The rise of Maulana Fazlullah, the ruthless Taliban leader who ordered the Peshawar school killings
Dean Nelson, Taha Siddiqi and Ashfaq Yusufzai, The Telegraph, December 21, 2014 12:20 PM ET, Source - National Post
This frame grab taken from 2008 video footage shows Maulana Fazlullah, chief of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), speaking with local journalists in the Pakistan's northwestern Swat valley.
As Pakistanis united in revulsion at the massacre of 141 pupils and teachers at Peshawar’s Army Public School last week and the government began executing convicted terrorists in response, the Taliban commander who ordered the slaughter emerged from hiding to justify it.
Umar Mansoor, a long-bearded, 36-year-old father of three known as “Slim” for his athletic build and passion for volleyball, shook his finger at the camera and said it had been a simple act of revenge for the women and children killed in the Pakistan army’s war on terrorism in the Taliban’s tribal strongholds along the Afghan border.
“If our women and children die as martyrs, your children will not escape,” he said.
His finger wagging, however, was a sleight of hand: the Taliban leader really pulling the strings is Maulana Fazlullah, a bearded terrorist demagogue best known for the attempted assassination of Malala Yusufzai, the 15-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who was shot in the head in 2012 for defying his ban on girls attending school.
Burying the Dead After Pakistan School Massacre
His orders to shoot Malala were widely condemned around the world – though not universally in Pakistan, where Malala was also criticised as a Western pawn whose campaign was being used to tarnish Pakistan.
Any ambiguity Pakistanis might have felt about Malala Yusufzai was swept aside last week in the tide of grief that followed Tuesday’s massacre. Seven Taliban gunmen stormed into the Peshawar’ school, shooting and bombing children, killing 132 of them in their classrooms and the school auditorium.
They also burned teachers alive in front of their pupils. The headmistress, Tahira Qazi, was blown up with a hand grenade as she cowered in a bathroom.
Now, perhaps for the first time in a decade, there appears to be a national consensus that the Taliban’s savage insurgency must be defeated once and for all.
But the story of the man who has taken its brutality to new depths reveals how he has survived and prospered because of weakness and indifference among Pakistan’s people, politicians and generals.
Until now, Fazlullah has been best known as the fiery and charismatic “Mullah Radio” for the pirate radio station he operated in Pakistan’s Swat Valley from 2004 until the army finally chased him out five years later.
His radio sermons won him a large audience of female admirers, who donated jewellery and urged their husbands to join his jihad.
He was born Fazal Hayat, one of eight children, in Imam Dehri, a small village in the Swat Valley, once known as Pakistan’s Switzerland for its snowy peaks and good skiing. He was regarded as a mischievous and intelligent boy who was respectful to his elders and loved playing cricket with local children.
He changed, however, when he began attending a madrassa run by a radical cleric named Sufi Mohammad, whose daughter he was later to marry.
He began arguing in mosques with moderate mullahs, and decided to build his own outside his home after his father-in-law and mentor was jailed in 2002. He began broadcasting his sermons, calling for locals to end their vices and embrace Islamic law. He was once arrested while preaching on horseback.
His family was alarmed at his radicalisation and pleaded with him to end his broadcasts after politicians complained that he was inciting people to oppose the Pakistan army.
“Many of our family members went to convince him but he did not listen to anyone. He was so blinded by his passion for Islam as he saw it that he even killed two of our uncles in 2007,” one of his cousins, who asked not to be named, told The Sunday Telegraph.
One opponent who complained to the police was sent away by an officer who said it was “above his pay grade” and hinted that he had support from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, said Talimand Khan, who later fled Swat after receiving death threats.
Their indifference served as encouragement and Fazlullah turned his religious mission into a military campaign. In December 2008, his followers seized control of the Swat Valley and began imposing their own brand of “Islamic justice”.
Barbers who had trimmed beards were terrorised along with shopkeepers who sold music cassettes and medical workers offering polio vaccinations. Schools that taught girls were attacked and policemen and opponents were murdered.
In early January 2009, the bullet-ridden body of one of the valley’s celebrated dancing girls, Shabana, was found slumped in Mingora’s Green Square. It was strewn with CDs and photographs of her performances.
A few days later, Fazlullah’s radio station warned listeners that “un-Islamic vices” would no longer be tolerated and any remaining dancers in the town’s Banr Bazaar would be killed “one by one.”
By February 2009, his group had become so powerful that the Pakistan government decided to open “peace talks” with him and replace local civil courts with “Qazi courts” under Sharia as a sop.
The United States privately backed the peace deal as preferable to Fazlullah’s continued rise and the prospect that he might join forces with the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) – the Pakistan Taliban – led then by the late Baitullah Mehsud in the unsettled and lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border.
Fazlullah saw the government’s response as a sign of weakness and ordered his men to advance on Buner district, just 96 kilometres from the capital Islamabad.
By the time the Pakistan army was ordered to retake Swat and Buner, Fazlullah’s men had killed 250 policemen and opponents, many of whom were hanged from pylons, destroyed 400 schools teaching girls and had ushered in a rampant return of polio to the valley.
The army’s operation to clear Fazlullah’s fighters from the valley was equally brutal but claims that he had been surrounded and arrested proved false. He escaped to Afghanistan with about 300 fighters, from where he continued to launch attacks into his own fiefdom in Swat – including the attempted assassination of Malala Yusufzai.
Hopes that a peace deal would keep him from joining Baitullah Mehsud’s TTP backfired spectacularly. He not only joined but became its leader after both Baitullah and his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, were killed in American airstrikes. The Americans and the Pakistanis had made a terrible miscalculation. They believed Fazlullah’s group was focused on Islamic law with no wider ambition to spread jihad and attack the West.
The Pakistan army was left in no doubt of his intentions when his men planted and filmed the roadside bomb that killed the senior officer in Swat, Maj-Gen Sanaullah Khan Niazi, as he returned from the Afghan border. In January this year, in the face of these attacks, Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, told his National Assembly that he still believed the Taliban wanted peace and opened talks with its representatives. Further executions of Frontier Corps soldiers and an attack on Karachi Airport, however, marked the end of official patience. In June, the army launched operation Zarb-e-Asb (Sword of the Prophet) with air raids on terrorist camps throughout the tribal areas.
The strikes opened up divisions within the Taliban, with several of the main Mehsud tribe factions abandoning Fazlullah with his dwindling band of fanatics.
According to Michael Semple, the former deputy European Union envoy to Afghanistan and one of the world’s most respected experts on the Taliban, Fazlullah’s latest outrage reflects his weakness.
He was chosen as a compromise candidate to replace Hakimullah Mehsud, but while he has matched him for brutality, the charisma that charmed the conservative housewives of Swat has not worked on the Taliban’s tribal commanders.
“Fazlullah is indecisive and is not really convincing as a leader or warrior,” Mr. Semple said.
“Since he succeeded Hakimullah, the TTP has been riven with factional conflicts and splits.”
On Saturday, Pakistan security forces raided suspected Taliban hideouts near Peshawar, while reports said the north-west frontier had also been hit by U.S. drone strikes.
Fazlullah retains close ties with foreign militants and Afghan Taliban groups straddling the border, and his future depends – as has the Taliban’s for so long – on the complex pattern of Pakistan local and international alliances.
But in the battle to win public support for a decisive strike against the movement, Tuesday may have been a turning point.
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