is with al-Qaeda.”
“Among my acquaintances there was already a lot of discussion about the merits of al-Qaeda and Daesh [the Arabic acronym for IS]. Many of us felt that al-Qaeda was reduced to mainly talk and little action,” Aziz says. “We were in Waziristan when the creation of the [IS’s] Khorasan [chapter] was announced, and we pledged loyalty to its emir, [former TTP commander] Hafiz Saeed Khan.” (A senior official of the Intelligence Bureau in Peshawar says Khan was “in Tor Dara area in Khyber Agency’s Tirah valley in January 2015”, the time period to which Aziz refers.)
Subsequently, he says, some of his associates did pro-IS wall chalking and left propaganda pamphlets in parts of Karachi, especially at the scenes of some of the attacks they carried out. Some of the people working with him, he claims, have gone to Syria as part of an effort to strengthen their connection with the IS leadership there.
Weeks after Mahmud’s murder, Jaadu, her white Persian cat, would sit expectantly by the door of her house for hours every evening, waiting for a familiar footfall on the steps outside. Inside, her mother, Mahenaz Mahmud, sits on a chair looking like her daughter might have 20 years in the future — had she had that much time. The mother also exudes the same warmth, intelligence and artlessness as the daughter — and, since Mahmud’s death, a stoicism that would move a stone to tears.
“On April 24, Sabeen made breakfast for us (Mahenaz and Mahenaz’s mother) as usual. That was her routine. She would switch on the kettle, run to her computer, then she would put the bread in the toaster,” Mahenaz recalls with a chuckle. “She didn’t want me to have a cold slice, so she would toast the second slice only after I had finished the first.” They would usually chat away during breakfasts. “We would talk about all kinds of things.” Sometimes, Mahmud would seek her mother’s advice. “She would ask me what I thought of something being done at T2F. Sometimes we would flog some philosophical concept. We would share articles, then discuss them… there was lots that we talked about.”
That day, though, Mahenaz sensed something unusual. “I don’t know whether it was anxiety but there was some element about this Baloch missing people event, especially because of the talk that was cancelled at LUMS [under orders from the ISI],” she says. Mahmud was not moderating the session; she hadn’t even organised it. “Someone else wanted to do it and she had agreed to provide the space,” says Mahenaz. “But she talked to some people about it and then said to me “It’ll be ok, Amma””.
After breakfast, the mother went to work – she is an academic programmes advisor at a teacher training institute – but planned to attend the talk on the Baloch missing persons. “I hadn’t been to any event for a long time because I get quite exhausted by the evening but that day I had a very strong feeling that I must be around her.”
Following the event, around 9pm, Mahmud was planning to drop her mother home, pick up a friend and go to another friend’s place for dinner. “When Sabeen came out [of T2F], I remember she was in a hurry, and she told the driver to sit in the back. I got in the seat next to her and we drove off.”
A short distance away, the Sunset Boulevard traffic signal turned red and their car came to a stop. “It is impossible for me to process those five, 10 seconds,” Mahenaz says quietly. “I was talking to Sabeen, and my face was turned towards her. She was looking in front. A motorcycle came up along the side she was sitting, much too close for comfort. My eyes became riveted on a gun in someone’s hand. I said to Sabeen, “What do you think he wants? He’s got a gun.” I thought it was a mugging. All this must have taken only three or four seconds. Then the window shattered, and Sabeen’s head just tilted to one side; her eyes were open. There was not a moan, not a groan, not a whimper. Then pandemonium broke out around us.”
Mahmud was shot five times. Her mother also took two bullets: one in her back and another that, after going through Mahmud’s body, went into her arm and out again. She says she remembers feeling there was something “happening with my body but I wasn’t sure what.” She was too focussed on her daughter to be sure of anything else. “I was saying ‘Sabeen talk to me, give me some indication that you can hear what I am saying.’ Even though I knew that she had gone, somewhere there was a glimmer of hope.”
She herself was taken to the Aga Khan University Hospital for treatment. “Next morning, I started demanding that I wanted to go home. I was told that Sabeen’s body was being kept in a morgue and I thought she should be put on the way to her last journey immediately.” With a bullet still lodged in her back, she left the hospital to bury her only child.
When Mahenaz Mahmud learnt that the police had arrested some educated young men for carrying out the murder, it was a shock to her, almost a betrayal of some of her most closely held convictions. “I felt terrified. I am a person who teaches my students that we all have our biases and that we put people into boxes because we don’t have time to find out about each and every person.”
In the third week of June, T2F organised a qawwali session to celebrate her daughter’s birthday posthumously. While observing the audience from the back of the room, she couldn’t shake off a nagging thought. “I was looking at the young boys in the audience and wondering, ‘So what are they thinking? What is really going on in their head?’ Normally I wouldn’t have thought that about young people. I would be happy that all kinds of young people come to T2F. Now I am really scared about how these young men’s minds can be messed with.”
The senselessness of the murder is difficult for her to process. “I want to ask them, why? What happened to you? What was it that bothered you about Sabeen? Was it something she stood for? Did you just want to make an example out of her? Did you think that taking a human life is such a small matter? But then I realise that these people think very differently. Their paradigms are different. Their schemas are different.”
In another part of Karachi, sitting in her home studio, architect Marvi Mazhar, one of Mahmud’s closest friends, says: “I always knew. I always thought that if someone gets to her, it’ll be someone educated. Sabeen had to deal with a lot of hate speech, and from people who were all educated. They used to write, they used to tweet, they were all very tech-savvy. Every time she’d complain that these young bachas, I wish I could have chai with them, talk to them.”
Mazhar recalls an incident from last November. At the Creative Karachi Festival organised by T2F, the azan went unnoticed for a few moments in the hubbub and a young man angrily demanded that the music be stopped instantly. “Sabeen went up to the guy, took him aside and spoke to him for a while; a little later, he actually brought flowers for her by way of apology. There was this strange magic about her,” she says with a wistful smile.
In the days leading up to her death, Mahmud was particularly restless, says Mazhar. On Tuesday, April 21, there was a get-together of friends at Mazhar’s place where Mahmud was “a little agitated”. Mazhar heard her saying to someone on the phone, “If we are not going to do it now, then we won’t do it because after that I am leaving for London and I don’t have time.” She assumes this was about the talk on Baloch missing persons. “Her heart was not into this talk, mainly because she had so much going on otherwise. She believed in it, she believed that the Baloch must be given a platform. But, I felt, judging from the conversations I have had with her, she was waiting for a signal, waiting for someone to tell her not to do this.”
A sturdy metal barrier bars entry into a rough stretch at the end of Beaumont Road in Karachi’s Civil Lines. Only a few street lights illuminate the area; that, along with the dilapidated condition of the road, is perhaps deliberate, designed to make things a little more difficult for terrorists looking to target the CID headquarters that looms up on the right, after the barrier. They did exactly that on November 10, 2010, killing at least 17 people and injuring over 100 in a massive truck bombing. Access inside the CID premises now lies behind a raft of concrete barriers, designed to minimise the possibility of another attack.
Raja Umar Khattab, Senior Superintendent Police, strides into his office at around 10.30pm after taraweeh prayers. A stocky, barrel-chested man, he is wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with khaki pants, rolled up at the bottom and rubber slippers. He speaks in rapid-fire sentences; names of terrorists roll off his tongue like those of old acquaintances. Several phone calls interrupt conversation; a senior official has misplaced his cell phone and Khattab is trying to get it traced. “Sir, don’t worry. I’ll make sure it is back with you soon,” he says reassuringly.
As the CID’s lead investigator, Khattab is flushed with pride over the recent arrest of what he calls a major terrorist cell. He has no doubt the police under him have the men who killed Mahmud and committed the Safoora Goth massacre, apart from various other crimes.
Khattab believes it was a failed romantic relationship that sowed the seed for Aziz’s radicalisation.
The Sindh Rangers, too, have made a separate claim of arresting a mastermind of the attack on Ismaili Shias. “He has nothing to do with Safoora Goth incident; he never did,” says Khattab, shaking his head vigorously, when asked about the man arrested by the Rangers and reportedly linked to the detained office-bearers of the Fishermen’s Co-Operative Society. “When you go to a court to seek remand, you put in extra things. Otherwise it can get difficult to get a remand,” is how he explains the reason for the claim made by the Rangers.
More importantly, Aziz’s claim about his allegiance with IS meets with a similarly dismissive response. “We just finished a 16-day joint investigation but we have not established any direct or indirect link between him and Daesh. Al-Qaeda’s tentacles, however, touch him in multiple ways. We are sure he is with al-Qaeda,” says Khattab.
“And why should it be so surprising that these terrorists are so educated? There were always educated people in al-Qaeda. Educated people don’t join TTP. It is the madrasa-educated ones who join TTP. They have the desire for jihad but these [educated jihadis] are ideologues. They envision grander things,” he adds. And for that reason, Khattab states, they are far more dangerous: They can be anywhere — the shopping mall, the university, saying their prayers beside you.
Khattab believes it was a failed romantic relationship that sowed the seed for Aziz’s radicalisation. “He became disillusioned with worldly pursuits,” says the police officer. “When he joined Unilever for an internship [in the second half of 2010], he met Aliur Rehman – alias Tony – who was also working there.” Tony, a member of Dr Israr Ahmed’s Lahore-based Islamic movement, Tanzeem-e-Islami, was to play a vital role in Aziz’s radicalisation, inspiring him to fight for a Muslim caliphate, says the police officer.
But it was Minhas, the police claim, who turned Aziz into what he has become. In Khattab’s words: “Saad says Tahir motivated him so much that he no longer has any fear of killing people. His role in targeted killings was that of the shooter; by my reckoning, he has killed about 20 people.”
CID officials maintain that the terrorist group of which Aziz was a member had split from a larger al-Qaeda formation eight to 10 months ago. “While Tahir is its askari (militant) commander, he in turn answers to Abdullah Yousuf, who is in Helmand, Afghanistan. The other group formed by this rupture is led by Haji Sahib, Ramzi Yousef’s older brother,” says Khattab. He believes the crime spree by Aziz’s group, which hadn’t yet given itself a name, was aimed at raising its profile within the terrorist fraternity so that someone “owned” it.
Tracking down the group, he says, was not easy. They operated under aliases, did not use mobile phones and, instead, employed a Wi-Fi-based application called Talkray to communicate. The CID first picked up their trail sometime in 2014 through some men who were in prison, Khattab says. Based on the information obtained from them – he does not quite elaborate how but only says “we did some working on them” – the police picked up two former Karachi University students who had joined al-Qaeda through contacts at the campus and whose job was to maintain the organisation’s website. “We soon figured out that there is a network of educated al-Qaeda members in Gulistan-e-Jauhar, Gulshan-e-Iqbal and other areas around Karachi University,” he says.
The clues led the police to a sports teacher at Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, who had set up a laboratory in his house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal where, along with his son and nephew, he used to teach young men to assemble Improvised Explosive Devices. The police also found a lot of written material that led them to conclude that a large al-Qaeda group was active in Karachi. “We found out it had two wings — one askari and one daawati.” The police do not divulge whether or not they have arrested and interrogated the teacher or, for that matter, any other details about his identity and whereabouts.
While investigating the people arrested earlier, the police learnt that Minhas was the group’s commander. Born in a village in the Jhelum district of Punjab, Minhas is a resident of Kotri, near Hyderabad, and has been in and out of police’s hands since 2007. According to an official source, one looking very closely into the massacre of Ismaili Shias, Minhas, (a matriculate, according to this source), had a thriving poultry business in Kotri at one point. He is also, says the same source, rabidly anti-Shia and has been a member of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned organisation involved in hundreds of acts of sectarian and religious terrorism.
Khattab and his team of investigators describe Minhas as a highly sophisticated militant, with his own signature style. They claim to have discovered important similarities in the terrorist activities he has carried out: in all of these, silencer-fitted imported Glock, Caracal and Stoeger pistols are used; he and his associates always hit their targets in the head. “By the time the Safoora Goth massacre happened, we had gathered lots of little clues,” says Khattab.
Some other clues materialised in September 2014 after a suspect named Amir Abbas managed to escape during an encounter with the police but his wife was injured and arrested. “We found plenty of incriminating material at his house and worked on it quietly from September [2014] to April [2015], matching and cross matching the evidence,” says Khattab.
This finally led to the arrest of Minhas and his associates, including Aziz. “When we recovered their laptops, their browsing history helped us connect them to other cases. “Had we been even one day late, all these boys would have left Karachi for Quetta, Waziristan etc.”
The CID officers also show what they call a hit list. These are A-4 size prints, carrying no information about their senders and receivers, but complete with photos and addresses of the targets, which include naval officers, intelligence agency personnel, police officers, showbiz personalities, journalists, workers of non-government organisations and three fashion designers. In some cases, the prints also carry details of the targets’ daily routine. When asked why the group wanted to target fashion designers, Aziz is quoted by Khattab to have said, “You kill three. No one will design sleeveless clothes again.”
At a distance from the police’s neatly tied narration, events take a rather mysterious turn. A former academic at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) who once taught Aziz, and who has since moved to Europe, recalls his student as “being extremely close to [an intelligence agency]”. In April 2014, this academic needed a police clearance report for some work. Having tried unsuccessfully for a week to obtain it, he asked Aziz for help. “He told me it was no problem, and that he could get it for me in 10 minutes. He was wrong; it took him an hour.” This alleged link, however, could not be verified through any other source.
Aziz’s purported reasons for having targeted Mahmud are also rather mystifying. Many Pakistanis, weary of having their lives held to ransom by rampant militancy, make anti-Taliban statements the way she made at the talk on the Karachi situation. And on February 14 this year, Aziz’s restaurant had a promotional offer targeted at customers and their “loved ones” — complete with the image of two hearts placed right next to each other. Isn’t this just another way of saying pyaar ho jaane do? His account of planning her murder also mixes up a few details. He states that Tony was unable to spot Mahmud’s car outside T2F between the February 13 talk on Karachi and the April 24 discussion on Baloch missing persons. (Mahmud did leave Karachi on February 19 for an overseas trip and returned on March 5. She briefly went out of the country again from March 25 to April 5.) Between her arrival from abroad and her assassination, there were at least five events at T2F and she was also attending to her office work at T2F every day during this period. Can, then, her murder precisely on the day of Unsilencing Balochistan: Take Two be seen as purely a coincidence?
Whatever the motivation behind his actions – whether he is serving the ends of as-yet unknown masters or assuaging his own desire to ‘right’ society’s moral compass – his confession suggests that he is part of a cell carrying out orders issued by a central command structure. This is particularly evident in the Safoora Goth incident: an attack of that size and precision cannot be carried out by a motley group of like-minded individuals.
While Aziz has been singing in police custody, his confession may not stand the test of a trial in a court of law. Confessions before the police or a JIT, or any executive authority for that matter, have no legal standing. “[Only] a confession before a judicial magistrate has legal sanctity because a judge is an independent authority,” says Karachi-based lawyer Faisal Siddiqi. “A judge is not part of the investigation so he has no vested interest [in its outcome].”
Without independently verifiable evidence, it is virtually impossible to successfully prosecute any accused on the basis of their confessions alone. Ajmal Pahari, an alleged target killer, for instance, was acquitted in 2011 notwithstanding his on-camera confession of having committed over 100 murders. (He was soon re-arrested on additional murder charges, however, and is currently behind bars.) Aziz shows little concern about his trial and punishment when asked about his future. “What are my plans now?” he says completely unfazed, and laughing slowly. “We’ll go to prison, but we’ll break out of there. Then, we’ll make plans.”
ISLAMABAD, Aug 2: Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan lambasted Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) Chief Altaf Hussain on Sunday for his last night’s speech, saying the purpose of such a speech was to bring a bad name to Pakistan and its institutions.
“Speeches made from London have crossed limits of all the principles, laws and regulations,” said Chaudhry Nisar while addressing a press conference here.
He said Altaf’s invitation for NATO forces to come to Pakistan and launch an operation is completely preposterous and that his speech is tantamount to waging a war against the country.
The minister also said that the government is reviewing all aspects of Hussain’s speeches and the issue will be raised with the British government legally.
The interior minister said the MQM’s reaction to the ongoing operation in Karachi has grown intense over the past few weeks. “MQM is actually angry at the cases being faced by Altaf Hussain in London,” he added.
He clarified that Pakistan has nothing to do with Altaf Hussain’s cases in Britain.
He also dispelled the perception that the ongoing operation in Karachi is targeting only MQM. “No political party including MQM is being targeted in the Karachi crackdown; the operation is being pursued indiscriminately against all the criminal elements,” he explained.
Nisar said people belonging to various parties were apprehended during the operation and those who were arrested wrongly were released later.
He said there has been a marked improvement in criminal activities in Karachi including targeted killing, extortion and kidnapping for ransom. He added that targeted killing saw an 87 percent decline in the month of July 2015 alone while not a single case of kidnapping for ransom was reported in the same month.
Altaf Hussain’ speech from last night:
MQM Chief Altaf Hussain asked his party workers to stage protests in front of United Nations, White House and NATO to raise the demand for sending their troops to Karachi.
Addressing MQM’s Annual Convention in the US city of Dallas via telephone, Altaf said India itself is a coward country, if it had some honour it would not have allowed ‘bloodshed of Mohajirs’ on Pakistani soil.
He also reiterated the demand for a separate province for Mohajirs.
Prayers for Mullah Omar (Credit: commercialappeal.com)KABUL, July 30 — Taliban officials Thursday confirmed the death of the group’s founder and picked his former deputy as successor even as they put the brakes on peace talks with Afghan leaders.
A series of moves — which included strengthening ties with a militant faction that has al-Qaeda links — pointed to possible rifts within the Taliban and a potential major blow to hopes for negotiating an end Afghanistan’s 14-year conflict.
Yet the Taliban also offered some rare hints at outreach and self-reflection by apologizing for “mistakes” under the rule of the late Mohammad Omar, who Afghan officials said died more than two years ago.
A second round of peace talks between the Taliban and the government in Kabul had been scheduled to begin Friday in Pakistan, which hosted the opening session this month.
A statement from Pakistan’s foreign minister said the Taliban had requested the postponement amid “uncertainty” following confirmation of the death of Omar.
A spokesman for the Afghan government says it is investigating reports that Mullah Omar, the reclusive leader of the Afghan Taliban, may have died in 2013. (Reuters)
Taliban officials did not publicly announce their intention to snub the planned talks, but envoys at their political office in Qatar — the base for one major faction of the group — said earlier that they knew of no upcoming talks.
Seeking an end to the 14-year insurgency by Taliban forces is a major priority for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. The Taliban leadership shifts put in motion by the formal announcement of Omar’s death, however, could raise new complications for the peace bid.
It also could deepen divisions between Taliban factions supporting the peace initiative and those seeking to press ahead with the insurgency, which has included stepped-up attacks in Kabul and gains by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan’s north.
In an e-mail to journalists, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said Omar had “abandoned this mortal world” as the result of an illness. It gave no further details, and the circumstances and location of Omar’s death remain murky.
On Wednesday, Afghan officials said Omar died in April 2013 in a hospital in the southern Pakistani city Karachi, but they left open speculation that the death carried what they called a “suspicious nature.”
It remains unclear how widely the knowledge of Omar’s death had spread among the Taliban’s ranks since April 2013. But the acknowledgment brought a quick response from the Taliban to proclaim its new leaders.
In comments to the Associated Press, Taliban officials said the group’s supreme council had met in Pakistan and picked Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, Omar’s longtime senior aide, to replace him. Mansour was widely considered a top candidate for the post, but his selection is likely to be controversial.
Although the Taliban said Omar had died of an illness, a rival militant faction accused Mansour and another aide of killing him. Also, Mansour is said to be close to Pakistan’s government. Leaders of several other factions — including those based in Qatar — distrust Pakistan’s powerful intelligence services.
Analysts and political leaders in Kabul said the tumult erupting within the Taliban could potentially empower hard-liners and derail the Afghanistan’s hopes for peace.
“The Taliban are much bigger troublemakers now than they were two years ago. They are more violent, more organized and causing more harm,” said Shukria Barakzai, a member of parliament who met with Taliban officials in Oslo several months ago as part of preparations for the talks.
Omar’s death, she said, “could encourage them even more in this direction. The peace process will take much longer now.”
In another leadership shift, the Taliban gave the No. 2 post to the head of the Haqqani network, a militant group that has connections to al-Qaeda. Sirajuddin Haqqani’s group is thought to be linked to a series of attacks, including an assault on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in 2011.
Haqqani-linked fighters captured Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in June 2009 when he disappeared from his base in eastern Afghanistan. Bergdahl was freed last year in a swap for a group of Guantanamo detainees.
“The Taliban are fighting very hard now, and the situation is getting more complicated than ever,” said Barakzai. “Only a powerful international presence can keep the talks going and keep the Taliban from veering in a very dangerous direction.”
The Taliban statement Thursday — issued in the name of Omar’s son and his brother, Abdul Manan — also apologized for “any mistakes” made by Omar during his “rule of Afghanistan.”
Omar was toppled by U.S. and allied forces after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks on the United States for not surrendering al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. During its six years in control, the Taliban imposed strict Islamic rule that included banning education for girls, and carrying out acts of cultural purging such as the destruction of ancient Buddha statues.
Murphy reported from Washington. Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.
School in Karimabad, Hunza (Credit: Washingtonpost.com)
KARIMABAD, July 22 —Visitors to this stunningly beautiful valley, towered over by five snow-capped mountains, sometimes feel as if they are standing at the edge of the earth — or, maybe, at the middle of it.
Once a hardscrabble Himalayan town where residents barely had enough to eat, Karimabad, in the Hunza Valley, is now one of Pakistan’s most idyllic spots — an oasis of tolerance, security and good schools. That standard of living can be traced to residents’ moderate interpretation of Islam as well as the considerable support from one of the world’s largest charities.
Many parents in the valley say that if they had to choose, they would send their daughters to school over their sons. Nearly all families own at least a small plot of land. Residents say they cannot remember the last murder in the valley. And unlike in other parts of Pakistan, streams are not polluted with plastic bags, human waste and decaying appliances.
Such views — and protection of the surroundings — have allowed the Hunza Valley’s population to become a bulwark against Islamist extremism, despite its relative proximity to militant strongholds in Pakistan’s tribal belt and Kashmir, a disputed region that Pakistan and India have fought wars over.
“Here, we have facilities, we study, and there is no terrorism,” said Haider Ali, 18, watching classmates play soccer as the sun set behind Mount Rakaposhi, elevation 25,551 feet.
Not everything is perfect, of course. Electricity deficits can keep the lights out for days at a time. A once-vibrant tourism industry collapsed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Deforestation has led to a shortage of firewood, so families must huddle in one room to stay warm when winter temperatures plunge toward zero.
And some local leaders worry the community has become too dependent on charitable organizations, leaving it vulnerable to a sudden reduction in aid. Such concerns are growing more pronounced as the Pakistani government, which temporarily expelled Save the Children last month, implements strict new licensing requirements for international aid groups
But for now, Karimabad is an example of what’s possible in rural Pakistan when residents accept support from international charities and stand firm against the threats posed by militancy.
“This is the real Shangri-La,” Lars-Gunnar Wigemark, the former European Union ambassador to Pakistan, said in an interview after seeing the Hunza Valley for the first time last year.
Indeed, over the decades, the valley has been cited as one of several Himalayan locations that might have inspired the mythical Shangri-La in James Hilton’s 1933 novel, “Lost Horizon.” Even if it didn’t, the valley’s enormous cliffs, 20,000-foot-plus peaks and turquoise Hunza River would certainly make a spectacular backdrop for a Hollywood movie.
More than 90 percent of the residents of Karimabad identify as Shiite Ismaili Muslims, among the most moderate sects of the Islamic faith. They are followers of the Aga Khan family, viewing it as directly descended from the prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law.
Prince Karim Al Husseini, a billionaire philanthropist who lives in France and goes by the title Aga Khan IV, is the Ismailis’ spiritual leader — and a major benefactor of the Hunza Valley.
Husseini’s Aga Khan Development Network has an annual budget of $600 million and operates in more than 30 countries. Over the past four decades, it has worked with other charities to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the valley, paving roads, opening schools and establishing health clinics and water treatment centers for the 65,000 residents of the Hunza Valley.
About 16,000 of them live in Karimabad, which was the capital when Hunza was an independent state prior to the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
During the 1980s, in a bid to expand the local economy, the Aga Khan network helped persuade farmers to grow cherries and peaches along with the traditional cash crops of wheat and potatoes. Now, much of Karimabad is an orchard.
Husseini is also a proponent of education, and nearly everyone in Karimabad can quote one of his teachings: “If a man has two children, one boy and one girl, you should educate the daughter first. Because, when she is educated, she can educate her entire family.”
According to Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, the Hunza Valley’s literacy rate is 77 percent, although Karimabad residents say nearly everyone younger than 30 can read and write. The national literacy rate is about 58 percent, with a sharp disparity between men and women.
A World Bank study published last year concluded that female literacy in parts of the Hunza Valley had reached 90 percent, compared with 5 percent in another mountainous district, Diamer, about five hours away by road.
“When I was in school, few could even speak English,” said Javed Ali, 41, manager of Karimabad’s Hilltop Hotel. “Now, everyone speaks it fluently.”
From settlements at an elevation as high as 9,000 feet, children walk as much as three miles into the valley to get to school each morning.
After middle school, some female students enroll in the Aga Khan Higher Secondary School for Girls, which teaches only math and science. Nearly all graduates go on to college, according to Zahra Alidad, the principal and a graduate of the school.
“Even though it’s a remote area, students are motivated to learn,” said Alidad, noting that girls in other rural areas of Pakistan often stop attending school as early as fifth grade.
Another prominent school in Karimabad, the Japan-sponsored Hasegawa Memorial Public School, bills its teaching philosophy as one that creates “global citizens with a cosmopolitan, ethical orientation so that they can survive in any corner of the world.”
Students and teachers are encouraged to discuss sensitive issues, even those that challenge some Islamic teachings, said Nazim Aman, the school’s principal. Ninth-graders, for example, have been assigned this summer to read “The Kite Runner,” a novel about Afghan culture that touches on adultery, rape and homosexuality.
“We are true believers of pluralism,” Aman said. “We believe you, yourself, have to be authentic. We believe in diversity. We value social justice. We love nature, and you must develop that sense for survival.”
That teaching is echoed by the Sunni Muslim leader of one of Hunza’s largest tribes, most of whose members are Shiite Ismailis.
“A dish will taste better the more you mix it with spices,” said Mashgool Alam, 80, the leader of the Kurkutz tribe. “And if you mix many religions, society becomes a better place.”
Iqbal Walji, president of the Aga Khan Council for Pakistan, said that sort of attitude has helped shelter the Hunza Valley from the extremist ideology that has taken root in other parts of the country.
“When you have communities improving their own lives, and obtaining education, it prevents easy manipulation of communities and allows them to be resilient against external forces,” Walji said.
Some local leaders complain that residents have become too passive and reliant on the Aga Khan charities.
“Ismailis have become absentee stakeholders,” said Izhar Ali Hunzia, a local political leader. “All decisions are centralized and made in France, and people are just waiting for others to solve their problems.”
For his part, Ali Murad, 66, said he is grateful for financial support that helped free his and other families from the isolating grip of mountain life.
When Murad was a child, he recalled, his family struggled to make money and ate mostly food made from wheat. Now he owns eight cherry trees, 35 apple trees and 40 apricot trees. Two of his three sons have graduated from college. One works as a chef in Dubai and the other as a Chinese interpreter, he said.
“I’ve learned it’s better to own your own trees because, when you get money, you can just buy wheat,” Murad said.
Families of disappeared protest (Credit: nytimes.com)
KOHAT, July 25 — Niaz Bibi’s son disappeared into the night, whisked away by Pakistani soldiers who accused him of being a Taliban fighter. For 18 anguishing months, she could find no word of his fate. Then she got a phone call.
“Come to Kohat prison,” said the man on the other end. “Tell nobody.”
At the prison, in northwestern Pakistan, she was directed to a separate, military-run internment center where her son, Asghar Muhammad, was brought to her. They touched hands through a metal grill, and she wept as he reassured her that he would be home soon.
But when the phone rang again, one month later, an official delivered crushing news. “Your son is dead,” he said. “Come collect his body.”
Mr. Muhammad was one of dozens of detainees who have died in military detention in Pakistan in the past year and a half, amid accounts of torture, starvation and extrajudicial execution from former detainees, relatives and human rights monitors. The accusations come at a time when the country’s generals, armed with extensive new legal and judicial powers, have escalated their war against the Pakistani Taliban by sweeping into their strongholds and detaining hundreds of people.
Critics warn that those gains may be coming at the cost of human rights, potentially weakening Pakistan’s fragile democracy and, ultimately, undermining its counterterrorism effort.
“People live in abject fear of speaking out about what the military is doing,” said Mustafa Qadri of Amnesty International, which received reports of more than 100 deaths in military custody in 2014.
At issue is a network of 43 secretive internment centers dotting Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province and the tribal belt. Little is known about the centers, formally established in 2011 and given greater powers by a tough antiterrorism law passed last year. Most are based in existing jails and military bases and operate far from public view. The total number of detainees has not been made public.
Relatives of missing people have filed 2,100 cases with the Peshawar High Court, seeking news of their fates.
In many instances, the first news comes when a body is sent home.
Last year, for instance, a man from the Kurram tribal district told the court that three of his six sons who were detained in Kohat had died in custody. The man’s lawyer said he had not brought a criminal complaint against the military out of fear that his remaining sons would meet a similar fate.
The chief military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, did not respond to a detailed list of questions about conditions at the internment centers.
Classified documents leaked last year by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden made clear that American officials were aware of widespread human rights violations by the Pakistani military, even as billions of dollars in American military aid kept flowing to Pakistan.
Pakistani military officials tortured and killed people suspected of being militants “with the knowledge, if not consent, of senior officers,” said one American assessment in 2011.
“The military took care to make the deaths seem to occur in the course of counterinsurgency operations, from natural causes, or as the result of personal vendettas,” said the document, first cited by The Washington Post.
The Obama administration, which has gradually improved its relationship with Pakistan this year, has been muted in its public criticism of the violations and has not invoked a provision of American law that limits assistance to foreign militaries guilty of human rights abuses.
Instead, the administration approved more weapons for the Pakistani military: In April, it approved almost $1 billion worth of helicopters and laser-guided Hellfire missiles for use in counterterrorism operations.
State Department officials say they have warned the Pakistani military that the accounts of rights violations could lead to future restrictions on military assistance.
Until recently, accusations of such abuses by Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officers have been sharpest in western Baluchistan Province, where the army has faced accusations of abducting, torturing and killing people suspected of being Baluch nationalists as part of a decade-old effort to quell a separatist rebellion there.
The deaths at internment centers have come in conjunction with the military’s battlefield gains — in the past year, it has seized control of much of North Waziristan — and a general hardening of public opinion against the Pakistani Taliban.
Tough new antiterrorism laws have given the army greater legal powers, and the number of deaths in military custody has declined in recent months since a military court system, authorized by Parliament in January, became active. Fayaz Zafar, a journalist in the Swat Valley, counted 48 bodies being returned to that area in 2014 and five so far this year, the latest on June 2.
Experts say the military-run courts fall far short of international standards, and their authority is being challenged in Pakistan’s Supreme Court. But public opposition to the courts has been muted, particularly since a Taliban massacre that killed 150 people, most of them children, in December. The authorities have taken harder action against militants on other fronts, too, lifting a moratorium on executions that has led to 178 convicts being hanged.
The executions have drawn repeated protest from the United Nations and the European Union but barely a whimper of public complaint.
By several accounts, conditions at the internment camps can be brutal. One former detainee from Swat said he had been thrashed with barbed wire, reduced to eating soap because he was fed so little and forced to give false testimony against other detainees in court.
“I felt guilty, but I knew I would be beaten if I refused,” said the man who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further trouble.
Relatives of detainees who die in custody say they have been pressured into conducting hurried funerals, often at night, and sometimes coerced into declining an autopsy, even if the corpse bears signs of ill treatment. In other instances, they say, local mullahs are forbidden from offering prayers for the dead.
Asma Jahangir, a leading human rights lawyer, has brought a Supreme Court case challenging the detention of 33 men. When brought to court two years ago, two of the men said they had been tortured. They have since died in custody. “They supposedly had heart attacks,” Ms. Jahangir said.
In Swat, several women have formed a protest group to seek news of their missing relatives through street demonstrations and court actions. Their leader, Jan Saba, said in an interview that she had “knocked on every door” in search of news of her missing husband, but that she still had heard nothing.
Few dispute that many of the military detainees are linked to the Taliban. Mr. Muhammad, the detainee who died in Kohat last year, admitted to his family that he had spent eight months in the company of Taliban fighters before being arrested, relatives said.
One of his brothers, Abid, said that when the family asked Mr. Muhammad what he was doing during that time, he replied, “The less you know, the better.”
Such tales have led civilian officials to turn a blind eye to conditions at the internment centers. Jamaluddin Shah, the top civilian official in Kohat, said in an interview that he did not believe the military practiced torture or conducted executions at the center. But, he added, “even if such cases were true, why would that be an issue?”
“Have you seen them slaughtering people and distributing those videos?” Mr. Shah asked, referring to Taliban execution videos. “Do you think they deserve any human rights?”
But although the army has clearly weakened the Taliban in recent months, experts warn that reports of abuse could ultimately hurt its counterterrorism effort, in much the same way that harsh American tactics after 2001 led to global condemnation and bolstered militant recruitment.
Ms. Jahangir, the lawyer, calls the network of internment centers “Pakistan’s little Guantánamo Bay.”
“These laws risk turning Pakistan into a security state,” Ms. Jahangir said. “We cannot afford torture and killings on a mass scale, even in a time of war.”
Taha Siddiqui reported from Kohat, and Declan Walsh from London. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and an employee of The New York Times contributed from Pakistan.
