Word: ghazis
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...morning of his last day alive, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, head cleric of Islamabad's besieged Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), swore his readiness to die. "My martyrdom is certain," he told the local press. Within hours, Ghazi's bullet-riddled body was carted out of the basement of the sprawling mosque and madrasah, or seminary, complex where he and scores of heavily armed militants had battled Pakistani security forces for eight days. Ghazi is dead, but he may well come to haunt the President, General Pervez Musharraf, and the country...
...traditional, Shari'a-based society, or a modern, moderate Muslim nation. As the urban élite and middle class lauded what they considered to be Musharraf's action to clean out a hotbed of radicalism, protests erupted in the tribal areas condemning the President and lionizing Ghazi...
...consequences were immediate and deadly when last-minute negotiations at Islamabad's besieged Red Mosque failed Monday night. A group of religious and political leaders, including former Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, had offered militant mosque leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi one last chance to surrender. "I am returning very disappointed," said Hussain. "We offered him a lot, but he wasn't ready to agree to our terms." A day later, Ghazi was killed at the Red Mosque, not far from the very place where his father, the mosque's founder, was slain by unknown assailants in 1998. Minutes after...
...Interior minister Aftab Sherpao says that some 80% of the complex has been cleared out. Officers say Ghazi was holed up in one of the mosque's basements, reportedly surrounded by women and children from the women's school. Many of the female students have been just as active, if not more so, as their male counterparts in the madrassah's six-month-long anti-government campaign. However, the presence of perceived innocents serves as a protective shield for the mosque leader - and could serve him as a last-ditch propaganda campaign...
...Ghazi had told reporters that he was prepared to be a martyr, though only few may perceive him as such. For the moment, the public has been behind government forces, but large numbers of dead civilians, particularly women and children, could yet turn public opinion against them. That may have been part of Ghazi's plan...