Zahid Hussain, Islamabad | July 14, 2007
THE windowless room inside the girls' madrassa was charred, transformed from a seat of religious learning to an inferno by the suicide bomber who detonated his charge as Pakistani commandos stormed the Red Mosque compound.
Five of the people who were sheltering inside the room were so badly burnt by the explosion that it was impossible to tell their gender or age. Yet the officer who led journalists into the site of the week-long siege said that his men had found a severed head, presumed to be that of the suicide bomber, on the floor.
In the next room, swarms of flies buzzed over the stained floor and the chunks of broken masonry where militants had built a bunker. Walls that had been painted with Islamic verses were riddled with bullet holes, evidence of a vicious 35-hour assault in which commandos fought from room to room against 70 heavily armed militants.
But there was little blood and no bodies remained. Army spokesman Waheed Arshad, who had earlier announced a plan to "sanitise" the mosque before journalists were allowed to visit, bristled at the suggestion that more had been killed than the 75 bodies he had said had been recovered.
The tour came as President Pervez Musharraf vowed to take the fight against extremism to its conclusion. Pakistan was braced for a wave of protests by hardline Islamists yesterday following General Musharraf's pledge.
The nation's main alliance of fundamentalist parties, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, promised long, countrywide protests against the storming of the mosque.
Earlier, the commander who stormed the mosque said: "The resistance was beyond our expectation."
Inside the madrassa, an inscription on a blackboard read: "Oh God give us a martyr's death."
Another inscription, in what had been one of Pakistan's biggest religious seminaries, read: "Even if you are alone and your enemies are in their hundreds, do not see your weakness but have faith in the almighty."
Thousands of women and girls, aged from four into their 20s, studied the Koran at the Jamia Hafsa madrassa. It is likely that the number killed during the siege will never be known.
The army said yesterday that 19 corpses were so badly burnt that they could not be identified.
The bare concrete rooms that served as classrooms and sleeping quarters were littered with broken glass and spent rifle cartridges.
Books were piled into barricades, while the students' possessions lay scattered among upturned desks.
Every part of the sprawling mosque complex was left scarred by the battle.
In the blackened basement where Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the rebel cleric, and half a dozen followers made a last stand, the wall had been shattered by explosives. The acrid stench of battle hung in the air a full day after the assault. Metal furniture lay piled in a corner.
General Arshad said that 75 militants had been killed, along with 11 soldiers in the final operation to clear the compound.
Journalists were shown the remains of the militants' deadly arsenal: machineguns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition, anti-tank mines, unexploded suicide vests and a crate of petrol bombs made from green Sprite bottles. Home-made bombs, gas masks, electronic scanners and scores of alleged jihadi DVDs lay alongside them.
General Arshad said that only a few dozen of the hundreds of women and children that were said to be inside the school were actually in the complex when the fighting began. He claimed that almost all had managed to escape.
The Red Mosque itself was spared the worst of the fighting. But its entrance hall was destroyed by fire and chunks of masonry were blown from the minarets, which gunmen were said to have used as a vantage point. The speakers that were used to call the faithful to prayer hung from their wires, but the white dome appeared unscathed.
Ghazi was buried in his village in the Punjab. His elder brother Abdul Aziz, who was caught trying to flee the siege disguised as a woman, led the prayers. The cleric, who faces 25 murder and terrorism charges, was freed on parole to attend the funeral.
The Times, MCT, AFP
