Word: pakistanis
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Just a day after he was released on bail, Aziz, wearing his trademark spectacles and graying beard, returned to the Red Mosque, the site of a weeklong siege in 2007 between the mosque's seminary students and the Pakistani military, to deliver a sermon ahead of Friday prayers. Thousands of worshipers flocked to the centrally located mosque, spilling into the surrounding streets and kneeling on makeshift prayer rugs while Aziz's voice boomed out over loudspeakers. He told the story of Moses' struggle against the Pharaoh of Egypt to allow his people to practice their religion. Moses, considered by Muslims...
...siege of the Red Mosque was a turning point in Pakistan's inexorable slide toward religious extremism and violence. Lal Masjid, as it is locally known, became a rallying cry for the Pakistani Taliban who have declared war on the central government. It is their Alamo, and as such Aziz's return to the pulpit after two years in jail marks an ominous victory for the forces that are determined to bring the secular government of this nuclear-armed nation to its knees. "This is the second coming of the Red Mosque," says columnist and politician Ayaz Amir. "It will...
Aziz's release (the Supreme Court ruled that it had insufficient evidence against him) comes on the heels of another Taliban victory: On April 13 Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari signed an ordinance imposing Shari'a in the Swat Valley and its surrounding district, effectively ceding administrative and judicial control to the Taliban insurgents who have turned the one-time vacation destination into a war zone. The Nizam-e-Adl regulations, as they are known, were part of a controversial peace deal negotiated in February between the provincial government and an influential religious leader affiliated with the Taliban movement...
...religion and we are Muslims," he told reporters in Peshawar, the provincial capital. "The state is responding to the aspirations of the people." Yet more than 80,000 of the 1.5 million residents have fled the region. "The Taliban are taking Swat back to the Dark Ages and the Pakistani government is now complicit in their horrific abuses," said Ali Dayan Hasan, senior South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Tossing out the rights of the people in the tribal areas reflects abysmally on both the government and the Pakistani military's ability to protect Pakistan's citizens...
...Qasab, barely five feet tall but with powerful shoulders under his loose, long sleeved t-shirt, appeared in court this morning with two other co-accused, Fahim Ansari and Sabahuddin, inside the Arthur Road jail complex. Qasab, a Pakistani national, was the only surviving suspect from the Nov. 26 attacks on Mumbai that killed about 170 people; Ansari and Sabahuddin, who are Indian, were arrested separately and are accused of helping to plan the attacks. All three of them were barefoot and wore the same clothes as they did yesterday, sitting together on a bench in one corner...