Rough repairs to the wall of a prison in Dera Ismail Khan that the Taliban inmates escaped easily through. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Aug 18 2013 (IPS)

Nervousness permeates the very air of Dera Ismail Khan these days. It has been more than a fortnight since militants attacked a high security prison here in a military-like operation and released about 200 inmates, including Taliban commanders.

Dera Ismail Khan is one of the 25 districts of Pakistan’s northwestern province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It is adjacent to the North and South Waziristan provinces of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which have long provided the Taliban a safe bastion.

The fear is that the released Taliban men will now resume their activities and bear down heavily on people who they suspect might have given them away to the authorities.“I will take up the issue with army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani as to how the militants reached the jail after crossing half-a-dozen checkpoints.” -- chairman of the Pakistan Tehree-k-e-Insaf Party Imran Khan

“People are afraid after the jailbreak, as hardcore militants have been released. They will now harass the people and further disturb peace in the area,” Ahmed Sultan, professor of political science at the Gomal University in Dera Ismail Khan, told IPS.

That fear echoes in other areas as well. A police inspector in Tank district, located between Dera Ismail Khan and Waziristan, told IPS that people in this part of the country were now scared of a Taliban reprisal because of others who might have informed the police about their presence.

Tank too is located in the south of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and is said to have a heavy Taliban presence.

What has compounded people’s fears is the possibility of the role of the police and security forces in the Jul. 29 jailbreak in Dera Ismail Khan.

The Taliban have enough friends and well-wishers within the police force and administration, Muhammad Nabi Gul, a former jail superintendent, told IPS.

Locals too are confused about the role of the police in the incident. “There is every likelihood they have helped the Taliban out of fear or for money,” Muhammad Shah Khan, a resident of Dera Ismail Khan, told IPS. “The militants have become so powerful that the police have no courage to stop them.”

The suspicions over the police role were confirmed when a spokesman of the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), speaking from an undisclosed location three days after the incident, told Pakistan media, “We are thankful to the police and jail employees for their fullest cooperation.”

He went on to hail them as “good Muslims”. “It enabled us to get freedom for 250 people, who have now reunited with their colleagues in FATA.”

There are four central jails, seven district jails, seven sub-jails and four judicial lockups in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Together, they hold about 15,000 inmates, including 700 held on terrorism charges.

The Dera Ismail jailbreak, said ex-jail superintendent Gul, would not have happened had the government held a proper inquiry into the Bannu jailbreak of 2012 and brought those responsible to justice.

“From Bannu, the Taliban had taken away 384 prisoners that included 20 facing the death penalty,” Gul said.

It was one of the escapees in the Bannu jailbreak who masterminded a repeat in Dera Ismail Khan this year. The 2013 jailbreak, said Pervez Khattak, who took over as chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa after the May 11 election this year, was the brainchild of Adnan Rashid, a former employee of the Pakistan Air Force and an accused in attempting to murder former President Pervez Musharraf on Dec. 14, 2003.

Rashid is said to have trained a 10-member squad that gathered intelligence before storming the prison at midnight.

“The Taliban had made a film of the Bannu jailbreak as well as of the one in Dera Ismail Khan,” Ali Amin Gandapur, revenue minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, told IPS.

“Our police were nowhere in sight,” he said, lending one more voice of doubt over their role in the incident. “The police, who are supposed to protect the jails, instead took refuge in nearby houses at the time of the attack.”

As a member of the provincial cabinet, he said he would push the government to take action against those who did not put up any resistance.

The stance of the army too is being questioned. Chairman of the Pakistan Tehree-k-e-Insaf Party Imran Khan expressed surprise that the militants could carry out their task with such ease and precision despite 25,000 army men being stationed in the city.

“I will take up the issue with army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani as to how the militants reached the jail after crossing half-a-dozen checkpoints,” Khan told IPS over the telephone.

Khan’s party won an overwhelming mandate in Khyber Paktunkhwa in May this year.

“Less than 100 militants mounted on vehicles reached the Dera Ismail Khan jail, but the army failed to take any action,” said chief minister Khattak.

Khattak told IPS he had called up the Peshawar corps commander at the time of the attack, asking him to order the army to stop the militants. The corps commander told him that they were “seeking permission from the higher-ups”, Khattak said.

Khan said he wanted a closed-door meeting with Kayani and with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to know exactly why the army was reluctant to launch a full-scale military action against the Taliban.

The Taliban, meanwhile, are jubilant over their success in freeing their comrades. “A majority of the escaped prisoners were brought here where the Taliban received them warmly,” Muhammad Shah, a shopkeeper based in Waziristan, told IPS. He said he heard the local Taliban fire shots in the air in celebration.

A majority of the residents are unhappy over the jailbreak, Shakoor Ahmed, a shopkeeper in Dera Ismail Khan, told IPS. They want the criminals and militants in jail, he added.

Following these jailbreaks, the government has planned to build high-security jails.

“We have also ordered the installation of mobile jammers and walkthrough gates in all jails,” Khyber Pakhtunkhwa information minister Shah Farman told IPS. Soon after the incident, he added, the army had been deployed to protect Peshawar prison where high-profile militants are lodged.

Both men and women in the north-west of Pakistan traditionally wear the loose shalwar-kameez rather than tight-fitting trousers. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Aug 9 2013 (IPS)

A new Taliban fashion directive to men has created surprise and drawn opposition. Orders to men to wear the loose traditional dress rather than trousers have been challenged on the grounds that men in the northwest of Pakistan do not wear trousers in the first place.

The Taliban have long demanded strict Islamic dress for women. Now they are targeting men – dubiously.

“The men in tribal regions are appropriately dressed,” Ahmed Jamal, a resident of South Waziristan Agency in northwest Pakistan, tells IPS. “Unlike other parts of the country where people wear pants and shirts, those here wear shalwar-kameez.” The traditional shalwar-kameez is a tunic over a loose covering down to the ankles.

The outlawed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP) issued its ‘order’ Jul. 13, for men to wear loose, rather than tight, outfits. A day earlier, the Taliban had asked women to do the same – even though women invariably dress in an all-encompassing burqa and veil from head to toe.

The TTP warned shopkeepers against selling any garments the Taliban do not approve. It threatened to close down such outlets. As a first step the Taliban warned shopkeepers of a 50-dollar fine and closure of business for a month.

But worse has already come. Mustafa Shah, a shopkeeper in Waziristan, says there have been instances already of the Taliban burning cloth seized from businessmen.

“TTP men came on Jul. 22 and took away raw cloth from some shops and burnt it. We looked on but could not say a word because of fear of TTP reprisals,” he says. “Such instructions are bound to affect businesses because people now avoid markets.”

Shah says the orders have hit both residents and traders. “We have not heard of such directives in any Muslim country, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where the strictest Islamic laws are in place.”

People have already suffered a great deal at the hands of the Taliban, he says. “More than half of the FATA’s [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] five million population have been displaced due to the presence of Taliban and the military operations, which have brought our business to a standstill.”

Jamal, a mechanic in Wana, headquarters of South Waziristan, says the directive is only aimed at keeping the TTP in the news. “The majority of the Pashtun population living in the seven districts of FATA wears appropriate and decent dress.”

The pamphlet issued by the TTP says that wearing thin and revealing clothes is un-Islamic because such clothes do not cover the body properly, and are also against Pashtun culture.

Muhammad Sarwar, a lecturer at the Islamia College University in Peshawar, sees the order as a tool to frighten people and for the Taliban to impose their own brand of Islam.

“It is a glaring indication of how the Taliban are pursuing their agenda. They want to make their presence felt by issuing such irrelevant instructions.”

It is the right of people to wear what they want, he says. “The TTP had no right to ask the people to do this, and they are in any case not a part of the government. These directives are illegal, immoral and have no worth. They have enraged residents.”

FATA is located on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where the Taliban took refuge when they were evicted from Kabul by the U.S.-led forces towards the end of 2001.

“FATA people offered them sanctuary and treated them as guests, but they started attacking Pakistani forces, buildings and schools,” Afaq Ali Khan, a resident of Waziristan, tells IPS.

The TTP have lashed and stoned women for alleged adultery, and killed poor people on charge of spying, he says. “TTP punishes people without giving them a chance to defend themselves against the charges.”

Such acts have already made the Taliban unpopular. The latest instructions to men to not wear tight clothing will further alienate people, he says.

Such derogatory and unethical instructions are misplaced, says Khan. “Had these orders been issued in Karachi, Islamabad or Peshawar, they might have made sense.”

Maulana Naeem Gul, a Peshawar-based prayer leader, tells IPS that he was deeply saddened by the new instructions because these were designed to bring Islam to notoriety.

“Taliban are bereft of Islamic teachings. Their efforts to enforce Islam through violent means will not find any taker. To subdue the people through coercion is against Islam.”

Members of the PTI party protest the U.S. operation in Abbottabad that killed Osama Bin Laden. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

Though the constant hum of unmanned aerial vehicles flying overhead makes a strong case for staying indoors, residents of Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency are emerging in droves from their humble homes, some no bigger than huts constructed from mud and stones.

They have come out to protest the drone strikes on this devastated region, a hotbed of militant activity located on Pakistan’s northern border with Afghanistan, which is quickly becoming ground zero in the United States’ ‘War on Terror’.

"We watch the drones all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.” -- Rasool Bacha
Since 2004, 355 drone strikes have killed 3,336 people and injured scores more, according to a conservative estimate by the U.S.–based New America Foundation.

But while the U.S. government claims to be singling out militants and “Al Qaeda affiliates” for attack by remote-controlled aircraft capable of raining missiles down from a height of 10,000 feet, residents of this mountainous province say that civilians are taking a bigger hit.

Imad Ali, who has lived in North Waziristan his whole life, lost two sons in a drone attack. He told IPS that the pilotless planes appear unable to distinguish between civil and military targets, and called the strikes “indiscriminate and unacceptable.”

Now Ali, like many others in this Agency of 30,000, is joining mass rallies spearheaded by the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), a major opposition party under the leadership of former cricket legend Imran Khan, to call for an end to strikes on unsuspecting non-combatants.

“I lost my wife and elder daughter to drone attacks in February,” Muhammad Rafiq, a schoolteacher in South Waziristan, told IPS, adding that civilian opposition to the attacks will keep growing as long as innocent people are losing their lives.

Victim of a drone strike lies in a hospital bed in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

“We pass sleepless nights due to the looming threat of drone strikes. The situation is especially difficult for children who fear they could be killed at any minute,” he added.

With so many people busy counting the dead, the injured often get relegated to the footnotes of this story; like Rasool Bacha, who was fast asleep in his home in Dattakhlel, a small village close to the Afghan border, when he was struck by shrapnel from a drone attack this past January.

“Later in the morning I discovered that the strike had also killed four of my neighbours,” Bacha told IPS in the hospital where he is currently undergoing physiotherapy after surgery.

“All the victims were poor farmers,” he added, “and had no relation to the militants. It is simply not true that the drones kill only militants – when they rain down they destroy everything that comes in their way.”

Every day, eight to 12 unmanned aircrafts hover in the sky, he said. “We watch them all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.”

Enter the politicians

While residents are mainly concerned with the immediate threat to their daily lives, political parties have seized on widespread discontent to advance their position that the attacks constitute an assault on national sovereignty.

Following the latest series of strikes – that killed the deputy chief of the outlawed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Waliur Rehman, on May 29 in North Waziristan – Pakistan’s newly elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif labeled the attack “a violation of international law” and urged the United States to “respect the sovereignty of other countries.”

On Jun. 4, the PTI – which formed a coalition in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province after winning a landslide victory in the May 11 general elections here – submitted a resolution to the KP assembly condemning, and calling for an immediate cessation of, the attacks.

Echoing Sharif’s words on sovereignty, PTI Spokesperson Shaukat Ali Yousafzai was quick to point out that his party was the first to take up the issue as far back as May 21, 2011 following a strike that halted a NATO convoy heading for Afghanistan through the KP.

He told IPS his party also held a rally in Waziristan, whose population has borne the lion’s share of the attacks.

As elections draw nearer, other parties keen to “exploit anti-American sentiments and muster electoral support” are also stepping up opposition to the U.S. strikes and a planned operation to cleanse border areas of militants, according to Muhammad Azeem, former mayor of Mardan, one of 25 districts that comprise the troubled KP province.

He told IPS that the political grouping Muttahida Majlis e-Amal (MMA), which gathered various religious parties under one banner to win a sweeping victory in the 2003 elections, governed the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southeastern Balochistan province until it fell out of favour with the Taliban in 2008.

Now, parties like the Jamaat Islam (JI) and Jamiat Ulemai Islam (JUI) have taken up the cudgels on behalf of civilians living in terror of drone strikes, and have promised to guard tribal populations from a military offensive by the government.

But as political analyst Javid Hussain pointed out, this military operation against which parties are now crying foul has been ongoing in all seven agencies of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) since 2005, leaving 300,000 of the region’s 5.8 million people homeless.

“None of the political leaders bothered about it until now,” he told IPS, adding that politicians are only interested in the issue of drones insofar as they pay dividends in the election.

Earlier this month, the Peshawar High Court declared drone strikes illegal and asked the government to move a resolution against the use of drones in the United Nations, Muhammad Arif, political science lecturer at the Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, told IPS.

The court made its announcement in response to a legal petition filed last year by the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, an Islamabad-based legal charity, on behalf of the families of up to 50 people killed when missiles stuck a tribal gathering, or jirga, in March 2011.

“The National Assembly has passed several resolutions terming these aerial attacks unlawful, and demanding that they be stopped, but they continue unabated,” Wali Khan said.

On May 23, the tribal population was further disappointed when U.S. President Barack Obama made it categorically clear that drones will continue to target “Al Qaeda and its affiliates” because they killed U.S. citizens.