'He Did It for Allah' Pakistani Families Face Toll of Forbidden Fight

By Susan B. Glasser Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, December 1, 2001; Page A01

BIRROT, Pakistan -- In the courtyard of a home high on a Pakistani mountaintop, a congregation of village men has arrived to congratulate Azaker Abbasi on the death of his son. They shake his hand, they smile. Abbasi's son, Zia ul-Haq, has died a martyr, they say, in the faraway north of Afghanistan.

The phone call came on Monday. Zia had died Nov. 17 in Mazar-e Sharif. His family doesn't know exactly where or how. They don't know where he is buried. He was 23. "I was happy," said his mother, Shaheen Akhter, with no sign of emotion. "He was right in what he did. He did it for Allah."

To the south, on the edge of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, in the dusty village of Hattar, another mother recounted a similar tale. "I feel happy that he was martyred," Iqbal said as she cried big wet tears that spotted her brown head scarf. Her son, Rashid Sultan, ran away in October to join the Taliban's jihad against America. He died Nov. 7 in Mazar-e Sharif. All he left was a letter to his relatives, telling them what he could not admit in person. "God is my friend, and I am going toward him," he wrote.

All across Pakistan, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of families whose sons left to fight a holy war officially opposed by their government. Senior government officials estimate that as many as 8,000 Pakistani citizens are dead or missing in Afghanistan, casualties of an unacknowledged army that did battle for the Taliban even as Pakistan joined the U.S.-led coalition to topple the strict Islamic rulers.

With the Taliban's collapse in recent weeks, Pakistan has been unhappily riveted by the plight of its own warriors but uncertain what to do about it. Many were apparently killed in the prison uprising in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif this week. Many others are believed to be trapped in the besieged southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban's last stronghold. Already this month, officials said, 2,000 Pakistani families in border areas have appealed to the government for help in locating their missing sons and fathers.

But there is no public mourning for the dead, and those who make it back alive face the threat of imprisonment. The government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf has threatened to arrest and charge fighters returning from Afghanistan. Some religious leaders who led their students to join the jihad, or holy war, have already been jailed.

And the government has vowed to crack down further on the militant Islamic groups that recruited and sent Pakistanis to Afghanistan. Musharraf ordered his security advisers this week to prepare a new campaign to curb religious militancy, according to senior officials. The plan would ban all groups from recruiting fighters or soliciting money for the Afghan war and restrict the curricula of the religious schools, or madrassas, that inspired many of their young students to fight.

"General Musharraf has recognized that only a military government can rid Pakistan of a very small minority of religious militants who have defaced this great country," said a top adviser to the Pakistani president.

But at the same time, Musharraf has not been able to disavow completely the thousands of Pakistani jihadis, as the fighters are known here. He has publicly appealed for humane treatment of Pakistanis taken prisoners by the Northern Alliance and has privately lobbied -- so far unsuccessfully -- for the United Nations or another international group to take charge of those who surrender.

Musharraf's dilemma reflects the ambivalence of Pakistani society, which remains sharply divided over his decision to abandon support of the Taliban after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Public protests against that decision have waned in recent weeks, suggesting passive acceptance if not outright endorsement of Pakistan's new course.

And as fighters trickle back across the border, some have recounted their disillusionment with the Taliban and their uncertainty about why they risked their lives for a cause that pits Muslims against one another as much as against the United States. Some militant Islamic groups here have started to reconsider their support for the jihad in Afghanistan.

"Our teachers have categorically stated that jihad can only be launched against an infidel army occupying an Islamic state, and Afghanistan never fit that criteria," said Qari Salim Jan, 21, a member of a radical religious group called Lashkar-i-Taiba. "Afghanistan is essentially an intra-Afghan Muslim battle with an infidel army perched up in the skies."

But critics on both sides blame the government for tacitly encouraging young men like Zia and Rashid to receive military training in Afghanistan right up until September. And even pro-Western liberals fear that Pakistan has now abandoned such young men to Northern Alliance warlords who may massacre them.

Some of the Islamic militant groups say they will continue to recruit soldiers for the Taliban's last stand. Those include Jaish-i-Muhammad, the organization that sent both Rashid and Zia to their deaths in Afghanistan, according to their families. Despite its losses, the group this week launched a new campaign for the Taliban.

"We have to start a genuine struggle against the United States. This struggle has to continue till the destruction of the Great Satan. Time has come for all Muslims to join hands," wrote Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of Jaish-i-Muhammad, in a letter distributed in mosques across the country on Wednesday.

In Birrot, however, Zia's family is not entirely convinced. Despite the congratulatory handshakes, the smiles and the outward confidence of Zia's mother, Zia's father recalled his own doubts about this jihad and his many efforts to persuade his son not to fight.

"I didn't want him to go," said Azaker. "He wasn't properly equipped to fight. This war is not our war. But I could not change his mind. He did what he wanted to do."

Named after Pakistan's former dictator, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who supported the "Islamization" of Pakistan during the 1980s and allied himself with conservative religious groups, Zia had long talked about going to fight. Described by his family as shy but stubborn, Zia was drawn into Jaish-i-Muhammad about two years ago.

Seven months ago, he went to the city of Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, to conduct business for his father's grocery store for the day. He never came home. At first, the family thought he had been kidnapped. Four months later, a phone call came from Afghanistan, saying Zia was safe and in Mazar-e Sharif.

Zia's father, however, soon began to have nightmares in which he was building a new house -- to him, a sure sign that his son was in trouble. On Monday, the confirmation came. It was another unknown voice calling from Afghanistan.

"He was always religious, wanting to fight for Afghanistan and Islam," Azaker said. "I tried to tell him the other side of the story, but he didn't want to listen."

Now, Azaker is waging that argument with Zia's 16-year-old brother. He, too, wants to go to war against the Americans. Hanging on the wall in the courtyard of the family house is his own sign of defiance: a paper cutout of a Kalashnikov rifle.

Like Zia's father, Rashid Sultan's mother told him not to go -- pleaded with him, even. "He said he wanted to fight for Allah," she said. "I told him, 'Why can't you fight for Allah here, why can't you continue jihad in Pakistan? Don't go so far away.' "

A crowd of 18 relatives, cousins and brothers and sisters, listened as Iqbal remembered her son. "America is a very big terrorist," said one beautiful, shy cousin. That sentence, it turned out, is practically the only English she knows.

Iqbal, who says she is about 45 and who cannot read or write, said she had hoped when her son was young that he would grow up to be an educated man, "a person with a future." He never made it past middle school.

Not much is left with which to remember Rashid. His favorite food was boiled rice, his mother said, and he wore only simple clothes. There is a modest stack of pictures, much cried over. One shows Rashid at his father's bedside before he died of cancer. Another shows him playfully hoisting a younger brother into the air. The last picture taken of Rashid shows him as he was just before he left, wearing baggy white pants, a blue-and-red vest and a white Afghan hat. This is the one that his mother Iqbal kisses.

Rashid was the oldest of six children. With his father dead, his mother hoped he would support the family. But he never found a job that paid enough, working sporadically at a factory for low pay while dreaming of jihad. "As a Muslim, I am happy that he fought for Allah," she said. But she comes back, again and again, to the reason for her tears: "Now there are only two brothers left, only two brothers."

Even as she spoke, the loudspeakers of the mosque next door boomed out her son's name, seeking other village men to finish the battle that claimed Rashid Sultan. He was brave, exhorted the mullah, a true religious man. "Those who don't have the courage to fight this war are weak Muslims," he said.

Special correspondent Kamran Khan contributed to this report.

-- Anonymous, December 01, 2001