As my colleague Declan Walsh reports, Pakistani security forces have detained relatives of a Taliban militant accused of shooting Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old schoolgirl who became an icon of resistance against Islamist fundamentalism in her native Swat Valley region.
The suspect, identified as a militant named Attaullah, is believed to have fled to eastern Afghanistan, where the leader of the Swat Taliban, Maulana Fazlullah, has be en based since his forces were routed in a Pakistan Army offensive to regain control of the valley. A spokesman for the Swat Taliban in Afghanistan, Sirajuddin Ahmed, told Reuters last week that Mr. Fazlullah had dispatched the two men who stopped Malala's school bus and shot her through the head, to silence her calls for the education of girls.
Although images of Mr. Fazlullah are rare, a few seconds of surreptitiously recorded video showing his face was included in a 2008 PBS report on the Swat Taliban, recorded before the Pakistani military drove the militants out of the valley. Azmat Khan, a Web producer for PBS's “Frontline,†pointed to the archival video in a blog post on Mr. Fazlullah this week.
The video of Mr. Fazlullah, and an example of one of his radio broadcasts, comes near the start of the report by David Montero, who met the militant leader in 2007, when he was reporting on the militants for The Christian Science Monitor.
More video of Mr. Fazlullah appeared in 2010 when a clip of him preaching to a group of men identified as suicide bombers was released to dispel rumors that he had been killed by in the Pakistani military offensive the previous year. That video was included in an Al Jazeera English report from Swat in July 2010.
As Dana Priest reports in The Washington Post, Mr. Fazlullah “is also known as ‘Mullah Radio' for his use of a roving transmitter to broadcast lyrical rants against the central government in Pakistan, music, education and the polio vaccine.†In 2007, BBC News reported that Mr. Fazlullah helped to spread conspiracy theories about po lio vaccine in his broadcasts, telling listeners that the shot could cause impotency and was part of “a conspiracy of the Jews and Christians to stunt the population growth of Muslims.â€
In late 2008, just before the military attack that drove the Taliban out of Swat began, another reporter, Nicholas Schmidle, visited Mr. Fazlullah's compound to “get a sense of what a Taliban-controlled area in Pakistan would be like.†Recounting the trip in an article for The New York Times Magazine, he wrote:
Fazlullah's base was a sprawling mosque and madrassa compound in the village of Imam Dehri, located across the Swat River from the city of Mingora. The entire Swat Valley is surrounded by mountains blanketed with pine forests. The river pours from the Hindu Kush Mountains and meanders through the valley, nourishing apple and persimmon orchards. During the summer, thousands of Pakistanis flock here for a break from the heat and humidity choking the lowlan ds. When I visited Swat in June, for example, still weeks before the Red Mosque assault began in Islamabad, I had trouble getting a room at the exclusive Serena Hotel. By the time I returned in October, I was the only guest. Almost immediately after arriving the second time around, I saw why: at the edge of town, Taliban rode around in flatbed trucks, pointing weapons in the air and ordering motorists to remove the tape decks from their cars. Fazlullah, like his Taliban predecessors in Afghanistan, deemed music - and anything that plays music - un-Islamic.
The following Friday, I went to Imam Dehri, where I met the commander of Fazlullah's militia, a man with glacier-blue eyes named Sirajuddin. (Fazlullah appeared briefly, but didn't stay long; he was observing aitekaaf, a meditation period that lasts 10 days at the end of Ramadan.) To get from Mingora to Imam Dehri, my Pashto interpreter and I boarded a small metal tram attached to a zip-line. Six other people piled i n. We got a light push to get moving, and then soared over the river. Sirajuddin waited on the other side, and he led us through a crowd of Fazlullah's supporters. The P.A. system blasted prerecorded jihadi poems while Taliban walked about with assault rifles slung over their shoulders.
“We are struggling for the enforcement of Shariah,†Sirajuddin told me inside a brick shed that was his office. “Twice, in 1994 and 1999, the government said it was committed to enforcing Shariah in this area, but it never did. The people here want Islam to be a way of life.†He added: “We are Muslims, but our legal system is based on English laws. Our movement wants to replace the English system with an Islamic one.â€
Four Taliban sat in the room with us, watching me with dark, intent eyes. I asked one of them, a 32-year-old named Abdul Ghafoor, what he was fighting for. Islam? Revenge? “This is not personal revenge; this is our religious obligation,†he told me, s peaking Pashto through an interpreter. Ghafoor crouched on a low stool, a Kalashnikov resting on his lap. He said he was a recent graduate from the University of Peshawar with a master's degree in Islamic theology, and that he earned his living as a schoolteacher. Every day after school, and on holidays, he grabbed his gun and joined Fazlullah. He wore a long beard, a black turban, an ammunition vest stuffed with extra banana clips and pistols and Reebok high-tops with a Velcro strap. Messages crackled over the walkie-talkie attached to the collar of his vest. The Taliban were coordinating their movements.
Later, Ghafoor took me from Sirajuddin's office to a platform where some supposed criminals were scheduled to be lashed. About 15,000 men and boys, some sitting on picnic blankets, encircled the wooden platform, which was supported on drum barrels and had been erected by Fazlullah's group as a place for public punishments. The Taliban paraded three men, accused of ai ding kidnappers, before the crowd. Fazlullah's mujahedeen had caught the kidnappers as they were shuttling two women out of Swat. The Taliban sent the women back home and arrested everyone involved with the crime. Now the youngest of the criminals, who appeared to be still in his teens, scaled the steps to the platform. He looked as if he might collapse, legs wobbling with fear, as hundreds of heavily armed Taliban spread out around him. I stood among them, waiting to see the boy receive 15 lashings - the appropriate Islamic punishment, according to Fazlullah.
The boy lay face-down on the platform. Taliban held his arms and legs so he wouldn't flop around. Another jihadi, clutching a thick, leather whip, roughly two feet long, wore a camouflage shalwar kameez and a ski mask over his face. Every time the whip crashed on the boy's back, the crowd called out the corresponding number of lashes, as if counting the final seconds of a basketball game. The teenager's body conv ulsed under the crack and thud of each lash; when he finally stood up, he was shaking and drenched in tears.
“This punishment is permitted in Islam,†announced one of Fazlullah's deputies over a P.A. system fixed to a flatbed truck parked beside the platform. Along with the three accused men, who were lashed in turn, a dozen militants also stood on the platform, holding Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. Another lay on his stomach on the roof of a nearby shed, his eyes lined up behind the sights of an automatic machine gun. Everyone knew that Fazlullah's decision to take the law into his own hands was in blatant defiance of the government's writ: the militants' job was to repel any sudden ambush by the Pakistani Army or paramilitary forces; the deputy on the P.A. system, meanwhile, had to persuade the people that the lashings accorded with Islamic law. “Even if there is no central Islamic government, these punishments are permitted in parts of the country if it c ontributes to maintaining peace,†the deputy explained, speaking in Pashto. “We have no intention to occupy the government or for any political authority. This is only for peace and security.â€
Although Mr. Fazlullah is reportedly now a target for American and NATO troops in Afghanistan, Pakistani officials have accused the Afghan intelligence services of quietly supporting him, to retaliate for Pakistan's refusal to crack down on members of the Afghan Taliban who take refuge on its side of the porous border between the two countries.
