Taliban take Pakistani officials hostage
By Pir Zubair
International Herald Tribune
July 18, 2008
PESHAWAR Pakistan -- The Pakistani Taliban have taken dozens of local officials hostage, including police, paramilitary forces and even state bank officials, and threatened Friday to begin executing them unless the government released four of their comrades captured last week.
The standoff has grown over the past week into one of the most serious recent challenges to the government's resolve to curb the militants' rapid expansion just 10 days before Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani is scheduled to meet President Bush at the White House.
So far, the government has held firm, dispatching hundreds of soldiers to the area, Hangu, in North West Frontier Province, to engage in the first real fighting with the militants since the two sides agreed to a new series of peace deals earlier this year.
The fighting comes as the government faces mounting pressure from the United States to take stronger action against Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, which the militants use as a launching pad for attacks against NATO and American troops in southern Afghanistan.
Pakistan's newspapers and television programs have been abuzz the last few days about suggestions in Washington that the United States might take direct action itself in the tribal areas to stop the flow of Taliban fighters into Afghanistan. Such a move would be strongly opposed by most Pakistanis as a violation of sovereignty.
But the militants have also increasingly extended their presence into more settled areas of Pakistan, like Hangu, where provincial police arrested about half a dozen armed Taliban riding in a pickup truck last Saturday.
In revenge, the Taliban kidnapped the officials and are holding them in an undisclosed place. The Taliban said they were holding 49 hostages; the government said there were 29.
The militants' response was so ferocious because one of the Taliban arrested, to the surprise of the police, was a man known as Rafiuddin, a lieutenant of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, according to the inspector general of the provincial police, Naveed Khan.
The capture of Rafiuddin led to unusual and repeated demands from the Taliban for his release, Mr. Khan said. "That proves he means something to them," he said.
Another of the Taliban taken into custody goes by the name Anwar, and is one of 18 Taliban who formed the original core of Mr. Mehsud's organization, and who is one of his most cherished comrades, said a Pakistani counterterrorism and intelligence official in Peshawar who could not be identified because his job does not allow his identity to be published.
Anwar was perhaps Mr. Mehsud's most important fighter and had been with him since 2004, the intelligence official said.
The spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Maulvi Omar, said in a telephone interview Friday that the Taliban were waiting for the results of mediation talks before deciding what to do with the hostages. "If there's no result, we will start killing them," he said.
Rafiuddin, Mr. Omar said, was a "religious scholar" at the sprawling Kahi madrassa in Hangu. "He's not a fighter," he said. "That's why we want him back."
Mr. Omar also demanded the resignation of the new secular provincial government, which was elected in February, to replace a government dominated by religious parties sympathetic to the Taliban. If the government did not resign within five days, Mr. Omar said, the Taliban would take "organized action against the government."
Afrasiyab Khattack, the leader of the Awami National Party, which heads the provincial government, dismissed releasing any of the captured Taliban, a stiffer stance than that taken by previous governments. "The government is not considering the release of anyone, it's only for the courts of law to deal with the situation," he said.
The fighting between the army and the Taliban in Hangu was more serious than an effort by paramilitary forces last month to clear non-Taliban militants from an area of Khyber, a pocket of the tribal region adjacent to Peshawar, where security has collapsed and there is a general fear of the Taliban.
The Khyber operation was given wide television coverage, but appeared to be of little strategic value since the militants were granted plenty of warning to flee deeper into Khyber ahead of the paramilitary.
In more remote Hangu, an area of flat land at the foot of the Orakzai mountains, television cameras and journalists from outside the area have been barred from the conflict zones.
The spokesman for the Pakistani Army, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, said Friday that the provincial government had asked for a battalion of soldiers — 700 men — to be dispatched to Hangu from the army garrison in the town of Thal. The goal, he said, was to "clear the area of Hangu of the Taliban."
Taliban take Pakistani officials hostage - International Herald Tribune
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Guess those freedom fighters had to go somewhere.
Fortunately for the dozen taken hostage, the Pakistan government is level-headed and sympathetic to these Talibanis that their safety is all but assured. ;)
