Abdul Rashid

Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who led the Lal Masjid confrontation perished in a pitched battle with the Pakistan Army. Here are his last words, as reported in Daily Jang, Pakistan's leading Urdu daily [my translation]:

I am about to be martyred, Journalists take note
Speaking on the phone for the last time, after the start of Operation Silence in Jami'a Hafsa, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi called Naji TV and said: The commandos are near my doorway. I will not be alive much longer. In this matter, some political ulema have not behaved decently and they will answer to God about that. My wish was to give this entire matter into the hands of our religious scholars, so that everything is clear and the journalists can examine everything...how many we are, how much ammunition we have.

We gave them a tough time. We wrote history. Just as they achieved their goal with trickery in Wana, Waziristan, so they did with me here. They said that we have 25 fighters. We only have 11 klashnikovs. I am commanding myself. I want to give the message that we will surely be gone but the people will seek justice from you. Some religious leaders dealt very strangely with this problem and tried to get us killed. They used Tear Gas. The Operation started at the time of the morning prayer. The first bullet was fired just as I had finished talking to them. I had wanted things to be transparent but they don't want that. If truth had come out, it would have been very bad propaganda for them.

Waziristan is the proper context in which we should examine the aftermath of Lal Masjid. Surely, militants will try and strike back in major metro areas but it is the Baluchistan issue that can re-ignite. Musharraf may have walked away a winner if the siege had lifted without Abdul Rashid's death. The arrest - in a burqa - of the elder brother Abdul Aziz was surely the finest piece of political theater anyone could have dreamed up. But, now, the distaste of 70 deaths - including the elderly mother of these brothers - will quickly sweep across any PR gains he had made recently.